Charles Ingrid - The Sand Wars 01 - Solar Kill

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Chapter 1
Being a Knight didn’t necessarily mean he’d been promised Camelot—but where in the hell was the transport? What
had happened to recall? Jack fought the maddening impulse to scratch inside his armor, as sweat dripped down, and
the contacts attached to his bare torso itched impossibly. To scratch now, the way he was hooked up, he’d blow
himself away.
Damn. Where was that signal? They couldn’t have been forgotten, could they? If the pullout had happened, they
would have been picked up ... wouldn’t they?
As sweat trickled down his forehead, he looked around.
Sand. They had been dropped in a vast sea-gulf of sand. Everywhere beige and brown and pink dunes rose and fell
with a life of their own.
This was what Thrakians did to a living world. And the Knights, in their suits of battle armor, trained and honed to
fight a “Pure” war destroying only the enemy, not the environment, were all that stood between this planet of Milos
and his own home world lined up next in a crescent of destruction that led all the way back to the heart of the Thrakian
League. Jack had been galvanized to be here to keep the Thrakian menace from his own homestead.
They’d been lucky here on Milos, so far. Only one of the continents had gone under ... still, it was one too many as far
as the lieutenant was concerned. The Dominion Forces were losing the Sand Wars. And he was losing his own private
struggle with his faith in his superior officers. They’d been dropped into nowhere five days ago and had been given
the most succinct of orders, gotten a pithy confirmation that morning and nothing since. Routine, he’d been told.
Strictly a routine mop-up. You didn’t treat Knights that way—not the elite of the infantrymen, the fastest, smartest and
most honorable fighters ever trained to wage war.
Jack moved inside the battle suit. The Flexalinks meshed imperceptibly, the holograph that played over him sent the
message to the suit and, in turn, the right arm flexed. Only that flex, transmitted and stepped up, could have turned
over an armored car. He sucked a dry lip in dismay over the reflex, then turned his face inside the helmet to read the
display.
The display bathed his face plate in a rosy color and his eyesight flickered briefly to the rearview camera display,
checking to see which of the troops ranged at his back. The compass wasn’t lying to him. “Five clicks. Sarge, have
they got us walking in circles?” His suit crest winked in the sun as he looked to his next in command.
“No, sir.” Sarge made a husky noise at the back of his throat. Sarge wore the Ivanhoe crest—a noncommittal comment
on what he thought of his lineage and his home world, but it made no difference to Storm. A man who came into the
Knights might come from any walk of life and the only criteria was whether he was good enough to use a suit. If he
was, and he survived basic training, his past became a sealed record, if that was the way the man wanted it.
Jack wondered if the sergeant was chewing again, even though it was against regulations. His mouth watered. He
could do with a bit of gum or stim himself. The sand made him thirsty. He waved his arm. “All right, everybody spread
out. Advance in a line. If the Thraks are here, that’ll flush ‘em. Keep alert. Watch your rear displays and your flanks.”
The com line crackled as Bilosky’s voice came over in sheer panic. “Red field! Lieutenant, I’m showing a tracking red
field!”
Storm swiveled his head to the sound, cursed at the obstruction of the face plate, and re-turned a fraction more slowly
so that his cameras could follow the motion, “Check your gauges again, Bilosky. It’s a malfunction. And calm down.”
The last in a deadly quiet.
Bilosky’s panic stammered to a halt. “Yes, sir.” Then, “Goddammit. Storm—those Milots have pilfered my suit! Every
one of my gauges is screwed. I’m showing a red field because I’m running on empty!”
Storm bit his tongue. He chinned the emergency lever at the bottom of the face plate, shutting down the holograph
field. Then he pulled his arm out of the sleeve quickly and thumbed the com line switches on his chest patch so that he
could talk to Bilosky privately. Without power or action to translate, his suit stumbled to a halt. The Flexalinks shone
opalescent in the sun.
“How far can you get?”
Not listening, Bilosky swore again. “Goddamn Milots. Here I am fighting their fracking war for them, and they’re
pirating my supplies—I ought to—“
“Bilosky!”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got ... oh, three clicks to go, maybe. Then I’m just another pile of junk standing on the sand.” He turned
to look at his superior officer, the black hawk crest rampant.
Storm considered the dilemma. He had his orders, and knew what his orders told him. Clean out Sector Five, and then
stand by to get picked up. The last of Sector Five ranged in front of him. They could ration out the most important
refills for Bilosky once they got where they were going. “We’ll be picked up by then.”
“Or the Thraks will have us picked out.”
Storm didn’t answer for a moment. He was asking a man with little or no power reserves showing on his gauges to go
on into battle, in a suit, in full battle mode. Red didn’t come up on the gauges until the suit was down to the last ten
percent of its resources. That ten percent would carry him less than an hour in full attack mode. Not that it made any
difference to a Knight. Jack sighed. “We’re on a wild goose chase, Bilosky. You’ll make it.”
“Right, sir.” A grim noise. “Better than having my suit crack open like an egg and havin’ a berserker pop out, right,
lieutenant?”
That sent a cold chill down Storm’s back. He didn’t like his troopers repeating ghoulish rumors. “Bilosky, I don’t want
rumors like that bandied around. You hear?”
“Yes, sir.” Then reluctantly, “It ain’t no rumor, lieutenant. I saw it happen once.”
“Forget it!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Going back on open air. And watch your mouth.” He watched as the other lumbered back into position. Then,
abruptly, Jack dialed in his command line and watched as the miniscule screen lit up, his only link with the warship
orbiting far overhead. The watch at the console, alerted by the static of their long range com lines, swung around. The
navy blue uniform strained over his bullish figure. He looked into the lens, his nostrils flaring. The squared chin was
cleft and it deepened in anger. A laser burn along one side of his hairline gave him a lopsided widow’s peak.
“Commander Winton here. You’re violating radio silence, soldier. What’s the meaning of this? Identify yourself.”
“I’m Battalion First Lieutenant,” he said.
“Where’s our pullout? We were dropped in here five days ago.”
“You’re under orders, lieutenant. Get in there and fight. Any further communication and I’ll have you up for court
martial.”
“Court martial? Is that the best you can do? We’re dying down here, commander. And we’re dying all alone.”
The line and screen went dead with a hiss. Suddenly aware of his own vulnerability, Storm pushed his right arm back
into his sleeve and chinned the field switch back on. His suit made an awkward swagger, then settled into a distance
eating stride. Fighting wars would be a hell of a lot easier if you could be sure who the enemy was.
Bilosky and Sarge and who knows who else were talking about berserkers now. The unease it filled him with he could
do without. He squinted through the tinted face plate at the alien sun. Strange worlds, strange people, and even
stranger enemies. Right now he’d rather wade through a nest of Thraks than try to wade through the rumors
surrounding the Milots and their berserkers.
There was no denying the rumors though. The Milots, who had summoned Dominion forces to fight for them against
the Thraks, those same low-tech Milots who ran the repair centers and provided the war backup, were as despicable
and treacherous as the Thraks Storm had enlisted to wipe out. And there were too many stories about altered suits ...
suits that swallowed a man up and spawned instead some kind of lizard-beastman who was a fighting automaton, a
berserker. Rumor had it the Milots were putting eggs into the suits, and the heat and sweat of the suit wearer hatched
those eggs and then the parasitic creature devoured its host and burst forth—
He told himself that the Milots had a strange sense of humor. What Bilosky thought he’d seen, whatever every
trooper who repeated the gossip thought they were talking about, was probably a prank played at a local tavern.
Knights always took a certain amount of ribbing from the locals, until seen in action, waging the “Pure” war.
Ahead of him, the dunes wavered, sending up a spray of sand. His intercom burst into sound.
“Thraks at two o’clock, lieutenant!”
Storm set his mouth into a grim smile. Now here was an enemy he could deal with. He eyed his gauges to make sure all
his systems were ready, and swung about.
Thraks were insects, in the same way jackals were primates or ordinary sow bugs were crustaceans. They were equally
at home upright or on all fours, due to the sloping of their backs. Jack set himself, watching them boil up out of the
sand from underground nests to launch themselves in a four-footed wave until they got close enough to stand up and
take fire. Thraks were vicious creatures with but a single purpose—total destruction—at least, fighting Thraks were.
Diplomatic Thraks were as vicious in a more insidious way.
He cocked his finger, setting off a burst of fire from his glove weapons that slowed the wave. The line of Thraks
wavered and swung away, even as they stood up and slung their rifles around from their backs.
On Milos, they had the slight advantage, having gotten there first and having begun their despicable terraforming.
Even a slight advantage to the Thraks was disastrous to the Dominion. Milot was already as good as lost . . .
battalions had been wiped out, driven back to the deserts, to make as graceful a retreat as possible. Inflict as many
casualties as they could, then pull out. Jack’s job, as he understood it, was to make the toll of taking Milos so heavy,
so dear, that the Thraks would stop here.
Storm’s grim smile never wavered, even as he strode forward, spewing death as he went, watching the gauge detailing
how much power he had left. Bodies crunched under his armored boots.
They were mopping up. They were to distract the Thraks and the cannon long enough to let most of the troop ships,
cold ships, pull out, and then they would be picked up. That was the promise....
He strides through the line, knowing the wings of his men will follow, and seeing that the front is not a front, but an
unending wave of Thraks. What was reported as a minor outpost is a major staging area, and he’s trapped in it, wading
through broken bodies and seared flesh. He sweeps both gloves into action, firing as he walks, using the power boost
to vault over newly formed walls of bodies and equipment.
Somewhere along the way, Bilosky lets out a cry and grinds to a halt, out of power. He screams as his suit is slit open
with a diamond cutter and the Thraks pull him out. Jack ignores the screams and plows onward. He has no choice now.
The pullout site is ahead of him. He has to go through the Thraks if he wants to be rescued. Ahead of him is the dream
of cold sleep and the journey home. The dream....
Surrounded by what is left of his troop, and by stragglers from other battalions, he lives long enough to fall into a pit,
a pit ringed by Thraks. The Dominion warriors stand back to back for days, firing only when absolutely necessary,
watching the unending wave of Thrakians above them. And he sees a suit burst open, days after its wearer expired
with a horrendous scream, and the armor halted like a useless statue in the pit. He sees the seams pop and an
incredible beast plow out, and charge the rim of the pit, taking fully a hundred armed Thrakians with it, even as it
bellows. He knows he is dreaming that he has seen a berserker, and tries to ignore the shell-like empty suit left behind
in shards, with the crest of Ivanhoe settling into the sand.
Even as he stands and fires, he thinks of what it is he wants to dream. He wants to dream getting out of there alive,
with his men. That is what he wants most. Then he wants to be able to scratch. And he thinks he hears something
inside the suit with him, something whispering at his shoulder, and he knows he’s losing it. Aunt Min back home
always said that when the Devil wanted you, he began by whispering to you over your shoulder. Storm is scared to
turn around. All he wants to do is find his dream of going home. And when the recall comes, he doesn’t know if he’s
hearing what he’s hearing or not ... or if he can even be found behind the wall of Thraks.
A gigantic metal gate clanks open.
“... no survivors.”
“There can’t be. This ship has been adrift for seventeen years. All systems are shut down, some kind of massive
power failure. Look at them. Frozen solid. Transported out of hell, only to die on the way home. God. Look at these
antique cryogenic units. No wonder they didn’t make it.”
Jack is still dreaming. He sweats cold tears because he can’t wake. He’s locked in. The twenty-two years of his life play
over and over like a moebius strip. But he senses a stirring.
“One of the bays is illuminated, doctor.”
“My god. The auxiliary system is still functioning here. Get the life support in here, and quickly. We might just be able
to save this one—“
“But orders—“
“Fuck orders! Imagine finding one of them alive, after all these years ... and I’m going to do everything to keep him that
way.”
A tingle of warmth in his icy existence. Is he dreaming or dying?
“If we wake him, do you think he’ll be sane? What does a man dream of for seventeen years?”
“He’s locked into a debriefing loop. We’ll be lucky if he has any mind left at all.”
A scraping. Something scratching at his death mask....
“That’s enough chatter. Get the coffin open and get ready to plug him in ... god. Look at his feet. Frostbite. And his
hand. He’s set the auxiliary system off himself....”
“That’s impossible. He’s in cryogenic suspension.”
“When the power failed ... he may have come to enough to know there was trouble. He’s jammed his right hand
against the emergency panel. It’s the only thing that saved him. After he’s stabilized, check the other coffins. See if
any of the dead reacted as well. This man must be a born survivor....”
“Look at these suits.”
A distracted grunt, then, “Destroy them.”
“Destroy them? These are relics ... the black market....”
“You know the orders. Destroy them! Nurse, get your mask on and get ready. The coffin lid comes open ... now.”
Jack bolted up in his bunk. Sweat poured off his forehead and into his cupped hands. He took a deep breath, feeling
the darkness and the night sway around him. With that deep breath, he began to count down, sending his mind into a
hypnotic mode that he’d learned as second nature.
“And when he calmed, he told himself, “I’m awake this time. Awake and alive.”
As he dropped his trembling hands from his face, he looked at the clock, though he didn’t really need to. The graying
edges of the room told him it was nearly dawn,
He’d only awakened three times that night. Slowly, but surely, he was getting better. It wasn’t that his dreams
frightened him ... memories of the Sand Wars weren’t pleasant, but he could endure them. No, it was the stuff of
dreams themselves. The trap. Would he awake into reality or be ensnared again?
Jack put out a hand, reaching for the vial of mordil on his nightstand. It came up empty in his palm. He grimaced, then
threw the bottle away into the grayness. It clattered in the corner. Black market, the mordil hadn’t done much good,
anyway, though it had come guaranteed to give sleep without dreams. There was no telling how much the mordil had
been stepped on before getting to him. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. This night, it hadn’t. Not that
any of his doctors would have approved. Dreams were necessary, he’d been told, to keep a man sane.
He swung his feet over the edge of the bunk and listened to the sounds of Claron coming awake. The early morning
stir and tentative bursts of birdsong swelled in his hearing. Making his rounds in the virgin green forests of Claron
would do more for him than any mordil. Jack stood up and began to get dressed in his serviceable Ranger grays.
Before he left the station, he walked to a locked room and thumbed the door open. It was small, closet-like, and when
the storage door swung open, Jack felt the shock, like a physical blow, thump him in the chest.
His battle suit hung in drydock. Its mother-of-pearl form swayed off the meathook, the stirring of the air in the chamber
awakening it. It had the service markings painted on, though fading, and the even more garish personal markings that
the twenty-year-old rookie had illustrated for himself. And he looked at the crest, chosen by the innocent young
volunteer who could hardly wait to be a full-fledged Knight. Two years later, that rookie would be a veteran lieutenant,
abandoned to the Thrakians on Milos.
When the transporter had finally found them, he was the only one left at the bottom of the pit, but it didn’t seem to
matter, when he boarded the transport cold ship. Only one ship. It left three-quarters full, carrying the only survivors
of the Thrakian invasion of Milos. They’d been scraping them off the surface of Milos like so many squashed bugs ...
all that was left of the Dominion’s finest.
Nineteen years, three toes and one right little finger later, as he readied to leave the Veteran’s Hospital, the nurse had
very surreptiously presented him with a footlocker the night before his discharge. They had shared a lot of nights,
lately, and he’d had no suspicion this would be different. But the contents of the footlocker had sent him mentally
reeling.
“Don’t you like it?”
The Flexalinks winked at him, an obscene pearl from the bottom of the trunk.
“This ... this is my suit.”
“I know that.” She had hung onto his elbow, not noticing the tremble that ran through his body.
“They were all supposed to have been destroyed.”
She had smiled up at him. “I know. But this one’s yours. You survived, and I thought ... well, I don’t know. I thought
you’d like to have your suit, so I hid it.”
Jack couldn’t force himself to look away. In any other time, from any other war, a Dominion Knight would have given
his soul to keep his suit.
But not this time. Not this war.
He stared in horror. He remembered the cold fear it had given him in his dreams to be wearing the suit again. And
wondered if the Milots did create berserkers, and if so, how? And wondered if the nurse had ever realized what she’d
done when she’d saved the suit, hidden it, and then given it to him.
A bird trilled outside the compound, reminding him of his new life. He swung the storage door shut. When he could
open it and look the battle armor in the face again, emotionlessly, he would know he was well.
Until then, he planned to find the man that had made a coward out of him, and kill the son of a bitch.
Chapter 2
The rehab tech looked down at his clipboard for the twentieth time during the interview, not to review what the screen
was telling him, but to hide his face, so that the man sitting across from him couldn’t read his expression. The tech was
scared. He’d been scared for the past seven months, when the hospital had discharged this man into his general care
at the rehab center. The man was a Knight—an idealist who’d been trained to fight the “Pure” war, and believed in it,
had even taken vows accordingly and lived, exercised, breathed by those vows. And the man had been betrayed on
Milos, like thousands of his brothers—and was a tracking time bomb because of it. Who did his superiors think he
was, a goddamn saint, that he could rehab a Knight? Thank god, the patient no longer had access to a battle suit, and
that the Knights had been disbanded years ago. Today’s armored infantrymen were just so much cannon fodder, and
the tech could deal with that. The computer screen blinked at him, reminding the tech that he was supposed to be
working on his client’s discharge.
“I don’t care where you reassign me, just make it somewhere I can be alone. I want to be alone.” Storm stared at the
wall and watched it form into a comforting hologram. He glared at it until the picture grew hesitant, and then returned
to wall.
The rehab tech said blandly, “There aren’t too many people as alone as you are.” He typed something into his
keyboard. “All right. I’ll recommend several occupations that go along with your background survey—but I’ll tell you
this, Storm—you don’t want to be alone. And when you realize that, you’ll have accomplished what I’ve been trying
to do these past seven months.” He stood up, staring at the stark expression of the sandy-haired man. A
forty-one-year-old mind inside a lean, twenty-two-year-old body—both of them harboring the lust for revenge and the
killer instinct of millennia-old homo sapiens.
Jack barely heard the tech leave. His thoughts, waking dreams, boiled over him. Storm stretched out his right hand,
tensed it so that the muscles ridged over the back of his hand, muscles that led to the smallest digit and ended
abruptly in a scar-smoothed absence instead of the little finger. He rubbed the edge of his hand. That was the finger
that had saved his life ... and plunged him into living hell.
He’d had it explained to him, oh, maybe a hundred times. By the doctor, the nurses, the rehab tech, the computer
monitor, and it still made no more sense than it had upon hearing it the first time.
He was the sole survivor of the Sand Wars. Oh, there were bound to be a few others—deserters mostly, hidden here
and there in the underground strata. But his cold ship was one of only three to have made it off Milos, and the only
one to make it past the Thrakian blockade, although that was undoubtedly when it sustained the damage which threw
it off course and eventually caused massive system failures. It had drifted then, powerless and off course, lost in the
outer lanes for seventeen years. And, inside, only his bay was functioning on auxiliary power ... all of the others had
gone dark, their occupants as dead as the ship in which they lay.
The doctors had no explanation for it. Somehow, he had roused when the power had gone off—roused enough to jam
his right hand against the interior of the bay, pushing the panel that would activate the emergency auxiliary power.
The action could have sprung the “coffin” lid and freed him, but instead it jarred the auxiliary power button and he was
plunged back into cryogenic sleep. The coincidence had saved his life ... and lost him his right little finger and three
toes to frostbite, a small enough price to pay, his doctors had told him.
If he had been freed, they doubted he could have lived for very long aboard the systems dead ship.
He was heir to the ignominious title of sole survivor of the most disastrous defeat of Dominion Forces since their
formation. Jack smiled grimly at this, aware that he was no doubt being monitored from the other side of the wall,
beyond the holograph. He wondered what they thought about him—his tense smiles at nothing at all. His inability to
sleep a night through without waking, panic-stricken, six or seven times. His determination to stay solo, alone, a
survivor.
The Thrakians, he’d been told, had stopped conquering almost as suddenly as they’d started, leaving behind a
crescent-shaped path of destruction—once verdant planets turned into seas of sand by war and alien terraforming.
No, not sand. Jack stretched his hands in front of him on the table, aware even as he thought, that the rehab tech was
reporting to a superior, and decisions were being made that would determine the course of the rest of his life—or so
they thought. Once he was free....
Not sand. It looked like sand. Moved through the gloved hands of his battle armor like sand. Flowed. Grit floated on
the air when flung. Hot. Dry. Dusty. But not sand, exactly. They knew now that it was filled with microcosms. Tiny
organisms that stayed dormant until the Thrakians planted their young, and then went to work.
The Thrakian League had decimated eight solar systems in order to create nests for their grubs. Warm, sand-filled
nests. And why they stopped there, no one knew. It certainly wasn’t because the Dominion Forces had defeated them
at Milos. Nor had they been defeated at the Stand of Dorman’s Colony, Storm’s home planet.
No, the Thrakians simply stopped because they’d wanted to, and for the last fifteen years, there had been uneasy
treaty between the League and the Dominion. Uneasy because none of the Dominion scientists could predict when, or
if, the swarming would occur again—or how to stop it if it did.
It was already too late for Storm and for Storm’s family, long dead, though freshly mourned.
Breaking off his thoughts. Jack looked up at the wall. “Hurry up,” he said. “I want to get on with this.”
On with what? With saving the universe from the Thrakian menace? He laughed humorlessly at himself and leaned
back into the form-fitting chair. It made minor adjustments to his lanky form. He did not sit in a chair so much as he
conquered it.
The conference room door sprung aside to admit the rehab tech. He threw a motley looking gray jumpsuit onto the
table, where it slid until it halted in front of Storm. He picked it up with his nine fingers and spread it out to read the
insignia.
“A Ranger.”
“That’s right. You’ve got your wish, Storm. You’ve been assigned to Claron, one of the Outward Bound planets. Not
too much going on there ... mining and the supportive trade for that. You’ll be gathering a data base on the planet
itself.”
“I’m not a xenobiologist.”
“No, but you had some background training in it, before you volunteered.” The rehab tech gave a thin smile, matching
the sparseness of his brown hair. “The government can’t afford a specialist for every backwater planet. But if you
want to be alone, that’s the place to go. I’ve ordered a packet of background tapes for you.”
“How soon can I leave?” Storm lowered the suit, curling it toward his chest, a subconscious protective gesture that
the rehab tech noted.
“Day after tomorrow.”
For the first time in weeks, the veteran smiled, and the happiness reached his washed-out blue eyes.
And in the Claron morning, the echo of that smile touched his eyes again. He threw his pack over the skimmer and
lashed it on, listening to the redtails courting in the sky over the compound. Their raucous chatter could only lure
another redtail, and that was the way it should be. They swooped overhead toward the forest beyond and
disappeared, with a chorus of wild, hysterical giggles.
Storm fit into Claron. He fit better than even his rehab tech could have guessed, and in ways he never could have
predicted. The mining syndicates that made up the boomtowns operated within an unwritten code of environmental
protection ... one that he felt comfortable with. They had a purity to their industry, a code, that perhaps only someone
like himself could understand. The plains were filled with obsidite, worth crossing space to pull out, and worth doing it
right.
The only trouble he’d had in all his months of work was with a local brewery, Samson’s Ale. Claron boomrats had a
liking for the malt crops ... a liking that put them on the list for extinction.
It wasn’t that Storm had a thing for boomrats. When he’d first located his compound at the fringe of the Ataract
forests, he’d cursed at_the skinny little rodents more than once. The thieving, fractious critters stole his supplies and
ranged over their territory like packs of bandits, shoulder to shoulder, kits in the middle and scarred veterans to the
outside, though they were scarcely big enough to give a predator a decent mouthful. They walked on their hind legs,
to look bigger and more ferocious, Storm thought. And when they’d discovered Samson Breweries’ malt fields, they
thought they’d walked into paradise. At first it hadn’t been necessary to kill them—the boomrats ate themselves to
death, unused to the luxury of abundant food. Jack had walked through rows of chewed-off stalks, with bloated
boomrats belly-up in the aisles.
That hadn’t taken them too long to figure out. Then the crop eating began in earnest and he’d had to go toe to toe
with Samson to give the little critters the right to live. Luckily, the sonic fences he’d devised seemed to work all right.
Storm didn’t know what niche the boomrats occupied in the ecology of Claron yet, but he knew he’d find out. And he
was pleased with himself for saving them for that niche until then.
The dawn fled completely. The mauve horizon of Claron’s southern sky hugged the forest and mountain ridge fiercely.
He looked out toward the plains, to the mines, and saw the white funnels of their steamstacks. He felt like a little
company. In a day or two, after this tour, he might go into Upside, and say hello. A little public relations, and private,
would go good right about now.
He kicked the starter and swung on, the skimmer shuddering into life beneath him. Its shadow skimmed the dirt clod
meadow and took off as he throttled it forward. He’d have to learn to spend more time on the Ataract ... it was
supposed to be the site of his permanent base, but he’d found excuses to keep the compound relatively mobile for
several years. He didn’t like staring into the eye of Star Gate on the eastern edge, even though that was principally
why he was on Claron— why they’d needed a Ranger.
He was little more than a Gatekeeper. Oh, the exobiology work he did was important, but only if colonists started
moving in, next to the miners. But it was the Gate—unnatural hole in the fabric of the universes—it was minding the
Gate that had put him there. And so Storm watched it. He watched it with the faint prickling of hair at the back of his
neck, as he comprehended just what it was he dealt with, unlike most of the locals. No, Storm knew its powers all too
well. Claron had been discovered at the other side of the hole when the Gate had been punched through, and it had
taken the energy of a small nova to do it. Star Gates were few and far between, being too expensive and too dangerous
to the patterns of the galaxies to use. This one had been a fortuitous accident ... and would stay that way, as long as
he was assigned as Ranger. The Dominion did not want it expanded.
Jack wanted it closed, but knew that wasn’t likely to happen either.
He sighed as he brought the skimmer in line with the golden eye. It was a short run from the compound. He measured it
off, to be sure it was still anchored. The energy waves radiating from it rippled. He’d set up low level sonic posts to be
sure nothing from Claron absentminedly wandered into it—although the corner of Jack’s mouth twitched at the
thought of a pack of boomrats wandering into the Gate. He’d like to see the fraction of a second long, wide-eyed
expressions on their rodent faces when faced with deep space.
Measurements done, he swung the skimmer about, and turned on his recorder. The morning breeze of the Ataract
swept his face, drying the nervous beads of perspiration on his forehead. It was a raw breeze, and spiced, smelling
nothing like the planet he’d grown up on. Dorman’s Stand had been an agra-planet, with the smell of freshly loamed
earth and tangy pesticides, and freshly harvested vegetables. He took a deep breath. He’d almost forgotten what
Dorman’s Stand had smelled like ... dampened by the years spent in the stink of his own sweat and lubricants of the
battle armor.
Storm brought the skimmer to idle and stalled there, in midair. He felt uneasy. The Ataract was relatively quiet this
morning. No boomrats were out. Yet the sun was up. He rubbed the back of his neck. He felt vaguely on edge, the way
he usually did before an assault drop—
Jack swung the skimmer about, and began to patch in his recorder to the compound computer. His hand trembled and
he cursed as he fumbled over the keys missed by the amputated tenth finger. He looked up, caught a vision of the tree
looming in front of him and leaned over, pulling the skimmer around it. But it brought the machine skewing to a halt,
trembling in the air, and he caught himself panting.
He took a deep breath and got control of himself. The terminal vibrated under his fingertips, letting him know it had
made the connection, and he dropped his gaze to read the board. Everything was fine. There was nothing in this
section of the Outward Bounds that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Jack laughed at himself. He disconnected the linkage, and returned it to recording. The skimmer coughed once.
Below him, crudely dug out ground rippled in the air discharge from the skimmer. Jack descended and turned the
transport off as he recognized the field he’d dug. Small, twisted green snoots of malt edged upward, and he grinned as
he crouched down to examine it. He’d conned Samson Breweries out of a sackful of seed, and here was his reward,
already pushing up to meet the sun. He tickled a shoot. He hadn’t entirely lost his green thumb, he guessed, though
only the gods knew what would happen when the boomrats found this patch. He’d grown it for them, though.
A sharp pebble skimmed the air, slashing into his shoulder. Jack yelped with the sting and straightened up, looking
around.
The horde of boomrats looked back, shoulder to shoulder, their beady, flint-colored eyes staring, the adults stretched
to their utmost height on their skinny hind legs. One of them gripped a stone in his front paw.
“I’ll be damned,” Jack muttered. He took a step away from the malt patch, and watched as the thirty-strong pack of
boomrats shifted warily with him. He pointed. “This is for you, guys— but if you chew it down to the nubs now, you
won’t have anything left for the winter, or to go to seed for next year.”
Scarface, the leader, showed his fangs.
Jack backed up, toward the skimmer. He wasn’t worried about one or even two boomrats, but a pack could chew him
up a little. He held his hands up in the air even as he wondered if they’d thrown the stone at him. Tool implementation?
He’d have to make a note as soon as he got out of here.
As he backed up, Scarface seemed to relax. His tawny body dropped to all fours and he ran at Storm, and stopped,
chittering. His rodent muzzle worked, then he spit something out at the man’s booted feet. Then, warily, the boomrat
backed up and rejoined his pack.
A shiny green stone, covered with spittle from the creature’s mouth pouches, shone up at Storm. He bent over and
picked it up, and wiped it off. It was not anything of import, except it was something pretty and shiny. Jack
dropped it into this pouch.
“I take it this is a thank you for the malt. You’re welcome—but—“ Jack hesitated as he swung aboard the skimmer.
“Don’t do anything rash like taking over the planet, okay? I could be in a lot of trouble for this.”
Muzzles and whiskers quivered uncomprehendingly as he kicked the skimmer back into operation and headed for the
fringe of the Ataract.
He woke sweating. His pulse pounded in his ears like war drums, and he lay still in the darkness of the room, waiting
for his hearing to go back to normal. He wiped the palms of his hands across his T-shirt. As usual, he couldn’t
remember what he’d been dreaming, just that he’d been suffocating—
Jack swung off the bed. He went to the faintly glowing panel of the computer terminal and activated it. Something was
wrong. Not just his life or his psyche, which was always abnormal, but something was wrong with Claron. He feared it.
The screen fired to life under his fingers, but he heard the noise before the tracking came up, and he flinched, looking
upward, seeing only the ceiling, but knowing what he heard outside. Blips and streaks across the tracking field
confirmed it.
Claron was under siege.
Jack bolted for the doorframe. He looked outside, to the barely lightening sky, and heard the rumble. He cursed, even
as his heart took an awkward leap in his chest. The sky over the mines took on a violent, orange glow.
“Holy Knights,” Storm muttered and froze, unable to look away.
He was watching a planet burn.
He heard the reentry rumble and knew that the warships were headed his way.
Fumbling, he lunged back at the terminal and transmitted a message along the computer lines. Then he stopped. There
was no way of knowing if anyone was there to receive his warning.
Dull thunder spoke overhead. He had no time left. The very air crackled with the heat, the heat of the weaponry being
unleashed on unsuspecting, undeserving Claron. He had one chance left. He stripped off his shirt.
Jack pulled open the storage locker and jerked open the seams of the battle armor. He didn’t have time to think. The
suit hummed faintly as he climbed into it and began the laborious process of sealing up.
He attached only the contacts he had to for operation. He wouldn’t have time to fight back— no, all Jack wanted to do
was to live. He had one chance to make it. His helmet snapped into place.
The ceiling blew off the compound. Orange light flared in, wrapping around him like a maelstrom. The suit was baffled,
but stayed upright. Jack paid no attention as he connected the last of the wires, and the holograph came on,
whispering smoothly.
He’d kept it well oiled and powered all these months, in spite of his fear of it. He still feared it, but he feared dying
worse.
The firestorm caught up the last of the compound, whipping it up from around him, and Jack stood in the clear. In the
orange glow of the burn-off, the golden eye of the Star Gate had turned to an eerie blue. Jack ran toward it, loping
easily, the power vault of the suit giving him the ability to move over the terrain even as it charred and buckled under
him.
He looked up, once, his sensors dulling the fire, and he caught sight of the tremendous warship cruising overhead, its
reentry shields still glowing. He couldn’t identify it.
The cannon mouth swung around. Jack ducked his head and put all his resources into a last leap. He flung his arms
forward and jumped, diving headfirst into the blue curtain of the Star Gate.
It wrapped around him, still dormant, hugged him, brought him to a stop. Jack rolled over and looked back out the
Gate. Red and orange fire, in sheets, rippled across the verdant tracts of the Ataract forest—over all of Claron. He had
only a second to ask himself why, when the energy blacklash hit—and the Star Gate activated, blowing him through
and beyond.
Chapter 3
There is always a kid in Basic who ignores the drill sarge when he says, “Don’t ask.” Always. It’s a universal law, like
gravity. Even when you don’t really want to know the answer, there’s always some jerk to ask the question.
“What if the drop tubes misfire and instead of going planetside, we get put out beyond the orbit?”
Someone in the back row had snickered, saying quietly, “What if you put your ass in your helmet instead of your
head?”
But the D.I. had ignored all of them, his baggy brown eyes sweeping over them with contempt. “Don’t ask,” he
answered. “You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, but—what if,” the kid persisted. “I mean, your suit’s got air—it’s insulated and it can pressurize. You got
communications, water— you could make it, couldn’t you? Until you got picked up? It’s battle armor, right, but it
could double for a deepspace suit temporarily, right?”
“You don’t wanna know,” the sarge repeated, wearily.
But this kid that asks these questions, it’s also a universal law that he just doesn’t shut up until he gets his
answer—or fifty laps.
In Storm’s case, the kid in Basic got fifty laps. But as he looked out his face plate, doing a slow tumble, he thought ...
now I know, Sarge. And the answer is yes ... your suit’ll hold. Not forever. Probably not until you get picked up and
especially not if someone is hanging around to shoot holes in it, but yeah—the suit will hold.
Probably longer than your mind will.
And he did another slow roll through black velvet space, praying the tinting on the face plate would block out the
starlight, saving his sight for another day. Beyond him, the golden eye of the Star Gate stared back, an unwinking
deity which, after having punted him this far, was dormant once again.
He didn’t even feel like calculating the time he might have left. The thought was too morbid and, Jack added to himself,
he’d probably been on borrowed time since he waded into that pit of Thraks nearly twenty years ago. So much for the
borrowed time theory. So what he did do was cautiously, supremely cautiously, for every wave of the suit’s limbs sent
him veering in another direction, take the time to finish hooking himself up, weapons and all.
His cameras scanned and he saw that he was drifting in open space, but that he might not necessarily drift for
eternity—there was a planet within view and, in a few months, he might even drift close enough for its gravity to snag
him and pull him down. It went without saying that Jack wouldn’t be alive to find out if he was right or not.
He considered his com equipment, wondering if he should put out an SOS. It took little energy, was solar-powered,
and up to optimum, so he kicked the chin lever that put out the transmission. Eerily, he couldn’t hear it, so he could
only assume the suit broadcast what he was telling it to.
Jack spent the rest of his time sweating, hearing things, and being angry. It was the anger that kept him sane ... and so
he fed it, because he didn’t like the aching fear of the suit, and he was worried that he was actually hearing what he
thought he was. It was a low, scratchy mumbling, just beyond the range of his senses, and he didn’t know if he really
heard anything or not, like a ghosted-transmission. Just a spidery, whispery kind of noise. It made no difference to him
that the suit embraced him like a long-lost lover, that wearing it brought back a kind of easy familiarity, that it nestled
him close and kept him alive.
“Sarge, what happens if the Milots got to my suit, too, and put those—those parasites into it and even now I’m
hatching them and they’ll consume me and I’ll be like Bilosky, dead, and then a lizard berserker, like you, Sarge?”
“Ya don’t wanna know.”
“But, Sarge—what if it’s true? What if it happens? What if it’s going to happen to me?”
“Don’t ask.”
“But Sarge ... I can feel something tickling the back of my neck!”
“Fifty laps, kid, and then, if you still want to ask a question, ask why some jerk of a commander sent you dirtside to
Milos, and then left you there to die? Ask that one.”
“Ya don’t wanna know why, sergeant,” Jack said wearily. He licked his lips for the hundredth time and felt his stomach
do an elegant zero-grav flip-flop as the suit rolled over again.
“You don’t want to know the answer to that one.
“No, but you do. Jack. And you’d better stay alive to ask it, this time. They shut you up with seventeen years of cold
sleep and two years of hospitalization and rehab, but they ain’t shutting up this time. There’s nobody else left to ask
the question this time. Jack my boy—and you’ve already done your fifty laps. And—hell! While you’re at it, ask them
what happened to Claron!”
His dazed voice echoed inside his plate, and he realized he was still suited up. How long now? How long had he been
talking to himself. He shook. Carefully, he withdrew his right hand from his glove, the missing metacarpal bothered him
with a ghost of sensation, and he wiped the trickling sweat on his face. Heat dissipation still a problem inside a suit. He
grinned without humor. While he had his hand out, he checked the SOS beam. Still on. Had anybody heard him?
Somebody had better hear him, because he wanted to live!
The scratchy whispering had stopped. Had he only imagined it? How long had he imagined himself back in Basic?
How long had he been tumbling out here?
He spread out. Below him was a canopy of stars. To his two o’clock, the glowing blue ball of a planet which just might
snag him in—if he could afford to wait for months. He couldn’t. The suit wasn’t made for it, and neither was he. And
even if he got close enough, who said the planetholders down below were equipped to pick up a reading on him, and
dash out to save him?
He slipped his hand back inside the glove and flexed the fingers. Jack decided to go back to talking to himself. After
all, staying angry was as good as staying sane, until he came to the end.
“Holy shit,” Tubs exclaimed, his fat fingers playing over the sensor keyboard of the Montreal. He’d been looking for
trouble dirtside—they were strikebreakers after all, going in to bust up a planet, but he hadn’t expected to sense
anything this far out. A mine, perhaps. He waved frantically for Short-Jump to attend him at the screen.
“What is it?”
“I’m tracking the god-damndest piece of space junk I’ve ever seen.”
“A mine?”
“I thought so at first, but don’t know now.”
Short-Jump frowned and leaned in over Tubs’ shoulder. He was uglier than sin, so ugly it was hard to find a woman
who’d look at him twice unless he got a short jump head start, hence his nickname. He wrinkled his spatulate nose.
“Hell, that’s a suit. Probably deader’n last week’s soya rations.”
“A scab maybe? Jettisoned out here as a warning?”
“Could be. Strikers can be a tough lot.” Short-Jump grinned. He relished a good fight. Opinion aboard the Montreal
used to be that he hoped for a battle injury to give him a free ride into cosmetic surgery. Tubs had given up on that
theory long ago. Strikebusters like Short-Jump made enough money to pay for any kind of surgery. He had decided his
shipmate just liked to bust heads. “I’ll go tell the captain.”
Tubs looked back to his screen, his pop eyes still round with amazement. “Shit,” he muttered to himself excitedly, as he
caught a better view. “That’s no deep suit—that’s battle amor!” He began to plot a fix for the tractor beams.
The captain of the Montreal watched noncomit-tally as the tractor beam hung the armor in midair and the hangar doors
sealed shut. The Flex-alinks glistened like mother-of-pearl in the dingy recesses of the privateer’s hold. The suit hung
quietly, with no sign of life in it. Captain Marciane scratched his thin thatch of brown and gray hair. He’d never seen
battle armor quite like this before—one of the old, elite suits, was his best guess. At his side. Tubs finally babbled to a
halt and scuffed his boots on the decking. Marciane realized his men waited for him to do something. He signaled for
the transparent bulkhead to open. Still eying that suit cautiously, he stepped into the now pressurized hangar.
“Now that’s one oyster I’d hate to shuck,” he murmured to himself.
“Shall I go cut it down, captain?” Tubs blurted.
“No. It might be armed.” He waved the tractor beam off. It unlocked, dumping the armor five feet to the deck abruptly.
It landed with a BOOM that reverberated off the metal walls.
Tubs yelped. “Holy god, captain! If it was armed—“
Marciane silenced him. “Not armed that way. It may be armed against tampering.” He walked a little closer, tilting his
head back. Whoever had worn the suit had been a tall man. “The men who used to wear these things ...” his voice
trailed off.
“What’11 we do with it?” Short-Jump pushed back past the bulkhead into the hangar with them.
“We leave it alone. After we get dirtside, we see what kind of salvage we get from it.” Having seen enough of a legend,
Marciane turned his back on the armor.
Tubs, a skittish man, but good in his field, gave an odd hop, and grabbed the captain’s forearm. “Captain! It moved. I
swear it did.”
Marciane turned around slowly on one heel. He could see no evidence that the suit had so much as twitched. He
grabbed Tubs’ torch from his equipment belt and shone the beam into the darkened face plate, and saw nothing. The
beam etched dark shadows into the half-empty hold. He lowered the torch. “You guys are all on edge—a fighting
edge, and I like that, because that’s what I need to break a strike. We’ll be doing reentry shortly. Get back to your
posts and get ready, because we’re going down burning. I want us to be too hot for th’ line to handle. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.” Tubs’ round, usually florid face paled, but he saluted.
Short-Jump just gave him a flat smile from his ugly face. Marciane nodded briskly.
He turned for one last look back at the bulkhead. “Besides,” he said to himself. “If there had been someone inside
there—he’s either dead, or insane by now, anyhow.”
A dry, rasping voice followed them hollowly. “Would you settle for thirsty?”
The three men froze. Tubs was the first to turn around, but his legs had buckled and dumped him on the deck, where
he quivered, his mouth working uselessly. Only his hand twitched into activity, pointing at the suit.
Short-Jump kneed his companion. “Cut it out, for crissakes. It’s not a ghost, there’s someone in there. Captain,
permission to aid the visitor?”
摘要：

 Chapter1 BeingaKnightdidn’tnecessarilymeanhe’dbeenpromisedCamelot—butwhereinthehellwasthetransport?Whathadhappenedtorecall?Jackfoughtthemaddeningimpulsetoscratchinsidehisarmor,assweatdrippeddown,andthecontactsattachedtohisbaretorsoitchedimpossibly.Toscratchnow,thewayhewashookedup,he’dblowhimselfawa...

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