- Comrades in Arms

Comrades in Arms

Palming the power stud on his laser rifle, Rader leaped into the alien trench and sighted on his enemy. Targeting vectors appeared on the inner surface of his helmet face shield, and the tactile sensors on his gloves linked to his artificial hands.

Ten Jaxxans skittered along the angled trenches they had dug as they made progress across the planetoid’s contested landscape. Moving in ranks, they all reacted in unison to his arrival. The enemy did not like, did not understand, unpredictability.

As a Deathguard, Rader was unpredictable. He had been designed that way.

He found his balance on the loose pea-gravel, used his momentum to keep charging forward. In their open bug-tunnels, the Jaxxans had no room to scatter, nor did they have time.

The brain fire pounded through him, the Werewolf Trigger that insisted he kill, KILL! He was a well-armored bull-in-a-china-shop, brain still alive along with a patchwork of his original body, hooked up to spare parts that allowed him to be sent back onto the battlefield. The chaos he provoked was part of a tactical plan issued by officers far from the battlefield; Deathguards weren’t expected to survive long, though.

Rader had been briefed about this as a new recruit, though he hadn’t ever considered it a real possibility while he and his squad mates laughed about squashing roaches. But the officials had made him the offer, showing him the contract as he lay there hooked up to complex life-support mechanisms in the med-center bed. Rader had barely been able to read the type with his one remaining eye.

“You want this, soldier? Or would you rather just be disconnected?”

The answer had seemed obvious. At the time.

Now the first alien died before he even saw the Deathguard: a pinpoint of red laser light burned through his chitinous face. Cyborg components kicked in, and Rader swiveled, sweeping the area with the nose of his weapon. Energy gels and synthetic adrenaline kept him moving, kept him shooting.

There were ten Jaxxans, then seven, then four in the invisible wake of his beam.

Much of the surface of the planetoid Fixion was a no-man’s land, slashed with enemy trenches and tunnels interspersed with watchtowers. The aliens liked geometric order, but used unsettling angles, tilted planes, rarely straight lines. They had already occupied twenty asteroids in the Fixion Belt, just as the human army had; now both sides fought over the rest of the territory, particularly this central planetoid.

No longer part of the Earth League forward lines, Rader had already served his term as a soldier, given it his all, and now had this “opportunity” to give some more, for as long as he might last. He was there as an independent berserker, armed and juiced, sent into the no-man’s land without any obvious military objective—it drove the Jaxxans nuts.

Deathguards were expensive and effective, categorized as Vital Equipment rather than Personnel—and so far the PR victories had been worth every penny of the military’s investment. Or so Rader had heard; he was not on the list for explanations.

In short order, he killed eight of the Jaxxans in the trench, but he found himself wound in the luminous green threads of an energy-web cast by the last two aliens. The mentally projected web closed around him in a glowing net that would short out his armor and destroy his components—both the artificial ones and his biological ones.

But the Werewolf Trigger screamed at him like a drill sergeant inside his head. KILL! KILL! And he obeyed. The last of the Jaxxans fell to the trench floor, angular limbs twitching, and the coalescing energy-web faded.

The mindless Werewolf Trigger died to a whisper as the threat diminished and he calmed himself. Now that Rader could see more than a red haze, he gazed upon the carnage. The filters in his helmet blocked out the stench of burned meat and boiled ichor.

Alone, Rader recorded high-res images of the dead enemy in the trenches, transmitted his kills to HQ, and received acknowledgment but no praise.

He didn’t need to remind himself that these Jaxxans weren’t human. He stared at their scattered bodies, trying to compare them to something from Earth; they evoked locusts, lizards, and skeletons all at once. The aliens were unnaturally thin, with tough skin that resembled chitin. Their eyes were striking, large black globes that reflected the goldenrod light of Fixion’s sun.

The Jaxxans carried no weapons, nor did they encase themselves in armor. All their power, their energy-webs, and everything else about them (he wasn’t sure how much was rumor and how much was truth) originated in the minds behind those eerie polished eyes. Many Jaxxans supposedly studied human culture and language, but he hadn’t had a chance for conversation to confirm it.

The walls of the shallow trench rolled inward, sliding down to cover the bodies. The sandy, gravelly soil of Fixion was lousy for digging trenches in—not to mention lousy for growing things in, lousy for building things in, lousy for living in. As a matter of honor, the Earth League would never let the Jaxxans have it, and the alien command apparently felt the same way.

Time to move on, keep finding targets, keep causing trouble—Commissioner Sobel had told him he might have four weeks of operational capability before the brain/cyborg interface deteriorated. He followed the Jaxxan trench, taking the path of least resistance, but he encountered no other Jaxxans. The trench bent in one direction, then another, but ultimately went nowhere.

Off in the distance, near the asteroid’s foreshortened horizon, human artillery brought down a tall Jaxxan watchtower, and soldiers clashed in a forward offensive as part of the official military plan. His comrades. Former comrades.

Rader didn’t belong there, would not be going back to the main base on the far side of Fixion, would not be going home.

He climbed out of the trench and set off across the open landscape.

On the very last day that Rader (Rader, Robert: 0166218: Earth-Boston) lived as a grunt, he rode inside a spearhead-shaped assault fighter, enthusiastic about the impending engagement. He crowded next to his buddies on the hard metal benches, hunched over, counting down the seconds until they reached the Jaxxan nesting asteroid.

They were a team, comrades in arms. No time for second thoughts now.

The cold metal air had been recycled too many times but still carried the unmistakable odors of sweat and farts, obvious indicators of human tension. Rader was pumped up on metabolic supplements and foul-tasting power goo. At the Base, he had wolfed down a chewy high-protein breakfast cake, which was supposed to taste like bacon and eggs, before rushing to the assault ship, grabbing his weapon, securing his body armor, and getting mentally prepared.

His squad mates were ready to go squash some roaches. They had been cooped up far too long at the Earth League’s Fixion Base #1, participating in simulation after simulation, blowing up fearsome holographic Jaxxans during practice sessions.

So far, Rader had been on only one real assault mission, a raid on a Jaxxan supply ship. Hundreds of Earth League forces had captured the small alien craft, and they had slaughtered every enemy aboard without any difficulty; Rader barely got off a shot. In battle simulations, the holographic alien warriors had always fought much more fiercely. He suspected that the Jaxxans on the supply ship were just civilians hauling crates of packaged food.

Today’s assault was bound to be much more challenging.

The night before, while prepping for the mission, Squad Sergeant Blunt had given them the full briefing—and “blunt” he was indeed, although the word “gruff” seemed equally appropriate; some of Rader’s squad mates preferred the term “psycho-bastard.” Rader had sat joking with his buddies, nudging ribs with elbows. Since being thrown together into the same pressure cooker with the same goal and the same enemy, their squad had become very close—Renfrew, Chaney, Coleman, Rajid, Gonzalez, Huff.

In the briefing room, Sergeant Blunt projected a map of the asteroid belt, a smattering of space gravel strewn along an orbit that just happened to be in the star’s habitable zone, though no one would really want to live there. Nevertheless, the Earth League deemed the Fixion Belt worth fighting for, and Rader had signed up in a fit of patriotism that had lasted significantly less time than his term of service.

The Sarge pointed to illuminated asteroids on the diagram, indicating the ones held by humans and an equivalent number held by Jaxxans. (The score received boos and hisses from the squad members.) The largest planetoid, Fixion itself, was the most hotly fought-over piece of real estate in the Galaxy.

Blunt pointed to another flyspeck amid the dots in the asteroid belt. “Intel has discovered a roach hatching base, or a nest, or whatever the hell they call it. We’re going to wipe it out. Squash the bugs before they can hatch a thousand more disgusting soldiers.”

The Sarge paused for a moment, looking at every member of the squad. “Payback. The Roaches did the same thing to us on Cephei Outpost. They saw that little colony and assumed it was our breeding station, killed all those poor colonists, those children. I don’t think they understand how humans breed.” Sergeant Blunt’s voice became grim and angry. “We’ve got embassies set up on the Détente Asteroid, and the Jaxxan higher-ups speak better English than you do, but neither side talks.”

The mood in the briefing room grew resentful; many of the grunts sneered at the very idea of peace talks. Huff let out a rude snort. “How can you talk with the things that slagged Cephei?”

Sergeant Blunt got them to concentrate on the priority. “It’s not your job to think about the big picture. We don’t pay you enough to consider the complicated things. Commissioner Sobel decides when it’s time to talk to them. For you guys, we keep it simple: Enter the roach hatching station, destroy everything, and go home.”

Rader raised his hand. “Any intel on Jaxxan defenses there, Sergeant?”

“Doesn’t matter.” The Sarge gave the closest thing to a smile that Rader had ever seen. “We’ll have a Deathguard with us. A fresh one, all systems still fully functional.”

A quick hesitation of surprise, then a round of cheers …

Later, as the assault fighter closed in on the targeted Jaxxan hatching base, Rader checked his weapon, his suit, his med kit, his backup power pack. He pretended to relax. Waiting … gearing up … waiting … joking … waiting. Typical Earth League operation: hurry up and wait.

Voices grew louder in the spacecraft as the conversation became edgier, more rushed. He and his buddies talked about what they would do on their next R&R, reminisced about their homes, their families, their sweethearts. Although his squad mates were not a particularly handsome lot, each man claimed to have a gorgeous girlfriend who put porn holostars to shame and yet was entirely loyal and head-over-heels in love.

After the massacre on Cephei Outpost, he’d been too young by a month when the first call went out. But his best friend, Cody, was two months older and just barely squeaked into the Earth League military, ready to go after the Jaxxans. Before he left for basic training, Cody said goodbye to Rader with a quick embrace and then a studiously practiced League handshake. “There’ll be plenty of roaches for both of us to kill, don’t worry! Get your ass in the League as soon as you can sign up, and I’ll meet you out there.” He gestured vaguely toward the sky. Rader promised, waving … but wishing his friend had waited, just a couple of months.

His parents and his sister worried about Rader going off to war, but it was the patriotic thing to do. All healthy young men were pressured to join up, and he was anxious to follow in Cody’s footsteps. A month later, on his birthday, he filled out the forms.

One week into basic training at the lunar military base, Rader received word that Cody and his entire squad had been wiped out by an equipment malfunction. An airlock hatch blew open when the troop transport was approaching a space station. Explosive decompression killed all personnel, sucked them out into space. Simple mechanical failure, bad luck—nothing that could be blamed on the enemy.

Rader had joined wanting to fight alongside Cody. They had always been a team, and he had hoped they could support each other, stand together against the Jaxxans. But the Earth League had him now, and he couldn’t change his mind. His squad mates were his comrades now, his new best friends.…

As soon as the assault shuttle landed on the Jaxxan nesting asteroid, explosive bolts would blast the hatch open so that the soldiers could storm out in a howling rush. His companions whooped, winding themselves up during the final approach, and Rader joined in. But as he looked warily at the hatch, suited up and holding his laser rifle, he thought of Cody’s last moments … willing to die in a blaze of glory out on the battlefield, not from a stupid malfunction.

Sitting wordless on an empty bench, the Deathguard in their team was an ominous, armored form, like a knight in shining armor. Rader respected the powerful cyborgs—resuscitated, revamped, and restructured to become perfect fighting machines—though he wondered what thoughts kept them going. Did they focus on the mission, even knowing what had happened to them, and what would happen to them? He supposed it was better than being declared dead. All Deathguards got an honorable funeral, and their families received full pensions; no one knew the former identity of any individual Deathguard. Rader hadn’t thought twice about it when he enlisted in the League. He’d signed up body and soul.

Huff leaned over and whispered to him, “I can’t wait to see that Deathguard go bonkers on the roach nest.”

“So long as he doesn’t go all Werewolf on us before it’s time,” Rajid said.

Rader found himself staring at the silent cyborg. “Not going to happen. They’re too sophisticated for that.” The Deathguard made no comment, one way or another.

Through the small window port on his side of the craft, Rader could see the potato-shaped asteroid as they closed in. The large craters were covered over with domes like large blisters, as if the space rock had reacted with an outbreak of boils to the alien presence.

Sergeant Blunt walked in heavy boots from the front bulkhead and stood before them in full uniform armor. “Listen up. Based on the small number of roach military ships stationed at the asteroid, looks like the enemy has no major defenses here. We have no intel on the interior of the base, so you’ll have to find your way. Get to the main hatching chamber and destroy it. Clear enough? Your job is simple—point and shoot.”

On the way in, the assault ship’s pulsed lasers disabled the four Jaxxan ships stationed at the nest asteroid. Even though the nest asteroid sent emergency calls for Jaxxan reinforcements, Sergeant Blunt had expected it. The plan was to strike fast and finish the operation before alien backup vessels could fly in.

“All right, children,” the Sarge said. “Saddle up, take your toys, and let’s go scramble some eggs. Just don’t let them scramble you. We’re coming in hot, going to blow through one of their entrance domes. Do I need to remind you that this is not a prisoner capturing mission?”

“No, Sarge!” they all chimed in.

“Good, I was hoping you weren’t all as dense as you looked. Now let’s move it.” The Sergeant fitted a breathing mask over his face; Rader and his companions did the same. The Deathguard sat waiting, like a missile prepped for launch.

Once the assault shuttle careened up against the largest blister dome and a shaped-charge explosion blasted open the hatch to let them loose, Rader’s squad mates boiled out, swinging their laser rifles and yelling; they exercised just enough restraint to keep from shooting one another.

The alarms inside the hatching base sounded like staccato clacking beetles. Rader bolted forward and used his laser rifle to cut down any aliens he encountered. It wasn’t his place to decide whether the roaches were civilians, politicians, medical personnel, or soldiers.

In the back of his mind, he wondered if the Jaxxan assault squad on Cephei Outpost had operated under similar orders.

As they rounded a corner into the main base, a Jaxxan in front of them raised his thin forearms and wove a deadly psychic energy-web. Gonzalez let out a cry more of surprise than pain, then the incandescent green lines disintegrated him.

Astonished, Rader used the sudden jolt of shock and fired. He blasted the Jaxxan before he could move his angular arms again.

Behind the main squad, the Deathguard lurched into the fray, mowing down targets, yet never coming close to hitting one of his human comrades. The cyborg blew open door hatches, thrust his armored body into well-lit research chambers, annihilated any aliens he found working in their labs. Then the Deathguard pushed forward, leading the way along skewed corridors and through angled intersections, deeper into the hatching base.

Still off-balance and angry from the loss of Gonzalez, Rader ran headlong with four of his comrades into a chamber of horrors—a nursery. Five Jaxxan attendants had lined up to protect more than a dozen fat, squirming grubs, white segmented things like maggots the size of alligators.

Coleman said, “That’s just wrong!” He opened fire, and the grubs spilled open like fleshy sacs filled with entrails and ichor.

Frantic, one of the Jaxxan caretakers cried out in English, “No! Not the offspring.” The alien’s comprehensible words were so startling that Rader hesitated. But it was just a ruse: other aliens nearby worked together to weave a sparkling energy-web, filling the air with a mesh of green that they cast toward the human soldiers.

Rader focused and shot one of the roaches, then the next, working his way down the line, just like in the simulation. Huff knocked out the other two, and their incomplete energy-web dispersed. The rest of the Earth League soldiers made swift work of the remaining grubs in the nursery, chopping them into chunks of meat.

The Deathguard, who wasn’t part of the formal operation, had already moved ahead on his own, continuing his rampage. Apparently, the cyborg soldier wanted to make the most of his second chance.

Over the implanted radio, Rader heard Sergeant Blunt yelling from a different sector of the asteroid, “Just woke up a hundred roach warriors in the deep tunnels! And they look angry. Called Base for reinforcements. Another ship should be here in an hour or two, so hold the roaches off ’til then.”

“Roger that, Sarge,” came a chorus of responses.

The Sarge added, “We know they sent off a distress signal too. It’ll be a race to see who gets here first.”

Rader said with genuine bravado, “Won’t leave anything for them to rescue, Sarge.”

As the squad pushed into the asteroid’s most secure chambers, desperate Jaxxans fought harder and harder. Energy-webs rippled down the angled corridors, ricocheting off stone walls and frying several more human soldiers. Rader kept a rough score in the back of his mind, tried not to name his friends who lay dead. Concentrate on the operation, on the objective.

So far, he thought the humans were taking a greater toll.

Explosions rippled through the nesting base, and overpressure waves made his ears pop. Sergeant Blunt shouted over the implanted radio, “Heavy resistance—fresh warriors from below.” He paused, as if to listen to a report. “Ah, crap—there’s a roach ship coming in! Don’t know if we can hold ’em off long enough.” Rader heard another explosion, a sizzling sound, then a cry of pain from the Sarge—a high-pitched yelp that did not at all sound like the gruff, hardboiled man—then only static on the comline.

Rader shoved aside his alarm and dismay, not sure how the survivors of his squad were going to get out of here, but they would keep pushing toward the objective.

He, Coleman, and Huff fought their way into a large guarded chamber where the roaches made their last stand. The entrance hatch was sealed, so the three soldiers used their laser rifles to melt an entrance through the putty-like polymer metal wall.

“This must be the place,” Coleman said.

Inside the protected chamber, Rader and his comrades discovered row after row of polished black casings the size of coffins.

“Giant eggs,” Huff said. “Look at all of them!”

The soldiers opened fire on the casings, cracking them open and spilling out white and slippery humanoid forms with backward-jointed arms and legs, ovoid heads, and giant black eyes that were covered with a milky caul.

So they were chrysalises, not eggs.

With a high-pitched chitter, three Jaxxans lunged out from between the rows of black casings. When they hurled half-formed energy-webs, Rader dove out of the way, but Coleman was too busy shooting the chrysalises. The energy-web snared him, killed him.

Huff began firing wildly at the Jaxxans. From their cover, the aliens formed another energy-web that shimmered in the air and came toward them. Rader dropped to the floor and took cover, rolling up against one of the tall black casings. He yelled a warning, but Huff kept firing even as the web encircled and disintegrated him.

From his position of dubious shelter, Rader shot the two Jaxxans, then waited, listening.

Moving in a scramble of excessively jointed arms and legs, another alien skittered forward to a split chrysalis and caught the albino, mostly formed creature as it slumped out of the cracked shell. Like a soldier holding a wounded comrade, the roach cradled the dying, half-formed creature in segmented arms.

Rader rose to his feet, and the Jaxxan swiveled its head toward him, showing those large, black eyes like pools of sorrow. “Look what you have done!” Though the creature’s chitinous faceplates showed no emotions, Rader felt that the Jaxxan was giving him an accusatory glare.

A red spot appeared on the Jaxxan’s forehead, and a laser blast cooked his encased head, exploding his entire skull.

The Deathguard strode into the chrysalis chamber. From behind the helmet, which was no more readable than the alien’s face, the Deathguard looked at Rader, then turned back to the black cases. He began shooting them one by one.

Rader’s implanted radio burst to life again. “This is Lieutenant Nolan with the reinforcement ship, closing in on the nesting asteroid. Two roach defenders got here before us. The asteroid’s overrun, but we’ll take ’em on! We don’t leave men behind.”

Rader didn’t cheer the speech. He and the Deathguard were trapped in the chrysalis chamber. In the corridors outside, he could hear the ominous sound of hundreds of skittering legs—warriors that had been hiding deep inside the asteroid, and were now closing in on the chrysalis chamber. Rader joined the Deathguard, standing together as they shot the rest of the casings, knowing they didn’t have much time … knowing they weren’t likely to get out alive.

At least he had a chance for some payback for his lost comrades. It was the only thread of hope he had to cling to. He wished he and Cody could have been here together doing this.

The armored and silent Deathguard turned around and opened fire on the Jaxxan warriors that surged into the chamber. Sergeant Blunt had counted more than a hundred of them; to Rader, it seemed like a thousand. Sergeant Nolan’s reinforcements would never get here in time. The radio channel remained silent, no transmissions from the rest of his squad mates.

Backing deeper into the chrysalis chamber, the Deathguard worked his way in among the black casings. Rader thought their position by the door was more defensible, but then he realized that the Deathguard was making a calculated move to lure the roaches inside.

The Deathguard turned his unreadable helmet toward Rader again, expecting him to understand. From his armored casing, he removed a thermal-impulse grenade.

Rader’s heart froze. The cyborg had nothing to lose. Rader could have made the same calculation as the Deathguard, but he was unwilling to come to the obvious conclusion. Nevertheless, the Deathguard was going to do it.

When all of the roach warriors charged into the chrysalis chamber and tried to corner the two remaining humans, the Deathguard lifted his grenade and depressed the activation button.

Rader dove among the cocoon casings in an instinctive, but futile gesture. The flash of dazzling white light was the last thing he ever expected to see.

But it wasn’t.

The quality of light that came into focus had a harsh, sterile quality, and the surrounding brightness resolved itself into clean ceramic-plate walls—the Base’s medical center. He could hear diagnostic scanners, medical machinery, a respirator breathing for him like a gasping schoolgirl. He felt no pain … he felt nothing at all.

Rader couldn’t move his head, only his eyes—one eye, actually—which limited his field of view. He tried to move, but could barely twitch his head … in fact, he could feel nothing but his head. The rest of his body remained numb. Maybe he’d been paralyzed. Maybe he’d lost limbs. Maybe he’d lost everything.

A worried-looking orderly appeared in his field of view, staring down with brown, clinical eyes. Even in his condition, he didn’t consider her pretty. “You’re awake, aren’t you?” she said. “Don’t try to move. You’re not ready for that yet. We haven’t connected all the necessary pieces, still waiting for one part to be modified.” She fiddled with one of the tubes hanging at his side. “There. Give it a few seconds.”

Tranquilizers flooded into him, and he dropped back out of consciousness.

When Rader awoke again, a smiling man stood over him, a face that looked oddly familiar—not from personal experience, but from images on the news broadcasts. “Congratulations, soldier!”

Rader placed him as Commissioner Sobel, the man in charge of the Earth League forces in the Fixion Belt.

“The rest of your squad mates gave their lives to destroy the Jaxxan nesting asteroid. You fought bravely and kept yourself alive … just barely, but it was enough. Your mission isn’t over—not yet.”

Rader tried to talk, but only croaking noises came out. He still had tubes in his throat.

Commissioner Sobel continued, “I’m congratulating you, soldier, because you have a second chance. A chance to join an elite group. Every one of your comrades gave their lives in service to the war, but you have an opportunity to keep fighting. Don’t you want to hurt the enemy that did this to you?” He smiled. “We’re offering you a position as our newest Deathguard.”

Propped in the med-center bed, paralyzed in place, Rader couldn’t see how much damage he had suffered from the explosion … how much of him actually remained. Once they hooked him up to the cyborg components and encased him in his permanent armor, he doubted he would ever know.

Did it really matter?

A little extra time to carry on the fight. At the moment, he didn’t quite see why that should be his priority; he would rather go home, say his farewells to his family, see Earth one more time. That second chance seemed more important.

“You’re a hero and will be remembered as such, soldier. We’re declaring the mission a success, now that we’ve looked at the cost-benefit ratio in detail. We did lose your Sergeant and your entire squad, but we successfully wiped out the Jaxxan nesting base. And you can honor them by replacing the Deathguard who died in the operation.”

Rader was trying to speak, but no words came out. Sobel patted him on the shoulder—so, at least he had a shoulder. “We’ll hook up your vocal cords in time for the official announcement, and then we’ll turn you loose as a one-man army on the main Fixion battlefield. That’s where you’ll be most useful. Singlehandedly, you can create a hell of a lot of trouble. You’ll have weeks, maybe even months before the interface breaks down. Cherish every moment of it—I know you’ll accomplish as much as you can. We’re all proud of you.”

Sobel smiled again and then left. Rader hadn’t been able to say a word.

III

Commissioner Sobel scowled at the insignia on his collar, still shiny from his recent transfer here. He was a dark-haired man, thirty pounds past good-looking: the kind whose face turned red very easily, and lately his face was turning red more than usual. He brushed off a few specks of dust and leaned back in the seat of his shuttle taking him from the Base to the Détente Asteroid. After six months, the useless embassy there was just beginning to feel familiar, though he doubted he would ever get used to Fixion.

As Commissioner, he was not foolish enough to believe the optimistic projections he sent back to Earth through the Information Bureau, but he had to make others believe them. Each report submitted for public dissemination had to show the human soldiers as faultless heroes and paint the Jaxxans as monstrous and alien. Fortunately, the Jaxxans looked hideous, and people had been programmed for centuries to fear bug-eyed monsters. How else could the Earth League maintain support for this abysmal war in this godforsaken place?

Humanity had a long history of shedding blood over worthless scraps of land, and this broken asteroid belt was one such place. Humans had visited there, established a tiny astronomical observatory, set up small outposts, planted their flags. So had the Jaxxans. When both governments dug in their heels, possessing Fixion and its entourage of habitable worldlets became a matter of honor.

Sobel was savvy enough to know that this war was not as senseless as it seemed. Rather, the Earth League—and no doubt the Jaxxans as well—used it as a practice field to test the mettle of the rival species and determine whether they wanted to prosecute a larger war across numerous star systems.

Three years ago, the aliens had shown their aggression (or maybe it had been a retaliation for something) by wiping out Cephei Outpost. So humans responded by blowing up any Jaxxan outpost they could find, and the two militaries began their nose-to-nose warfare on the main planetoid.

The people back home rallied, and recruiting offices had lines out the door. As the battles went on, the Deathguard cyborg killing machines were portrayed as warriors so tough that even death on the battlefield could not stop them from continuing the fight against the Jaxxans. Poignant, tragic, glorious.

Sobel’s two predecessors had put in their time, and now he was stuck administering the Earth League forces. He ran the show out here, organized the military, sent back the PR dispatches.

For appearance’s sake, he was also the designated spokesman, an ambassador for humanity, charged (on paper at least) with finding a peaceful solution to the conflict. His superiors had never indicated that they genuinely desired a resolution; nevertheless, he needed to maintain appearances—he was good at that.

One of the small drifting rocks with a tenuous but stable atmosphere was named the Détente Asteroid, complete with a human embassy building and an adjacent Jaxxan embassy. By mutual agreement, each side was required to have a representative available at the embassy a certain percentage of the time, but due to a loophole in the agreement—intentional, Sobel thought—the human ambassador and the Jaxxan ambassador were not required to be on the Détente Asteroid at the same time, which made substantive peace talks difficult.

After a two-hour flight, Commissioner Sobel’s shuttle landed on the Détente Asteroid. He was preoccupied enough with his thoughts that he forgot the oxygen mask until the last moment and fumbled it into place just as the hatch slid open.

He gathered his briefcase full of files and followed a small honor guard across the landing zone to the embassy building; a vanguard entourage had already restored the power, heat, and air-generators. No one had occupied the building for weeks.

Not surprisingly, the corresponding Jaxxan embassy building was shut down: windows shuttered, doors locked, no one inside.

Sobel made quick work of settling in. Though it seemed a pointless obligation to be here, he did look forward to a few quiet and uninterrupted days. He had paperwork to review, forms to finish, consolation letters to write.

No matter what the Earth public saw in the glorious video footage sent by the Information Bureau—how human forces had pushed forward to gain a few more acres of the no-man’s land, how the Deathguards continued to attack the enemy like heroic vigilantes—Sobel knew the war was not going well.

Something had to change soon. An unqualified victory would bring a surge in support on Earth, but even a devastating defeat would inflame their passions, and he could take advantage of that as well. The worst case was that the battle for the Fixion Belt was a stalemate that would continue for a long, expensive time. Since he and his Jaxxan counterpart, Warlord Kiltik, had no particular reason to hold meetings, no resolution was in sight.

Seated at his temporary desk, Sobel opened his briefcase. Before delving into the files he needed to review, he glanced through the tinted window at the closed Jaxxan embassy. As soon as the Commissioner left, Kiltik would arrive to serve his own time as mandated by the interim treaties, and he would go through the same motions.

Fixion’s amber sky was barren of clouds, always. Even during the day, the tiny lights of other asteroids in the Belt were strung like a necklace overhead.

Dark spots speckled Rader’s sandy brown armor, some camouflage, some just stains. Leaving the Jaxxan squad he had just killed, the Deathguard dodged across the landscape. Cover was easy to find on the torn-up terrain of canyons, craters, and angled trenches.

He noticed fighting in the distance and chose to head toward a collapsed Jaxxan watchtower. The Earth League operation had moved on, but if the roaches returned to begin repairs, maybe he could charge in among them. The Werewolf Trigger remained quiescent, but he didn’t need it.

So far, all of his components functioned well. His brain moved the replacement parts in tandem with what remained of his body, but the breakdown could come at any time: a failed neural interface, a mechanical fault in the cyborg parts, or a collapse of life-support maintenance. The Earth League had drilled the duty into him: his commanding officers and comrades expected him to do everything in his power to defeat the Jaxxans.

He had accepted the terms in the med center: the extent of his injuries already categorized him as terminal, and he could either become a cyborg or be disconnected. In exchange for his new superhuman abilities he pledged to take on a solo mission that would not end until his final breath. His friend Cody had had no such opportunity.

Rader pushed on, alone, for as long as he might have left.

He dodged from one huge boulder to another, closing the distance to the damaged watchtower. He climbed an outcropping of rock above a steep gully, a crack in the shattered landscape from an ancient meteor impact. He stopped short, staring at the single Jaxxan that had taken cover in the gully below.

The alien was bent over a burnt human form—an Earth League soldier who had been charred by the backwash of an energy-web. Moving sharp-angled hands, the Jaxxan busily touched, inspected, prodded the soldier, who let out a groan of pain. The alien plucked a vial from a small open kit on the ground.

During basic training, Rader had heard of the awful things the roaches did to human bodies. He brought up his laser rifle and prepared to fire.

The alien looked at him with polished black eyes. He held a vial in long fingers, tilted it, and turned back to his work on the burned soldier.

With a jolt, Rader realized the open package on the ground was a standard-issue Earth League med kit. The Jaxxan was tending the wounded man. The alien fumbled with the kit, swiveled his head back to Rader. “Assistance. Help me understand.”

Roaches moved in groups, fought together, crowded in their trenches and hives; they were rarely encountered singly. This one would be easy prey. He kept the laser rifle pointed toward the alien, but did not fire.

The Jaxxan put a gauze pack down, inspected a different bottle. “How do I revive him?” He spoke in short, clipped syllables.

Confused, Rader slid down the side of the gully, still keeping his rifle ready. The injured man stirred, and Rader saw how horribly burned he was. He croaked with a voice he had rarely used since being turned loose as a Deathguard. “What are you doing?”

“No time.” The alien chose a stim pack from the kit. “This one, I believe.” He pressed it against the dying soldier.

Rader jabbed the laser rifle forward. “Stop!”

The alien continued his quick and efficient movements, either not intimidated by the Deathguard, or driven by other priorities. “I need to wake him before he dies.” Although the Jaxxan’s hard lips did not allow him to pronounce certain sounds correctly, Rader couldn’t believe how well the Jaxxan spoke English.

His response should have been clear; he wasn’t supposed to wonder. Why hadn’t he killed the Jaxxan on first sight? Why hadn’t the enemy tried to kill him?

And why was the alien trying so hard to revive a dying soldier?

The soldier’s uniform identified him as a recon scout, a member of a small team sent to assess the aftermath of the earlier military operation. A moan escaped the man’s blackened lips, and his eyes flickered open in terror and pain for an instant before he finally died.

The Jaxxan sat back on the ground, folding his long legs. He made a satisfied sound, then raised his face to the Deathguard. “Now you will kill me?”

Rader’s eyes narrowed behind his darkened visor. “Why did you do that? Explain.” He kept the laser rifle trained on the roach’s chest.

The Jaxxan bowed his head, in what seemed to Rader an alien expression of guilt. Anthropomorphizing. Nothing more to it.

“My energy-web hit him from behind. I was afraid. He did not see me. He had no chance to know he was going to die.” He paused as if waiting for Rader to understand. “His soul did not have time to prepare for the departure of death. Had he died without awakening, his soul would have remained trapped within the body, forever. I would not wish such a fate upon even my enemy.”

Rader felt the hard rock against his armor as thoughts flashed through his mind. He also recalled the Jaxxan in the chrysalis chamber of the hatching asteroid, who had clung to the half-formed but dying alien as it slid out of the broken cocoon case. Look what you have done.

“How do you know our language?” He couldn’t imagine any of his squad mates trying to learn to speak Jaxxan.

“I studied.”

“Why?”

“Because you are interesting.” Rader didn’t know what to say to that. “Many Jaxxans study humans. We review your broadcasts, your culture. I am a scholar, teacher, imaginer.”

“Then what are you doing on the battlefield?”

“I was assigned to the System Holystal project. My interpretation of facets contradicted my superior’s, and so I was transferred here.”

Rader assessed the skeletal, bug-like Jaxxan. He seemed scrawnier than most. “You don’t look trained to be a soldier.”

“Not trained. I was meant to die, in service.” The alien studied him with eyes like molten pools of ink. “Why did you not kill me, Deathguard?”

Both remained silent for a long moment in a strange standoff. A shooting star sliced across the sky, bright enough to be seen against Fixion’s amber daytime sky. “I don’t know.”

“You are confused, your emotions in turmoil. We are each supposed to kill the other, yet neither wants to.”

Rader stiffened. He had not moved the laser rifle. “I may kill you yet.”

“No. You will not.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I can read it in you.” The Jaxxan cocked his head. “Did you not know we are empathic?”

“No.” Command had neglected to include that detail in their briefings.

The Jaxxan shook his head in disappointment. “What is your name, Deathguard?”

The question itself opened old wounds. A name signified he was somebody, an individual. A hero killed in action during the raid on the nesting asteroid. That name, that person was dead; his family had the certificate to prove it, even though Rader continued fighting for a brief period, like a mayfly in its final days.

“My name was Rader, before I was … Now, I’m just a Deathguard.” He sounded more gruff than he wanted to. He paused, wasn’t sure why he even asked the question. “And your name?”

The Jaxxan proceeded to make a series of unpronounceable clicks from his alien gullet. Rader knew he could never repeat the name and said with a hint of humor. “I’d better just call you Click.”

The alien seemed satisfied with that. “Rader, I must contemplate this turn of events. I was not prepared for such an occurrence. Please let me meditate.” Still holding his laser rifle like a toy soldier positioned in place, the Deathguard regarded his enemy. Click answered the unspoken question. “I am not afraid of you. You will not harm me.”

Rader was confused at such unwarranted trust, until he realized an empath could feel that Rader wasn’t going to harm him. But how could he be so sure about Click? Maybe this was just a ruse to get him to drop his guard.

“You will want to bury your comrade.” Click stood and moved away from the burned soldier. “That is the tradition.”

Rader had just left the group of Jaxxans in the trench after killing them.

He could put the recon scout in a shallow grave, although Fixion had no known scavengers or predators that would disturb the body. He’d send a locator signal for an Earth League pickup crew to retrieve the fallen soldier. But, depending on where the fighting lines were, there was no telling when or if they would come. Due to interstellar shipping costs, bodies were never returned to Earth.

Yes, the recon scout deserved to be buried.

But Rader didn’t know where he would go afterward. He had never let the question trouble him before. Days of running, fighting, killing tried to catch up with him, but internal mechanisms pumped stimulants into his body. He could rest here, but he could never sleep again—not after what they had done to him.

Since he already knew what Deathguards were, Rader figured out the implications even before the counselor came and rather impatiently explained his new situation. He’d had enough time in the med-center bed to draw his own conclusions.

“Your family has been notified of your heroic death, and the Earth League gave you a funeral with full military honors.” He realized afterward that she did not use his name. “We sent home a clean packaged uniform, along with a posthumous medal of honor. The heirs designated on your enlistment form will receive a generous military combat pension.”

His throat made noises, and he had to try several times before he could form the words. “Thank you.”

She brushed the comment aside. She was rattling off a memorized speech and didn’t want to be interrupted. “I regret to inform you that you are a terminal case. What remains of you belongs entirely to the Earth League. We will provide and maintain the machinery that keeps you alive.” The counselor leaned closer to Rader. “We supply all of the equipment and components to make you whole again, temporarily. If you choose not to accept reconfiguration as a Deathguard, we will reclaim that equipment.”

“Expiration … ?” He wanted to say much more, articulate a full sentence, but the counselor understood.

“How long will you last? Is that what you’re asking? It varies. Each Deathguard is different, depending on the scope of injuries that put you here and the quality of the interface between your remains and our equipment.” She looked down at a screen, touched a tab that activated his chart. “Not much left of you. I’m surprised you made it to the life-support bed on the rescue shuttle … in fact, I’m amazed they bothered to carry the scraps there in the first place.” Frowning, the counselor read further. “Ah. No other survivors from your squad. The Information Bureau must have needed to salvage something from the mission.”

Rader didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to recall his family either, or his friend Cody, or Earth. He wasn’t supposed to have anything to look forward to. He was just an afterimage of his life.

“Look on the bright side, soldier. If you accept, you’ll have years, or months, or weeks to keep up the fight—extra time that you wouldn’t have had. When the Jaxxans try to understand our strategy and tactics, Deathguards are our ace in the hole, an element of random destruction they simply cannot predict.” He had seen more convincing smiles on plastic mannequins. “You could well be the key to winning this war.”

Rader had heard the pitch before, had even believed it when he went through basic training. He didn’t argue. Judging by the counselor’s flippant attitude, he imagined that she had little difficulty convincing other new Deathguards. He allowed them to put him back together again, Humpty-Dumpty in combat gear.

With the potential for malfunctions building day by day, the Base was anxious to get him tested and functional and back out onto the front lines. When they brought Rader up to speed on his defenses and prosthetics, he seemed to have one of everything he needed. The components functioned to design specs. He had his armor, his weapons, and his training.

Occasionally, during test exercises, he would catch glimpses of his skin, small patches that showed in between the armor plate. His flesh was so burned and scarred it looked like wadded, dried leather. He had no desire to see what he really looked like anymore.

He was trained to shoot automatically, accurately, and without remorse. A Werewolf Trigger had been implanted in his brain, activated by stress and perceived danger in a battlefield situation. And his self-preservation drive was dampened.

Without mentioning Rader’s name, Commissioner Sobel introduced him with great fanfare in a cheery patriotic broadcast sent out by the Information Bureau. “I give you the newest member of the Deathguard!” He raised Rader’s gauntleted arm. Cheers resounded from the soldiers who had gathered at the Base for the formal announcement.

Despite the celebrations, Rader knew he could never be around people again. The Werewolf Trigger was like a firing pin in his brain, a siren that sounded off at oddball times. A Deathguard couldn’t live back at the Base, nor bunk with other soldiers, not even fraternize with them. If something triggered his rampage, Rader could rack up countless casualties before he was terminated. From now on, he would be on his own.

The Commissioner’s voice grew more somber. “Unfortunately, peace negotiations have broken down. Neither side is talking, and I don’t expect the situation to improve. We’ll need our Deathguards now more than ever.”

More than a hundred of the deadliest, most powerful soldiers had been turned loose on the battlefield. Rader would join them, without comrades, in a last independent mission to create as much havoc as possible until his systems failed.

When he finished digging the grave and covering up the fallen recon scout, Rader looked across at Click. His cyborg senses and sensors had remained alert during the burial, but the Jaxxan hadn’t moved.

The alien meditated peacefully, obsidian eyes staring off into nothingness. The air shimmered in front of his face to reveal a scintillating crystal that opened like a rosebud, a projected object half a meter across, glowing with prickly facets and spires—not a weapon like the energy-web, but a crystalline snowflake that hung by unseen threads. Click remained motionless, peering into the facets as if hypnotized.

Rader came closer, intrigued. This seemed delicate, wondrous.

Click spoke without looking up from his scrutiny. “This is my holystal: a holographic crystal that I create in my thoughts. A three-dimensional map of my life, what has happened and what may yet occur. Every possibility has its own facet, constantly shifting and re-emerging as circumstances change. This …” He reached out to touch a portion that was not symmetrical with the others. “This is where you fit in, Rader. Your presence has distorted all probable futures, giving me chances I should never have had, adding dangers that were not present before.”

Rader was fascinated. “Can all Jaxxans do that? Or is it only you?”

Click made a rattling sound, and he realized the alien was laughing. “I am an imaginer, a scholar. My caste specializes in interpreting holystals, advising our leaders. Warlord Kiltik has his own expert on the System Holystal we are constructing in the Fixion Belt.”

“And you disagreed with the expert, so you were punished.”

“Yes. I was transferred to the battlefield.” As Click spoke, the projected holystal shifted slightly, a gentle flickering of one facet into another. He pointed to the most prominent pinnacle. “This spire symbolizes that which is most important to me. It has stopped growing now. My work was my life, back in our home system … before I was assigned here. To this war.”

Rader thought of Cody, their own boyhood dreams, their plans for the future, but nothing so concrete as this crystalline blueprint of the Jaxxan’s life.

Click continued with a distinct undertone of awe. “A team of engineers, scholars, imaginers, and dreamers was working on our race’s History Holystal out in the free, empty space beyond the influence of Jaxx’s sun … a holystal so vast that it took our ships days to circle around it. Every facet, polished down to the finest detail, chronicled the events in the history of our planet, Jaxx’s wars and triumphs, peoples, leaders, arts …”

Click sighed, and Rader could almost feel the icy pain in his voice. “Then I was dispatched to the Fixion Belt, assigned to construct and interpret the System Holystal here. Now I shall never see my great project finished, or even look at it again.…”

Rader thought of his own brief military career, the capture of the alien supply ship, the assault on the nesting asteroid, and the Jaxxans he had killed, all leading up to a brief encore as a Deathguard. Since being turned loose in the no-man’s land, he had spent much of his solitary time considering the paths that had led him here. He relived all the living he had done.

Now that he objectively reflected on his past, Rader realized he hadn’t accomplished much in his years. His friendships were what he cherished most, how he and Cody wanted to do everything together, and then the close bond he had formed with his squad mates. But Cody, and his squad mates, were all dead now.

“At least you built something,” Rader said. The only things his parents had received were a letter of condolence, a posthumous medal of honor, and a pension.

He realized he was consoling the alien, and the thought appalled him. He had enlisted in the League to kill roaches, Cody had died in the service, every one of his squad mates had given his life to wipe out the enemy. Rader had already killed ten Jaxxans today.

But not this one, who had used a human soldier’s own med kit to try to save his soul, even though the recon scout would surely have killed Click, given the chance.…

The alien was staring at him with unreadable eyes, agitated to feel the waves of emotion emanating from the Deathguard. Rader tried to calm himself, fighting the tension so that it wouldn’t activate the Werewolf Trigger. In frustration, he picked up a handful of dead soil and flung it at the rocks around them.

With a scrabbling of pebbles above, a human soldier came over the lip of the gully, sighted on the enemy, and fired without hesitation. The holystal shattered, dissolving into fragments and then nothing.

Click let out a high-pitched chittering sound as he scrambled for cover. The laser rifle followed him, and the rock wall next to his head ran molten.

The Werewolf Trigger yammered to life in Rader’s head and he sprang into action before he could think, driven by the pounding command KILL, KILL! Unseen in his camouflaged Deathguard armor, he burned a neat hole through the human soldier’s chest.

Click wheezed a terrified gasp and pulled himself to his feet. “Thank you.”

Shock like cold water doused Rader’s berserker rage, and the Werewolf Trigger fell silent inside his head.

Another soldier, the third member of the recon scout team, appeared at the top of the gully, saw his companion drop to the ground, noticed the Deathguard’s laser rifle—and the huddled Jaxxan. “What the hell?”

Rader whirled, raised his laser rifle, but the scout dashed back to the safety of the rocks before the Deathguard could fire. In control now, Rader amplified his voice through the helmet, “Halt!”

He climbed up out of the loose gravel in the gulley, worked his way to higher ground in pursuit of the third soldier. But in the broken terrain with craters and a labyrinth of Jaxxan trenches, the seasoned scout had infinite places to hide. Rader looked half-heartedly, knowing the scout would head back to Base with his shocking report.

Rader returned to where Click waited, looking up at him, and the Deathguard stared at the human soldier he had just killed.

“Oh, damn! What have I done now?”

VII

Tapping his fingers on the desktop (pressed fiberboard, of course—not real wood, not out here in this godforsaken asteroid belt), Commissioner Sobel pondered the news.

Very serious. An embarrassment. Incomprehensible.

One of his Deathguard had turned sour, abandoning his duty, killing two recon scouts—in the presence of an alien. Had the Deathguard been brainwashed somehow? The Jaxxans did have strange mental powers.

Or had the Deathguard suffered some kind of psychological breakdown? Sometimes, the cyborgs were so damaged mentally and physically that they were unstable, hence the impetus for turning them loose on the battlefield. Over the course of the war, four other Deathguards had failed spectacularly, and three had gone catatonic out on the front lines, where they were quickly killed.

But not a single one had ever cooperated with the enemy before! Sobel was infuriated. They had saved the life of this—he shuffled his papers, searching for a name—this Robert Rader. Earth League cyborg engineers had taken the burned, blasted remnants of a man, patched him up enough to keep going for a final stint on the battlefield. Wasn’t that what soldiers wanted?

He reviewed the records. Rader had suffered extensive damage, but he had agreed to the cyborg conversion; nothing exceptional had showed up on his psychological tests. Given a Deathguard’s typically short service life, it wasn’t cost-effective to waste months on extensive evaluations. The Deathguards were activated, pointed in the right direction, and turned loose on the battlefield.

As soon as the high command learned about a traitor among the lone-wolf cyborgs, however, they would crucify Sobel. The Commissioner didn’t understand it. What would make the man turn against his own kind and consort with the enemy?

Sobel punched a rarely used sequence on his communications console. The viewscreen shimmered before him, as if reluctant to reveal the image of his Jaxxan counterpart.

The desiccated-looking alien’s black eyes stared impatiently at him, trying to fathom the human’s expression. All the roaches looked the same to Sobel but, judging by the ornamentation on the rigid hide, he ventured a guess. “Warlord Kiltik?”

When the alien tried to answer, he broke into a coughing fit before he could speak. “Commissioner Sobel? Yes, it is you.”

At least the alien recognized him. “Warlord, you know I wouldn’t call you if the matter wasn’t urgent.”

Sobel looked past the alien, gleaning details from the background of the enemy headquarters. The walls were odd planes, tilted at random in the spirit of insane Jaxxan architecture, but his eyes were drawn to a spiny mass of crystals that hung in the air behind the warlord, like a thousand fragments of glass bound up with threads of light. Some kind of three-dimensional military diagram?

He cleared his throat. “Yesterday I received some very grave news: one of my Deathguards has apparently joined with one of your soldiers. If you have subverted him somehow, hijacked his programming, the Earth League will protest strenuously. Such mental attacks are specifically prohibited in the terms of our interim treaty.”

Kiltik stiffened, though Sobel couldn’t read any subtle change of expression on the alien face. “We have not broken the treaty terms. I myself received reports that one of our soldiers has deserted, possibly kidnapped by a Deathguard in clear violation of our no-prisoners protocol. Summon your cyborg back to base and release our captive soldier to us so that we can address the charges of desertion.”

“I can’t control or recall the Deathguard, Warlord.” Could it be that this wasn’t a Jaxxan plan? “It seems we both have a potentially embarrassing problem. For the past few months, my record here has been impeccable, thanks in large part to the Deathguard program. I can’t have one of them shooting his own comrades and fraternizing with the enemy.”

Kiltik’s staccato coughs interrupted his train of thought. The Warlord composed himself with an effort, then added, “Jaxxans do not break ranks. Jaxxan soldiers are tightly trained. But this deserter was not a member of the soldier caste. He was a holystal imaginer who was improperly reassigned.”

Sobel didn’t understand half of what the Warlord had just said, but he seized on one detail. “So, you’re saying you could be in trouble for this, too.”

“I have been assigned to the Fixion Belt since the beginning of the war. Although I will not lose my position here, I would prefer to avoid an ‘embarrassing problem,’ as you so delicately put it. My superiors will never send me back to Jaxx.” He broke off for a quick burst of coughing. “However, this war was getting tedious. What do you propose we do?”

The Commissioner hid his sigh of relief. “When I received the report, I immediately sent five special commandos to terminate the defective Deathguard. I assumed your deserter would be collateral damage.”

Kiltik did not sound unhappy. “Then the problem is taken care of.”

“Unfortunately, the Deathguard killed the entire team, with possible assistance from his Jaxxan ally. This morning I dispatched another seven on the same mission, but they are going to have a tough time behind your lines. If you send your own hunters, one of the groups should succeed.”

The Warlord stiffened. “That is nonsense, Commissioner. A ruse on your part.”

Sobel hurriedly continued, “This matter concerns both of us, Warlord, and it may require all our resources to put an end to it.”

The Warlord coughed once before he spoke again. “The morale of our soldier caste will suffer when they learn of this, and henceforth they will doubt the veracity of our holystal projections that guide this war. I must ponder this further and consult my holystal, Commissioner. I will contact you shortly. Your line will be open?”

“Of course.” Sobel used his sweetest-sounding voice, but as soon as Kiltik’s image faded, he slammed his fist on the desktop.

VIII

They had been on the run for days.

Before he and Click set off again, Rader had insisted on burying the other scout he had instinctively killed. He remained tense, all of his sensors alert, knowing that the third recon scout would report to Base.

With the two soldiers buried, showing a last glimmer of responsibility, Rader had activated his helmet communicator and transmitted the location of the two graves. He added a brief message to let Commissioner Sobel know he was going offline and not to expect any further reports from the field, then he tore out the locator, disengaged the built-in comm, and told Click they had to move.

The Earth League would want to deactivate and analyze Rader. It was absurd to believe he could surrender, explain what he had done, and apologize to his superiors for his mistake. That wouldn’t bring the dead soldiers back to life. Now that he had proved to be dangerously unreliable as a Deathguard, he would be “retired,” and the Commissioner would quietly remove his name from the books.

And the Earth League would kill Click.

Addressing his own situation, Click was certain he would be decapitated in a public ceremony if he ever turned himself over to the Jaxxan military. They could not surrender to either side. Rader didn’t know how much time he had left, but he refused to waste it. They were on their own.

On the day after Rader met Click, five Earth League trackers had found them, set up an ambush, and attacked. Click, the first to spot the trackers, set up a clumsy energy-web that knocked out one of the fighters. When the other four turned their weapons on the Jaxxan deserter, Rader let his Werewolf Trigger take over, and he eliminated them with professional efficiency.

More blood on his hands.

During Rader’s training, the counselors had insisted that Deathguards had no conscience. Although he didn’t think that was true, Rader did not let the guilt paralyze him. While he would not have chosen to kill other Earth League soldiers, they had given him no choice. The best solution to protect himself, and Click, and other soldiers, would be to avoid any further encounters.

Commissioner Sobel’s shuttle touched down on the Détente Asteroid’s shared landing field, as had been previously arranged. It felt strange to be here at the same time as his Jaxxan counterpart. Uneasy, Sobel glanced behind him at the five specially chosen soldiers who rode in the shuttle—not as an honor guard, but as candidates for the unorthodox mission Kiltik had proposed.

It had taken Sobel some time to realize that the Jaxxan Warlord was serious; the idea proved that the alien military leader was in fact alien. Sobel would never have suggested such an insane approach, and yet …

A joint team composed of both human and Jaxxan soldiers to hunt down and eliminate the two deserters as swiftly as possible? If it was a trick, then Sobel would lose five good fighters … but he had already lost almost three times that many in his solo efforts to control the situation. He decided to risk it. This mess had to be cleaned up, swept under the rug, and the fewer people outside of Fixion who knew about it, the better.

Deathguards were the best fighters in the Earth League, although not necessarily stable or controllable, as Rader had proved. His hand-picked soldiers were specialists in their own right; Kiltik had chosen similarly talented Jaxxan hunters.

His five specialists crouched on the benches, anxiously shifting their laser rifles from hand to hand. The Commissioner had given them strict instructions not to open fire on Warlord Kiltik or any other Jaxxans when they disembarked on the Détente Asteroid. That would ignite a powder keg, and Sobel did not want to deal with the resulting paperwork.

As the door split open and the disembarkation ramp extended, the men jumped out and stood protectively beside their Commissioner. A line of warrior caste Jaxxans greeted them, and the two groups faced each other, as if daring someone to break the agreement.

Sobel said to his team with a scowl, “Enough posturing. We’ve got work to do.”

An alien, obviously the Warlord, walked across the landing field, sliding through the line of stiff Jaxxans. Sobel actually recognized Kiltik after only two viewscreen conversations, picking out distinctive features on the alien face.

Kiltik bowed his head, bending his stalk of neck. “Commissioner Sobel?”

“Good to meet you in person, Warlord!” He reached out to shake Kiltik’s brittle hand, but the Jaxxans reacted as if it were a hostile gesture. The air thrummed with building energy-webs, and the human specialists brought their laser rifles to bear.

But the Commissioner knocked the nearest soldier’s rifle aside. “That’s a friendly gesture among my people, Warlord. We’re not here to kill each other now.”

Kiltik stood silent, as if reading Sobel’s emotions. “I sense hostility in you, but it is not directed at us. For the moment.”

Sobel nodded. “I’m glad your empathic ability can break the ice.”

The Warlord fought back a spasm of coughing. “Please pardon my cough—it comes from breathing this thin, dry air for years.”

“No problem at all.” The Commissioner gestured for his five specialists to follow him toward the normally empty embassy buildings. “Is the conference room ready? We’ve got important things to do.”

For several days, Rader and Click made their way across the landscape, remaining hidden, staying alive, but without a plan. Each still possessed high-density ration packs, but the food would run out soon enough.

Despite the Deathguard’s best attempts to remain out of sight, they were repeatedly attacked by patrols—both human and Jaxxan—eluding some, killing others.

He and Click sat together at night, quietly brooding, thinking of what they could do next. Night on Fixion was oddly different from how Rader remembered nights should be. The dark sky was strewn with brilliant clumps of asteroids from the Fixion Belt, glittering almost-moons that added to the feeble starlight. He didn’t think he would ever get used to the low gravity, the thin atmosphere, the wrong constellations.

He would not see the skies of Earth again, no matter what. Even if he hadn’t fallen in with Click, if he’d been a good and loyal Deathguard, he would have rampaged behind enemy lines until the alien soldiers destroyed him, or until his systems shut down from cascading failures in the cyborg process. What remained of his human body—wired up and intertwined with weapons and armor—could not withstand the shock for long. Maybe biological tissue rejection would get him, or faulty mechanical and electronic integration.

The Werewolf Trigger was oddly quiet inside his head, and he felt no compulsion to rampage among Jaxxans and slaughter them. Maybe that compass of violence had also gotten skewed, the neural hookups damaged somehow by his second thoughts. But no, it was more than that.

Each day, Click focused his thoughts and manifested the shimmering holystal. After watching his comrade’s meditation, Rader had begun emulating the process as best he could. The Werewolf Trigger could send him into a murderous frenzy at any time, but he was learning to quell the urges. He hadn’t known that a Deathguard could control the trigger—no one had mentioned it in his training.

Now, Click rotated and inspected the glowing image he had manifested, and even Rader could see the extreme changes in the crystal pattern. As his mistakes piled up and his options became more limited, the three-dimensional map of Click’s life became more jumbled. The holystal was a sorry mess, a lump with no discernible paths leading into the future.

“We can’t just stay here and hope no one finds us,” Rader said. “We’ve got to get off of this asteroid.”

During basic training with his squad mates, Rader had studied the layout of the Fixion Belt. He knew the handful of human outposts and remembered one of the first facilities the League had built here: an automated observatory on a small outlying asteroid, established before the initial encounter with Jaxxans. Observation dishes mapped the deep cosmos and monitored the Belt’s other asteroids. Years ago, those telescopes had been the first to spot Jaxxan incursions into the asteroid belt, watching the aliens build their own bases on the handful of habitable rocks.

The observatory was out of the way and uninhabited, but with functional life support installed and left behind by the original construction crew.

“I know someplace safe. We’ll have time and breathing space—if we can get there.”

After Rader described the observatory, Click said, “But we cannot live there for long. It can only be a temporary measure.”

Rader’s voice was bleak. “My life is just a temporary measure. If we reach the observatory, maybe I’ll stick around long enough to help you find a safer place. One step at a time. First, we’ve got to get from here to that little asteroid.”

Click pondered for a moment. “If we need nothing more than an in-system ship to take us through the asteroids to the observatory, the Jaxxan base’s landing field has many capable vessels. We could take one.”

“I couldn’t fly it,” Rader said. “How about you?”

“That depends on the specific type of vessel. I flew several of those craft during my team’s work on the System Holystal. We could try.”

“We could try,” Rader agreed.

Click looked across the landscape to where the distant Jaxxan base and its landing field glowed above the foreshortened horizon. Suddenly his holystal shifted, adjusted itself to the new reality—and one new bright spire emerged.

Commissioner Sobel traveled in secret to a landing field near the main Jaxxan base, where he would meet with Warlord Kiltik. Together, they would unleash their special team behind battlefield lines to take care of the embarrassing situation before rumors could leak out.

Sobel could cover up the problem for another few days, but high command would know about it before long. He wanted to be able to announce that he’d eliminated the defective Deathguard before uncomfortable questions came down the pipeline. He didn’t have much time. Although he had no understanding of Jaxxan politics or military protocol, he sensed that Kiltik felt just as much incentive and anxiety.

As he and the alien Warlord watched the ten human and Jaxxan trackers demonstrate their cooperative efforts, Kiltik startled him with an unexpected comment. “I have learned that your people call us ‘cockroaches,’ Commissioner.”

Sobel tried to cover his embarrassment. “Roaches? Yes, I’ve heard that. It’s just an Earth insect. There are some … physical similarities.”

“Not just an Earth insect, Commissioner, but one that is considered filthy, one that wallows in or feeds on garbage. In reality, the Jaxxan race is quite fastidious.”

Sobel gave an unconvincing laugh. “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s a common practice among grunts—er, lower level soldiers—to create derogatory names for the enemy. I’m certain your race does the same. Don’t you have any insulting terms for humans?”

Warlord Kiltik twitched. “We call them humans. That is all the insult we need.”

The ten-member hunter squad continued training. The human soldiers had already been briefed specifically on how to kill a Deathguard (details they would not reveal to their alien counterparts). The current exercises showed the team members how to effectively combine Earth League laser weaponry and Jaxxan energy-web techniques. Most importantly, they got used to working with one another. That was the big barrier to break.

Kiltik said, “I find it discouraging that ten trained fighters are necessary to combat two deserters.”

“No one is more annoyed than I am, but those two have already killed fourteen of my fighters and six of yours. I should be proud of our Deathguard’s fighting skills, but I cannot help but wonder if your soldier somehow corrupted him.”

Kiltik choked his dry, rustling cough. “Who corrupted whom? Remember, Jaxxans are empaths. How can one of us possibly remain normal when constantly bombarded with your Deathguard’s alien perspectives? Our deserter was already flawed, in the wrong place after being removed from the System Holystal project. Your Deathguard has irreparably damaged him.”

A Jaxxan trotted up from one of the outpost buildings and handed the Warlord a small geometric crystal. Kiltik turned the object over in his hands, feeling the facets and reading its shape. When he finished, the crystal vanished from his hands.

“I have just been informed by my reconnaissance that the two deserters were spotted in the wastelands, moving away from the front. Then they vanished again.”

Sobel frowned. “If we knew where they were going, our hunter squad could intercept them.”

The Commissioner remembered visiting Rader in the med-center when he was no more than a few mangled lumps of flesh wired up to life-support; he’d had high hopes for his newest Deathguard. Now, he just wanted him removed from the equation.

He and Kiltik stood together, admiring their special team.

High above the ecliptic, bright starlight reflected off of the giant planes of polished cometary ice and majestic crystal spires being assembled there by Jaxxan imaginers and psychics.

The human military did not know the location of the System Holystal construction above the asteroid belt. Even if they did stumble upon the site, they wouldn’t understand it. Warlord Kiltik did not understand it himself. Holystal interpretation was not the duty of his caste, but he trusted the skills and knowledge of those who manifested such a representation. They could read the lines of fate, the fractures and angles that showed which paths Jaxxans could take into the future.

Thousands of workers operated here in space. While high-powered imaginers used their mental powers to create holographic portions of the ever-changing structure, teams of builders pushed small chunks of orbiting ice and diverted comets to deliver the materials here.

The Jaxxan race now inhabited five star systems. In each one, a revered System Holystal such as this one guided their decisions. The Jaxxan deserter who had joined forces with the human Deathguard had once been a skilled holystal imaginer who could understand subtle nuances in the cosmic constructions.

Now the Warlord flew in a small observation shuttle, piloted by his chief adviser. It was part of Kiltik’s regular briefing to plan the next week’s tactics, but he was losing confidence in the adviser’s recommendations. Any decent interpreter should have been able to warn against the current mess. The chief adviser knew his failing and desperately wanted to return to the Warlord’s good graces.

The observation shuttle approached the gigantic holystal, and Kiltik marveled at its facets, saw the distant starlight that reflected from the shining surfaces. He realized that it had been a mistake to demote the holystal engineer and turn him into a mere battlefield soldier. Observing the facets and angles, the Warlord could see how easy it would be to predict a different future from all the complexity. Even his chief adviser now suspected that some of the deserter’s contradictory warnings might have had some merit.

However, the deserter’s actions were indefensible: collaborating with a human—and not just any human, but a Deathguard who was single-handedly responsible for the murder of dozens if not hundreds of Jaxxan soldiers! It was shameful, an embarrassment, and Warlord Kiltik needed the situation resolved. In that, he was completely aligned with his human counterpart.

Reticent and chastised, the chief adviser flew the survey shuttle in a tight orbit over the giant holystal. Kiltik remained silent, his disapproval hanging in the enclosed cockpit. The adviser devoted his attention to the kaleidoscopic facets, the ever-changing fissures, crystalline angles, cracks and impurities, each of which indicated a different future, a path of fate that must be heeded.

Finally, the Warlord expressed his impatience. “I am not sightseeing. I am here to ferret out information. You are my interpreter. If you wish to regain my respect, then find answers.” He turned his polished eyes to the nervous chief adviser. “Look at the holystal, find the portions that are relevant to these deserters. I need to know what their plans are. Our hunter squad must know where they intend to go.”

The adviser’s voice was thin and warbling. “The holystal is still under construction, Warlord. Even if we find the proper facets, any answers are merely within a locus of possibilities.”

“Then I need those possibilities. Narrow them down so I can make my decisions.”

The chief adviser guided the survey shuttle over an expanse of stalagmite-covered ice and broken shards, a jumble that meant something to a Jaxxan properly versed in interpretation. “There, Warlord!” The adviser pointed to a flurry of cracks and warped transparency in the polished ice. “That appeared since my last visit here.”

“What changed?”

“The deserters have made a concrete plan, which is reflected here. This allows us to draw conclusions.”

Kiltik was careful not to praise the man too much. “How accurate can you be?”

“I have a … reasonable certainty.” He was cautious, not wanting to commit to what might be another error. The chief adviser stared through the window port, assessing the ripples and distortion in the crystalline structure. “We cannot extrapolate far into the future, but I can project where they intend to go next.”

Kiltik felt pleased. “If that information is accurate enough for our hunter squad to intercept them, then we won’t need any further projections.”

XII

With Click leading the way, they entered the hulking lump of buildings that was the Jaxxan military base—neatly organized but crowded structures, large and small, with flat walls slanted at hard-to-interpret angles. The buildings were dark, the passages between them narrow, the architecture strange and disorienting to Rader—everything based on oblique angles rather than perpendicular walls.

The Jaxxan military base, as with the human outpost on the other side of Fixion, had started out as a basic forward station, a testing ground for a possible colony, before the war broke out. But no hopeful colonists had ever arrived, and now the temporary city was a bizarre collage of trading posts, refectories, warehouses, arsenals, administrative hives, and command posts.

He and Click had to make their way through the middle of it at night, skirt any populated sections, and reach the landing field, where they hoped to steal a small in-system craft.

Rader used his suit sensors to scan for danger, while coaching Click in how to keep himself from being seen. Somehow, the alien couldn’t grasp the technique of searching for cover. However, after countless switchbacks and false starts, Click had become lost in the tangled streets. He sounded dismayed. “I was assigned to the System Holystal project out in space. I spent very little time in this settlement.”

Rader scanned ahead. “We’ll figure out a viable route to the landing field.” He and his companion moved from alley to alley until they had lost all sense of direction.

Disoriented and impatient, Click stepped into a wide intersection to get his bearings while Rader took a reading to determine how far they were from the ships. The Deathguard’s sensors detected movement in the shadows, forms converging on them with high-sensitivity detectors of their own. He knew this wasn’t right.

He heard a voice hiss, a human voice, here in the middle of the Jaxxan base. “That’s him! The Deathguard—and the deserter!”

A laser rifle etched a molten line across the flat tan wall of a nearby building. Rader jerked Click back into the dark alley as a freshly formed green energy-web hurtled toward them. The shimmering threads sliced off the corner of a structure.

The hunters surged out of their cover, humans and Jaxxans tracking them together. Before Rader could grasp the implications, he used his laser rifle to kill one—a Jaxxan, he thought—and scatter the others. One down. Synthetic adrenaline juiced him, and he fell into full defensive mode. He dragged Click with him down to the end of the alley and blasted a hole through the thin wall so they could push their way into a side street.

They dashed through the maze of passageways, glad for the darkness. Deathguard reflexes kicked in, filling him with a sense of heightened danger. Without saying a word, Click ran along beside him, in shock. From behind, they could hear shouts and noises as the hunter squad continued their pursuit.

Rader was amazed to realize that the Earth League and the Jaxxan military had cooperated to hunt them down. It would take all his skills and energy to avoid capture and keep Click alive. He focused entirely on their escape.

Suddenly his insides jerked, and he felt pressure building up in his brain as the Werewolf Trigger activated: KILL. KILL.

“Click, get out of here!”

The Jaxxan stumbled next to him. “But where should I go?”

“I’m dangerous! Get away from me!” Rader shoved him off to one side, hunching over in his futile attempts to control himself. “Quick, dammit!” Click stumbled off, running but woefully clumsy.

The Deathguard’s implanted weapons systems activated, his laser rifle became part of him, and his head exploded with red noise, the alarm voice pounding against pressure points in his brain.

The whole world around him became a target, and the enemy lost its distinct form. He didn’t know for sure what it was he must KILL, but he had to KILL it anyway. The berserker alarm told him to.

Gripping his laser rifle with reinforced gloves, he leaped out into the street, taking pot-shots at buildings, shooting at shadows in windows. Rader’s shout was amplified by his helmet speakers—and from his scream, the hunter squad pinpointed his location.

He looked ahead down an alley, studying details through light-amplification sensors. A vague memory jumped into his mind. Someone had gone that way, indistinct—the enemy? He bounded between the angled buildings, paying no heed to the movement behind him.

Rader breathed with mechanical rhythm, peering into the shadows with heightened senses. His cyborg systems increased his metabolism, supercharged what remained of his biological tissue.

A brilliant shooting star, a gift from the Fixion Belt, whistled over his head in a final flash of glory.

Rader leaped forward, unable to control his actions. He saw a Jaxxan ahead of him, running, stumbling along. A vague, distant voice tugged at the back of his mind, telling him that this wasn’t the real enemy … but the Werewolf Trigger drowned the rational voice.

Click.

The lone Jaxxan let out a chitter of fear and ran along a perpendicular alley, straight toward the landing field, still trying to reach the ship they needed. He reached an open construction area where skeletons of oddly angled buildings stood among piles of naked plastic-alloy girders.

Rader launched himself into the construction area like a jungle fighter. Shadows surrounded him, but he paid them no heed. Ahead, he saw the alien, the enemy. Recognition flickered in his mind for a moment—but the clamor forced it away.

KILL

No!

Click stumbled among tangled wires and slabs of polymer concrete in piles for assembly crews. He stopped short against a half-constructed wall, wheezing in the thin air.

Rader stepped victoriously over a girder, then leaped down in front of the cornered target. He pushed the laser rifle close to the Jaxxan’s large black eyes.

But the alien refused to use his energy-web. Click merely regarded the weapon’s blunt barrel.

KILL KILL, the voice of the Werewolf Trigger insisted.

No! No!

Rader’s will struggled against a fortune of scientific conditioning. He had to fire, had to destroy. The command pulled harder at his mind, building in intensity, tearing him apart.

KILL KILL

No!

The Deathguard swung his weapon up and went wild, blasting buildings, slicing through support struts, destroying anything but Click.

Jumping away, he charged back in the direction he had come—and ran abruptly into the hunter squad. They reacted, but the Deathguard was too fast. The Werewolf Trigger ordered him to KILL—and this time he didn’t resist. He left two dead human soldiers and one Jaxxan in the wake of his fury, then dove into cover, racing through the construction site. Four down.

The six remaining members of the hunter squad took only a second to regroup. Leaving the three bodies where they had fallen, one of the Jaxxans motioned to the others, and they stalked after the Deathguard.

As soon as he escaped the scattered hunters, the Werewolf Trigger lapsed into quiescence, and Rader’s thoughts, intelligence, self-control flooded back into his mind.

He heard shouts from behind as the hunters called to one another. They were still out of sight, but with his amplified senses, he could hear them split up to approach him from different directions. However, Rader had an advantage now as calm calculation returned to him. The others expected him to act like a rampaging berserker.

He had to damp his emotions, draw them back into himself so that his turmoil wouldn’t become a beacon that declared his hidden presence to the empathic Jaxxans. Rader sought refuge in the darkness beneath an outside stairway, and his non-reflective, camouflage armor helped him melt into the shadows, turning him into a shadow himself.

He breathed methodically, forcing rigid control back into his body, imitating Click’s holystal meditation. Click! He didn’t think he had killed his comrade. Rader closed his eyes, ignoring the marching feet and hushed voices that hurried closer, then moved past him.

When the team had passed, he emerged from his sanctuary. Instead of pursuing the hunters, he crept toward the landing field and their way off Fixion. Click would have gone to the ships—he hoped.

Across twenty meters of open concrete, a small short-range cargo vessel rested, as well as six larger personnel transports and a bulbous fuel tanker. One lonely Jaxxan guard stood at the open door of the small cargo ship.

On the perimeter of the landing field, Rader spotted Click’s ill-concealed form in the shadow of a building. At least the alien was trying. The Deathguard silently made his way over to his friend, keeping so well concealed that even Click didn’t know he was there until the last moment.

The Jaxxan froze, then realized that he no longer sensed the raging, killing beast inside the Deathguard. Rader spoke in a whisper. “I’m in control now, but the rest of that squad is still after us. It won’t be long before they realize I’ve doubled back. Let’s get that ship!”

He knew that if they could get off of Fixion, they could lose themselves in the debris of the asteroid belt, travel slowly, hopscotch from rock to rock, and reach the observatory asteroid. Beyond that, Rader didn’t care.

He brought his laser rifle up, aimed. “I’ll get rid of the sentry.”

But Click’s bony arm stopped him. “Wait, there is a better way.” He hunkered down and concentrated on the sentry. Even through his armor, Rader felt a tingle in the air; his sensors registered an energy buildup. A galaxy of lights flickered in the deep universe of Click’s black eyes.

The sentry flailed his angular arms as a half-formed energy-web folded over him. The sentry clawed at the dimly sparkling strands, searching for his unseen attacker—a Jaxxan attacker.

Leaving their hiding place, Rader and Click rushed across the landing field toward the Jaxxan cargo ship. When Click spoke to the sentry, Rader was surprised to hear the menace in his comrade’s usually timid voice. “Do nothing unwise, or I shall be forced to complete my web.”

The Jaxxan guard did nothing unwise.

While Rader kept his laser rifle pointed at the sentry, Click scuttled forward and activated the hatch. “Can you fly this ship?”

The insectoid head bobbed up and down on its stalk of a neck.

“A hostage and a pilot,” Rader said. “Good enough.” He did not know what they would do with the sentry once they reached their destination.

Click chittered his instructions to the sentry. “You will fly on a random, evasive course. The humans have an observatory asteroid located on the far edge of the Belt. It must be in the database.”

Rader detected movement in the construction area, the hunter squad picking up on them again. “They’re coming. Get inside the ship—now!”

With a victorious outcry, the hunters charged across the landing field. Rader shoved Click through the cargo ship’s open hatch as one of the human soldiers braced for a careful shot, but chose the wrong Jaxxan. He burned a large hole in the alien sentry’s back.

As he tried to escape, Rader’s left leg suddenly collapsed, and he sprawled on the ramp. The attackers raced toward them, shouting, and he rolled, trying to assess the damage, sure that a laser blast had cut through the armor, ruined his cyborg leg systems. Using his good leg, his elbows, and his gloves, he hauled himself to the hatch.

Click had turned back to help him, and an energy-web glittered against the hull, smoking and sparking. Rader yelled, “Leave me—get to the control room!”

Instead, the Jaxxan grabbed his arms, dragged him the rest of the way into the ship. As soon as he was clear, Click sealed the hatch.

Rader looked down to see how much damage the shot had done to his leg, but he saw no burned hole, no melted slag of armor or shorted-out cyborg parts. The leg had simply failed.

Click dashed away from the hatch and scrambled up a thin-runged ladder to the control deck. Rader called after him, “You can fly this type of ship, can’t you?”

Click pointedly did not answer, and Rader stifled a groan.

The cargo ship rose jerkily, leaving behind a whirlpool of displaced air. The hunter squad watched in anger and defeat. After the vessel zigzagged in a drunkard’s flight from the landing field, the soldiers watched the flares of its engines dwindle into Fixion’s thin atmosphere.

The human captain stared at the sentry who lay sprawled on the still-warm pavement. “He’s dead. We can’t interrogate him for any intel the two deserters might have revealed.”

The Jaxxan leader shook his head. “Not too late. We will implement a post-mortem interrogation.”

He removed equipment from his belt pack—a probe, a diagnostic reader, two long wires, and a skull splitter. Jamming down hard, he broke the chitinous shell of the dead sentry’s head, spreading the hard faceplates to expose the soft, contoured brain. “We should still be able to access the chemical memory of the last few moments he experienced.”

The Jaxxan unfolded the screen, then dipped the sharp probe wires into the dead alien brain. Static washed across the screen accompanied by surreal images, colored patterns, old memories. He worked quickly before the memory-storage chemicals dissipated, the neurons deteriorated.

He touched different sections of tissue with the probe wires, moving urgently, until he found a blurred image of Deathguard Rader and his Jaxxan companion. He zeroed in, turned up the volume on the receiver, and heard their words, relived their last conversation, studied everything they had said.

The Jaxxan captain got the information he needed before the chemical traces crumbled into disjointed fragments and incomplete sentences. It was enough. He looked up at his comrades. “Now we know where they are going.”

XIII

“They got past all ten?” Sobel was still rubbing sleep from his eyes in front of the image of Kiltik.

The insistent call from the viewscreen had dragged him out of bed. He hadn’t expected to be disturbed, but Sobel had given the Jaxxan Warlord his direct contact code. At first, the Commissioner thought he would be happy to receive the call regardless of the hour, expecting good news—but Kiltik had not told him what he wanted to hear.

“Yes, all ten, Commissioner. The Deathguard killed four of them and escaped with the Jaxxan soldier in a stolen ship. A very reckless flight, evasive action. They vanished into the asteroid field.”

“Good riddance,” Sobel muttered, but knew the problem didn’t end there. Even if the two were never seen again—and the cyborg systems had to start breaking down soon—Sobel’s failure to resolve the situation properly would be a permanent blot on his record. He couldn’t just let the Deathguard die on his own. “This is a disaster, Warlord. We’ll never be able to track them—unless you can guess their destination from the patterns in that holystal thing of yours?”

The Jaxxan’s face was unreadable. “We have a clearer answer than that. Your Deathguard and my deserter tried to take one of the landing-field sentries hostage, but our hunter squad shot him inadvertently—a happy accident. Fortunately, one of my soldiers set up a mind probe quickly enough. We know the location of the asteroid where the two intend to go.”

“Really?” Sobel didn’t quite allow himself a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s better than a complete debacle, but we have to act without delay. Let me send you two of my best fighter ships—ours are faster than yours.”

“Accepted.” An expression of what might have been humor crossed Kiltik’s face, but then the alien broke into a spasm of dry coughing.

Sobel rolled his tongue around in his dry mouth. He had been asleep for only a few hours, and already his mouth tasted foul. “I’ll get those fighter ships sent over right away—and please don’t shoot at them! Then I’m going back to bed.” He yawned, but felt no better for it. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“No.”

“Oh … Well, I’ll speak to you when I have something to report, Warlord.”

“Call me Kiltik.” The Warlord touched the screen, and the images of his fingertips were blurred. “Now that I have met you in person, I find this communication very unsatisfactory. I feel no emotions, which makes understanding more difficult. From now on, I would rather dispense with this apparatus and meet you face-to-face.”

“That can be arranged—but let’s hope we can wrap up this problem quickly.” He blanked the screen, then established another connection. He spoke to a corporal in the fighter ship hangars, repeated his baffling instructions several times, then worked his way up the chain of command.

Sobel knew his bed would be very cold by the time he finally climbed back into it.

XIV

They flew away from Fixion, diving at breakneck speed and without a course into the scramble of drifting asteroids. Click quickly became adept at maneuvering the cargo shuttle.

“The military will be tracking us. We have to get far enough away,” he announced over the intercom.

Rader still lay on the lower deck, trying to get his uncooperative leg to function. He was sure the survivors of the hunter squad would be commandeering their own pursuit ships. Click accelerated as much as he could tolerate, and his tough alien body could withstand severe gravitational stresses. Rader’s Deathguard armor protected him.

“Once we are in the densest portion of the Belt, I will cut the engines,” Click continued. “Then our signature becomes identical to that of the other small asteroids.”

Taking a moment to assess his own malfunctions, Rader propped himself against a bulkhead. The cyborg leg had suffered no obvious damage, but the neural pulses from his brain no longer made it move as he intended. Unavoidable glitches, the start of what would be a cascade of breakdowns, and he knew how to do only the most basic repairs. He breathed silent thanks that his systems had functioned long enough and well enough to get him and Click off of Fixion. Now, if he could only find a plan that would get his Jaxxan comrade to safety.

One problem at a time.

Working with enforced patience, still feeling the afterwash of the synthetic adrenaline that had poured through his systems, Rader removed emergency tools, cracked open the primary circuits, and performed a standard reset procedure twice before his armored leg would twitch again. He swung himself back to his feet and tried to walk. He took painstaking steps at first, then limped forward. The metal ladder to the upper deck proved quite a challenge, but he eventually made his way into the control chamber.

Click flew the ship among a cluster of high-albedo icy asteroids. To confuse any systems tracking them, he matched the orbits of random stony asteroids of approximately the same size as the cargo ship, and the glaring sunlight masked their thermal signature after Click shut down the engines.

“We wait half a day,” the Jaxxan said, “then alter course slightly to take us closer to the observatory asteroid. We are patient.”

“Yes, patient.” Rader silently ran thorough diagnostic checks of his systems, his power sources, the alignment of neural conduits, and found many domino-effect malfunctions; his last battle and escape in the Jaxxan base had strained his components, running out the service life. “Take as much time as you need.”

One way or another, he doubted he had more than a week. Click didn’t need to know that, but his empathic senses would probably tell him anyway.

“With the ship’s life-support levels, we can survive for three days. Breathe as little as possible.”

Rader realized it was a joke. “Nobody’s been to the observatory asteroid in ages. Better hope their systems are functional. We won’t make it to anywhere else.”

Click said, “We have nowhere else to go.”

“That’s the next thing I have to figure out.”

While they drifted, Rader tried to implement repairs to his cyborg systems in order to buy a little extra time, but most of the systems were beyond him. And the failings were in his mental interface, not in the large-scale mechanics. He experienced a persistent headache that seemed to be growing worse. His eyesight suffered from double vision, as if the images from his real eye and artificial eye did not align properly.

For two days, they made their cautious, tedious journey across a stepping-stone course. Click monitored the cargo ship’s passive sensors. They were surrounded by far too many data points, which was good—a swarm like identical needles in a very large haystack. “I see no indication that pursuers have followed us through the numerous blips.”

Rader’s hope grew as the image of the observatory asteroid grew on the viewscreen before him. It was a domed rock less than two kilometers wide, moving among the rubble in the Fixion Belt. In less than an hour, if Click kept up his improved navigational abilities, they would arrive.

Rader almost smiled for the first time since … since that final day with his squad mates. He should have died then, and that day could have served as his final flash of glory, not this awkward encore. With so much time to think aboard their ship, he could not escape the conclusion. Even after they reached the observatory, Click had little chance of going much farther. He had not managed to come up with a viable plan.

He felt dismayed that this abortive “second chance” as a Deathguard had accomplished nothing—not for himself, not for his people, not for Click either. It was just a delay. And when Rader’s cyborg systems finally broke down, Click was not likely to last long alone on the observatory asteroid. He’d wait there until food supplies and life support ran out, like a man stranded on a desert island.

Short-term thinking. But it was better than shorter-term thinking. They were still alive. Rader had to hope they would find some other ship, or supplies … or a miracle once they got to the asteroid.

In the pilot seat, Click seemed satisfied. If he detected Rader’s troubled thoughts, he did not show it.

As they made their final approach, Rader studied the enhanced images, saw the framework of bowl-shaped radio telescopes reflecting starlight, the automated tracking mirrors of optical telescopes gazing out into the universe to gather astronomical data.

And he saw the recently installed military fuel depot, large tanks of spacecraft fuel, as well as Earth League stockpiled missiles, a forest of javelin-shaped warheads ready to be launched. He stared, realizing that this asteroid was not as forgotten and abandoned as he had hoped.

When Click scanned the rear navigational sensors, his glassy black eyes clouded over. “Rader …”

Two pursuit fighter ships swept up behind them like cruising sharks. They came straight toward the sluggish Jaxxan cargo ship.

“I cannot accelerate enough to outrun them,” Click said. “And we have very little fuel remaining.”

Rader glanced at the type of ship, knew their capabilities. “Those are the League’s fastest fighter ships. We don’t have any chance of outrunning them.”

When the pair of pursuers circled the cargo ship, Rader saw the Earth League insignia, but the image blurred and shimmered in his unfocused vision. The face that appeared on the comm screen, though, was a Jaxxan, demanding their surrender.

“Why don’t they just destroy us from a distance?” Click said.

“They will want proof—or trophies.”

The squad of hunters was composed of humans and Jaxxans working together; Rader wondered if the Earth League soldiers had orders to kill their alien comrades after a successful mission—especially now that they had seen the unexpected missile stockpile hidden on the observatory asteroid. Commissioner Sobel could not possibly want the Jaxxan high command to know about the depot.

“We cannot defend ourselves,” Click said. “This cargo shuttle has no weapons.”

Rader held his laser rifle. “We can defend ourselves.”

A clang of metal thrummed through the hull as the two fighter ships attached to the Jaxxan airlocks. “I have sealed the airlocks and denied them access,” Click said.

“They’ll burn their way through.” On the visual monitors he discerned a glow on the inner hull: one airlock being cut away by a powerful laser rifle, and the opposite lock rippling from a continuously applied energy-web. Even a Deathguard couldn’t defend both hatches at the same time.

Limping on his faulty leg, aligning his weapons systems with the vision from only his artificial eye to minimize errors, Rader picked a defensible position at the entrance to the cargo ship’s cockpit. He braced himself there, holding his laser rifle ready, his targeting sensors attuned. His artificial heart pumped nutrients through his cyborg and biological components, but the Werewolf Trigger remained silent. He didn’t need it. Or maybe that, too, had malfunctioned.

Both hatches surrendered at the same time, and on the visual monitors he watched the remaining members of the hunter squad move with brisk efficiency through the corridors up to the cockpit. The humans were wearing mirrored armor, which would reflect the beam of his laser rifle.

“I’ll take out as many as I can, but I doubt I’ll get them all,” he said. “Sorry we didn’t make it all the way.”

“We made it this far, Rader, and now we are dead.” Click’s voice was strangely emotionless. “But so are they.”

Rader identified an expression on the alien face that no other human would have seen. Click punched a sequence into the navigational computer, and the observatory asteroid shifted its position in front of them. “Our engines cannot outrun the fighter ships, but we have enough power to drag them along.”

Rader nodded approval. “A Deathguard’s mission is to cause mayhem.”

“Yes, I believe we have caused a fair amount of mayhem,” Click said.

“I just wish we had accomplished something more than that.” He wondered if the Commissioner would take the medal of honor away from his family … but that would be admitting something had gone wrong.

The six members of the hunter squad advanced up to the control deck.

Rader darted a farewell glance at his comrade. After setting their collision course, Click crouched in motionless silence, not even trying to fight. Instead, he hunched over a shining image, studying his last holystal. The glowing shape was a dazzling, perfect sphere.

Rader took a quick breath. “What does that mean?”

“It means that we have run out of alternatives.”

The hunter squad let out a chorus of shouts as they stormed the final corridor. Rader opened fire, placing a neat, centimeter-wide hole through the head of one Jaxxan.

Now the Werewolf Trigger clamored in his mind, but as he fired on the advancing squad members, his arm jerked and spasmed, spoiling his aim. The Jaxxans took shelter against door wells in the corridor, and Rader’s energy blasts reflected off the mirrored armor, ricocheting down the hall. The fractured beams dissipated, but he kept firing.

Rader’s leg gave out beneath him, and he tumbled over like a mannequin. He tried to aim his laser rifle as momentum carried his body in a clumsy roll, and he lay face up on the deck.

An energy-web hurled by the two remaining Jaxxans engulfed Click in luminous tangles. Click cried out as the web completed itself, but his words turned to scintillating shards of sound. His holystal dwindled to a last spark of light until that, too, vanished.

The human fighters targeted the Deathguard and rushed forward, while the Jaxxans ran past him, urgently trying to reach the shuttle controls in time. Rader stared at them through his visor: A band of humans and aliens working together, to destroy a human and alien who had dared to work together. He wondered if they understood the irony.

He looked past them to the cockpit to see the observatory asteroid rushing toward them. The cargo shuttle was going to crash into the spiny missile batteries instead of the telescopes … not that it made any difference.

A short time was better than no time—and he had spent it with a friend rather than alone.

Sobel grinned, ready to celebrate the news. “Well, Kiltik—we did it!”

“Yes, not even one of your Deathguards could resist the two of us.” The Warlord sat across from him in the conference room on the Détente Asteroid. Kiltik had shuttled over to the Earth League embassy at Sobel’s invitation, so they could await the final report.

The Warlord seemed troubled, however. The Commissioner would never have noticed it before, but now he could detect subtle differences in the alien’s moods. “You don’t seem as overjoyed as I expected.”

“Perhaps I grieve for the loss of your … astronomical facility.”

“Oh, that!” Sobel brushed the matter aside. “It was obsolete. We can always build another one—astronomy is low on our priorities.”

“But it did provide a good hiding place for your weapons stockpile. Either astronomy is quite a volatile science, or your supposed observatory was merely a camouflage.”

Sobel felt flustered and embarrassed, especially in his moment of great victory. “I could lie about that, but you’d be able to detect the truth, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” For his own part, unfortunately, Sobel couldn’t tell whether the Jaxxan was lying. The Warlord said, “We will need to discuss this further—at the appropriate time.”

“I’d be happy to talk about it with you, but right now, this calls for a drink! Would you care for some refreshment?”

The Jaxxan rattled his dry cough. “Water would be nice.”

“Nothing more festive?” Sobel frowned. “As you wish, Warlord.” He placed ice cubes in a glass and filled it from a pitcher.

Kiltik broke out in a spasm of raspy coughing. Sobel ran to help him. “You really should have that cough taken care of. Would you like one of my medics to check you out?”

The Jaxxan breathed deeply, expressing his thanks. “No, it would do no good. The dry air of Fixion has ruined my health. I have spent years in this climate—it is a wonder I’m still alive, so far from home.” In a distant, dreamy voice, Kiltik described his warm humid planet with steaming jungles and crystal cities, where rain fell in syrupy drops and sluggish rivers were choked with sweet algae.

Sobel tried to picture it. “After our great victory over the two deserters, can’t you use the political mileage to request a transfer back to Jaxx? For a short while at least?”

“I do not plan to report this matter to my superiors at all. I will be here for the duration of the war.” He looked up. “How long are you to be stationed here?”

“I have a year and a half left of my three years.”

“A year and a half.” Kiltik sipped his cold water. “These facilities on the Détente Asteroid are used ineffectively.” He paused for a long moment. “Would it be possible for me to visit you from time to time, friend Sobel?”

Still deciding what his celebratory drink would be, the Commissioner finally sat down with his own glass of ice water. “That could be arranged.” He chuckled. “Friend Kiltik.”

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Framed