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  But the clock in my head kept incrementing.

  I moved over to his sidearm and picked it up. At a kilo and a half, it weighted half again what I did, but I had sufficient strength to haul it around. I took it across my shoulders, a rescue carry, and began running again.

  Back at the clearing’s edge, ten meters ahead of me, I saw a human sniper and a spotter lying side by side, putting rounds into the collapsed cargo container. The clearing was on fire in places but empty of moving ’gangers. Clearly, though, there were some of us trapped, using the container’s wreckage for cover.

  I set the firearm on its butt, maneuvered it so that its barrel was aimed more or less at the sniper’s side, and sighted in along the trench of its sights. Then, ducking so my head was below and to the left of the slide, I carefully, slowly pulled the trigger.

  There was a boom overloading my audio sensors. All of a sudden I was on my butt with the sidearm on top of me.

  When I looked at my target again, the sniper was on his feet, looking vague and startled. A red stain had appeared near his armpit and was spreading. His spotter was shouting, I couldn’t tell what, and looking around.

  The spotter saw me as I got the sidearm upright again. He grabbed for the rifle. I swung the handgun into line, a fast, awkward aim, and yanked the trigger. Then I was on my ass again.

  But I looked up, and the spotter was on the ground too, rolling around, clutching his inner thigh. The sniper was still staggering around in shock.

  I sent a microwave burst toward the cargo container: “You’re clear, run.” Then I picked up the handgun and hauled ass.

  The trees at the north edge of the clearing were on fire by the time I reached that area. I continued laterally until I found a spot where the forest didn’t seem to be burning, and charged due north from there.

  I had a chance. I had a chance. But the location they Stand-Ups had given me for the Nest was probably a false one. I’d never find the real Nest by myself. So I had to get to the muster point and evacuate with the others.

  I reached a flat patch of ground and really picked up running speed … and then a mega rolled out from behind a couple of trees. It straddled my path.

  It was a forklift with a railgun and a plate-metal shield. I knew whose it was. I’d stolen and repaired most of them. It was Lina’s.

  I stopped where I was and sighed. I didn’t bother aiming the handgun at her. There was no way it could disable a tough old mega.

  The mega rolled up and leaned over me. Its belly hatch popped open. Lina’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Get in.”

  I dropped the handgun, leaped up, scrambled in, dogged the hatch shut behind me. Then I climbed up into the chest cockpit. I almost fell down the ladder shaft as Lina set her mega into motion.

  Over her shoulder, I could see the darkened viewplates, heads-up image of our surroundings on them, wire-frame images of trees and, distantly, humans and other megas.

  I flipped down the jumpseat, to the right of and set back from the pilot’s chair, and buckled myself in. I gave Lina a close look. She was dressed for work, wearing her Shavery jumpsuit, boots, no face paint. “Hey, you’re wearing shoes.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Why’d you come back?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at me, really saw the blood all over me, grimaced a little. She returned her attention to the terrain ahead. “Because you convinced me to.”

  “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “When you talked about Doc Chiang wanting his descendants to be free. It was clear you wanted it, too. Clear that you understood that we’re not a race unless we have descendants.” She shut up while navigating a thick stand of trees with exposed roots that threatened to upend the mega. Sometimes she walked the mega, its motion awkward and lurching, sometimes she returned to cruising on the treads. We headed into a burning zone, the brightness of the fire visible even through the polarization of the viewplates. Then we were past the trouble spot. “I realized … our children are going to need to understand where they come from. They’ll need ancestors, too. Like you and Doc Chiang.”

  “I’ll be damned.” That expression didn’t mean much to ’gangers, but Doc used it a lot.

  There was a distant boom from behind and to the left, sign that the humans were in pursuit of our retreating force. Lina gave me another brief glance. “There was another reason, too, I guess. That whole conversation, where you’d figured out the Pothole Charlie plan but had decided to go ahead with it anyway, and die … that made me realize you weren’t Big Plush. You were Bow, and I decided I’d miss Bow.”

  * * *

  A minute later, we reached the clearing where our extraction vehicles waited. They were tracked haulers to which we’d hooked rolling luggage trailers and flatbeds. Megas sat on the flatbeds, ’gangers crowded into the luggage racks. I saw techs working on limp ’gangers, some of them burned or missing limbs, some showing no apparent damage—zapped.

  We rolled up the boarding ramp onto the last trailer. When Lina depolarized the cockpit viewplates and everyone saw me sitting with her, Memnon, in his own mega, made an outraged noise, then began issuing orders. But Lina fired her recording at him, at BeeBee and Malibu, encrypted for Stand-Ups only.

  Her message was a simple one. “Anything happens to Bow, I stop sending cancel codes to a file I’ve already placed in the Zhou City communications net. A file that gives map coordinates for the Nest.”

  Had she actually placed such a file? I didn’t find out for some time. No, of course not; she wouldn’t endanger the Nest, the future of her kind. But her bluff sure put the brakes on any immediate attempt to grab and dismantle me.

  Everybody knows how the evacuation resolved itself. A few more ’gangers boarded, we began rolling, we stayed away from human roads, we traveled at a snail’s pace. And the meats didn’t catch us. We reached the Nest together.

  Of course, everybody on Chiron today knows where the Nest turned out to be, and what happened to it. But we were there undetected for quite a while, transforming ourselves from a group of revolutionaries into a people. And because of Lina, I didn’t end up fried and scrapped. In fact, until I told that story, the general ’ganger public never knew that I wasn’t always a trusted member of the Stand-Up Gang.

  Richter got the lion’s share of public appreciation for the operation, for the whole start of the revolution … posthumously. Memnon got himself appointed general of our new army. When elections started, Petal became our first Prime Minister.

  Pothole Charlie didn’t get the credit he deserved for orchestrating the whole thing, not for years. He still hated me, but we did our duty by our people and interacted with civility at public appearances.

  The Battle of Breen Hollow, as the brief, deadly exchange in the forest came to be known, did send a shock wave through the humans. Their toys had turned on them. Their toys were dangerous. Some of the meats did become bitter, hate-filled, life-long enemies of the Dollgangers. Others, and this was important, did start thinking about us differently.

  The ’gangers who stayed with the meats lived under increased security, increased scrutiny. I don’t imagine we were very popular with them. But except for those who eventually joined us—and there were a lot of those—they were no longer our people. They were plushes.

  Shortly after our escape, I saw an interview conducted by the meat press with Doc. He’d been investigated for possible complicity but came up clean. In the interview, he said pithy Doc things such as “You fear them because they are so different from us, which demonstrates your lack of imagination. You should fear them because they are so very like us.”

  Throughout the interview he wore a little half-smile. The interviewer thought it was enigmatic. I thought it was both sad and proud.

  As for Lina, and for what happened to Doc, and how the whole future of planet Chiron played out—well, that’s a story for another time.

  But at least nobody called me Big Plush anymore.

  The End


  COMRADES IN ARMS

  Kevin J. Anderson

  –1–

  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 squadmates 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.

  –2–

  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 z
one, 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.”