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  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 showed 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 appearances 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.

  –4–

  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 squadmates 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, buglike 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.

  –5–

  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.”