Suppose that soldiers of our present day are drafted by advanced aliens as peace enforcers on a distant world in exchange for technology …
In this first of the three original stories commissioned for this book, Mike Resnick teams up with Brad Torgersen, a Writers of the Future finalist in 2009 who then speedily sold stories to Analog, and who has been in the army reserves for twenty years. The amazingly energetic Mike Resnick has collaborated with a bushel of other authors (which turns out not to be a big sheaf but is actually eight gallons; nevertheless we’ll leave this), as well as authoring a library of books by himself and being expert on horseracing, purebred collies, Africa and who knows what else. As of 2009 at least he has the unique distinction (ahem, there can only be one) of being the all-time top award winner for short fiction.
IT WAS A normal duty day in the city until the Earth limo showed up. It glided through the chaotic s’ndar traffic that bustled across my assigned six-way intersection. Flow control was provided by a single s’ndar of the city’s provisional constabulary, who jerked his brightly coloured paddles to and fro over his bug’s head, herding his people this way and that.
Since the ceasefire, my squad and I didn’t mess with the locals unless we had to. We kept out of the way, as backup for the traffic cop in case of real trouble.
I exchanged glances with Corporal Kent, who’d seen the limo. Her facial expression said, You’re the boss; you figure it out.
I sighed, then got up out of my sandbagged security position and began walking towards the vehicle as it ground to a halt a few metres away.
The s’ndar traffic cop watched me, decided it was none of his business, and went back to waving his paddles.
Low-rise commercial and residential structures sprouted around the intersection like mushrooms, their hemispherical roofs designed to shelter pedestrians from the daily monsoon. Along the boulevards poles rose up from the pavement at regular intervals to support endless rows of electrical conduit, phone conduit and fibre optics.
A slight haze of smog hung over the s’ndar city. It was impossible to ignore how similar, and yet also totally different, the scene was from the average urban centre on Earth. Humans and s’ndar had reached roughly equivalent technology levels.
Then the Interstellar Conglomerate intervened.
The smooth hum of the limo’s twin engines quit, and the man who stepped out of the car was someone I was familiar with only from the news feeds. Senator Jeff Petersen had played football in college, and still kept reasonably fit. Tall and broad-chested, his full head of pepper-tinged hair was trimmed close. He had on a khaki field vest – one of the Earth embassy models that contained ballistic armour plating in addition to being festooned with pouches and pockets. He also wore neatly pressed khaki shorts and high-topped boots.
Given the oppressive humidity, I envied his wardrobe.
Two similarly dressed Secret Service personnel – one male, with a pistol on his hip, the other female, with a sub-machine gun in her hands – flanked the senator as he strode towards me. Other Secret Service agents stepped from the car and scanned the surroundings cautiously, their mirror sunglasses and straight faces making them seem somehow robotic.
I saluted the senator when he drew near.
“Sergeant Colford!” yelled Petersen over the din of traffic as he extended his hand. He’d obviously read my name tape on my armour. Good politician’s reflex. Made it seem like he really gave a damn who I was.
I rapidly chow-slung my rifle and shook Petersen’s hand. He had a surprisingly strong grip. Well, maybe not so surprising, given his profession. His smile was amiable, and his nicely capped teeth sparkled in the oppressive sunlight.
I strongly resisted the urge to like him.
“Senator,” I said formally, “I wish I’d known you were coming.”
“You guys always say that,” Petersen said, continuing to smile. “But how am I supposed to talk to you candidly if your commander or first sergeant is warning you at morning briefing?”
It was a good point. But if I knew my corporal, she was already calling in to the Tactical Operations Centre. Headquarters would have our asses if we didn’t report the senator’s arrival asap.
Petersen surveyed my semi-hardened position.
“A bunker and eleven troops. Kind of overkill, don’t you think? The s’ndar in this city are pro-Conglomerate now. They’re our friends.”
“Maybe, sir,” I replied. “But you weren’t here six months ago.”
“I read about that. Did you see a lot of fighting, son?”
Son? Hell, I was almost thirty.
“I saw my share,” I said evenly. “My rifle company trained en route. Our Conglomerate transports already had mock-ups of s’ndar urban terrain on-board. We thought we’d be ready.”
“But you thought wrong,” the senator said.
“Yah,” I replied, grimacing at the memory.
Petersen waited, as if expecting me to say something more. When I didn’t, he ran a hand over his scalp and then folded his arms across his chest.
“So, you’ve seen some rough fighting. OK. Do you at least feel like it was worth it?”
“Worth what, sir?”
“Earth’s involvement in S’ndar-khk’s civil war. America’s involvement in the CEMEF – the Combined Earth Military Expeditionary Force.”
“I don’t make policy, sir,” I told him non-committally. “I just follow orders.”
“Fair enough. But the UN’s bargain with the Conglomerate is costing American lives. Do you think it’s worth it?”
I frowned, remembering my sister Karen. She’d been an officer in the Air Force, and had wanted to be an astronaut too, before the Conglomerate established their first contact with Earth. The interstellar robotic transports the Conglomerate sent to us made Earth’s space stations look like toys. We’d not even put a man on Mars yet, and the Conglomerate was picking us up and hauling us off in whole battalions – over 300 light years to this obscure little planet, where my sister had been thrilled as hell to see actual aliens.
Now she was buried back home, her skull split by a s’ndar bullet. It had been a closed-casket affair, given the damage. Mom and Dad still weren’t over it.
“I’ve lost some friends here,” I said. “And family too. Things were a mess on this planet when we showed up. Lots of killing all over the place. Now there’s not so much. But only because we’re still alert every hour of every day. You ask me if it’s worth it … I sure as hell hope so.”
Petersen’s brow furrowed. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, his face turning empathetic.
“I’m sorry for your friends, and whoever else you lost in your family, too. Part of the reason I’m here is to assure you and the other troops that you’re doing truly important work. You’re saving lives. Human lives. We help the s’ndar establish and keep the peace, and the Conglomerate helps Earth. We need the Conglomerate’s clean fusion technology to reverse the economic and political damage from the Oil Crash. You’re standing guard on this intersection so that you – or someone like you – doesn’t have to stand guard over a few barrels of crude in the Person Gulf or Venezuela.”
“Militia coming!” yelled one of my privates.
Senator Petersen and I turned our heads to see a small patrol of s’ndaran-made armoured personnel carriers manoeuvring towards us through the hubbub. The large-wheeled, tank-like vehicles took a few minutes to reach our position, and when they did, several armed s’ndar climbed from the hatch on an aerial-spiked APC, and approached my squad.
The s’ndar in the lead looked older than the rest. It was a female. Hell, all the authority figures in the insectoid race from sergeant on up were females, just like the ants and bees back on Earth. Her chitin was greyed at the edges and had several wounds that had been puttied over with artificial quick-cure ceramic, now weathered. Her thorax bore the militia equivalent of a non-commissioned officer, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out she’d seen her share of combat.
Sergeant to sergeant, we saluted, the s’ndar in its form, me in mine.
As I lowered my rifle from the vertical, my Conglomerate-manufactured Translation Application Device – TAD – began speaking into my helmet’s earphones. Emotionless metallic English filled my ears as the s’ndar’s mandibles clicked and scratched consonants in between flute-like vowels.
“Good morning, Staff Sergeant,” she said.
“Good morning, Primary Sergeant,” I replied, my TAD turning my English into s’ndar words.
“My soldiers and I arrive in coordination with the senator’s visit,” said the primary sergeant.
I studied her. You could never really be sure about the militia. They worked for the provisional government, who worked with the Expeditionary Force. But that didn’t mean much on the street. I’d learned that first-hand. A few of the militia were quality. Many of them were either incompetently hazardous or deceitfully dangerous. It was best to be cautious.
Petersen turned back to me. “Do you mind if I go talk with your people?”
“Feel free, sir,” I said.
I watched Petersen navigate away from my fighting position, chatting briefly with privates, specialists and my corporal.
Finally the s’ndar sergeant spoke. “I apologize for this nuisance,” she said.
“Not a problem,” I answered, grateful my TAD didn’t translate my distaste. We’d come to S’ndar-khk to help, and the various s’ndar hives had fought us tooth and nail – in the middle of their own stupid hive-on-hive war. They might have gone nuclear on each other if the Conglomerate hadn’t established first contact, and intervened for humanitarian reasons.
I heard some loud, rumbling engines, and turned to see a series of large trucks manoeuvring into the intersection. They were flatbeds of s’ndar construction, weighed down with large, square containers. I frowned. Any kind of large-scale commercial traffic like this should have been cleared with the Tactical Operations Centre well beforehand. The native traffic cop out in the intersection knew it too, and began waving his paddles furiously, signalling for the trucks to stop.
Their drivers obeyed …
… and the traffic cop exploded in a spray of barking rifle fire.
After that everything became a blur.
I remember the sides of the shipping containers splitting open and a small swarm of s’ndar pouring out. Civilians on foot began to scatter while vehicles attempted to either halt, or speed off. The air buzzed with countless s’ndar voices which overwhelmed my TAD. I switched over to the squad channel as I brought my weapon from off my back and pulled the charging handle.
The turrets on the s’ndar APCs – armoured personnel carriers – rotated and began hammering heavy rounds towards the flatbeds, only to be hit by rocket-propelled grenades.
The APCs burned.
I couldn’t determine which of the attacking s’ndar had fired. In the panicked crowd, it was impossible to tell the attackers apart from the civilians. I saw the primary sergeant hunched and firing her rifle, so I got down on one knee and began firing likewise. Whoever she shot at, I could shoot at, at least according to the rules of engagement – s’ndar being better able to tell one another apart.
Corporal Kent was taking care of the squad. Her bellowing voice was comforting through the speakers in my headset.
Using the laser sight on my weapon, I drew a bead on a s’ndar moving hurriedly towards me, while the crowd scrambled in the opposite direction. My finger gave a near-motionless trigger pull and my target’s carapace cracked hideously as the jacketed round tore through its thorax.
I fired at another one, also moving against the crowd. And another. And another.
There were so many trying to converge on us at once!
The senator! I thought. They’re after the senator!
His armoured car was in flames along with the militia’s APCs, and I heard the popping of the Secret Service’s pistols, punctuated by the occasional rip of their sub-machine guns.
From somewhere in the chaos of the crowd, numerous small objects catapulted. For an instant they looked like opaque mason jars, then one was smashing onto the pavement two metres from me.
Grenades?
I stopped firing and turned to see other such objects cascading across our sandbagged position.
I crouched down and began to move towards my people when I caught a deep whiff of a sickly sweet chemical. The contents of the mason jars had spilled wetly on the ground, vapours pluming, and I suddenly found myself rolling helplessly onto my side, arms and legs twitching sporadically.
The s’ndar had never used chemical weapons against us before. Neural agents which were effective against s’ndar didn’t work against humans, and vice versa.
Until now, anyway.
My instinct was to reach for the unused protective mask in my thigh pouch, but the pouch was pinned under my bodyweight and I didn’t have the strength to roll over. It was as if all the signals travelling from my brain to my body had been roadblocked.
Darkness began closing in on me from all sides, and I thought about how stupid it was to be snuffed like this.
The screams of my squad fell quickly silent, and the last thing I remembered was the murky shape of a s’ndar leaning over me.
It was not a member of the militia.
* * *
“Staff Sergeant?”
I didn’t move.
“Staff Sergeant!”
I still didn’t move. The neutered voice did not compute.
Something like a tree branch raked my face.
That computed.
I reflexively opened my eyes and tried to bring my arms forwards in self-defence, only to find them shackled over my head. Short, rusted iron chains kept me pinned against a cold wall. A single hole in the high ceiling allowed a broad-based shaft of sunlight to penetrate, forming a too bright circle on the cracked cement floor, and leaving the perimeter of the room in near darkness.
A sudden wave of nausea hit, and I coughed violently, my nose and eyes running – doubtless a final reaction to the residue of the chemical attack.
For a second I thought I was going to pass out again, but the nausea slowly subsided and I began blinking the tears from my eyes.
“He is alert,” said the mechanical voice. “Go inform the others.”
I kept blinking until a s’ndar silhouette took shape before me. The rotund, beetle-like being was resting on its lower motile legs with one utensil arm poised, ready to strike. The stiff hairs along that arm had stung mightily when it swiped me the first time. I’d have been happy to swing back, if only I wasn’t chained.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.
My TAD scratched out a translation. I was thankful that both the device and its requisite headset were still on my person. That meant my captors wanted to talk, not just kill me.
“I am not authorized to tell you,” answered the s’ndar, its own TAD turning clickety-clackety mandible movements into human speech.
“The timing of your ambush couldn’t have been accidental.”
“You are correct.”
“What has happened to Senator Petersen and my squad?”
“No one has been harmed,” the creature said. “You must realize that if we’d wanted to we could have killed you where you stood.”
“OK, you could have killed us and you didn’t,” I said. “What now?”
The s’ndar turned and left my cell for a moment, the crude iron door hanging wide open, then returned with several others, including a larger, older female who wore the colourful cloth raiment of a priestess.
Great, I thought. Someone who knows God is on her side.
Among the usual squabbling of the various hives, there was a particularly absolutist sect of s’ndar fanatics who considered the human presence on their world to be a literal desecration. They were the ones still fighting guerrilla-style even when most of the other resistors had been bought off at the bargaining table, or beaten down into submission by the Expeditionary Force.
“We are holding your senator,” said the priestess. “Do you understand what this means?”
“Yes,” I said. Capture or assassination of the leader of a rival hive was a time-honoured tradition among the s’ndar. Kill or incapacitate the queen bee, and the hive falls apart. A simple yet effective strategy – if you grew up in a hive. “But I don’t think you understand what it means.”
The s’ndar remained silent, watching me with alien incomprehension.
“When word gets back to Earth that the senator has been taken hostage or, worse yet, killed, there will be a demand for justice.”
“Justice,” the priestess repeated. “By whose definition? How many thousands of innocent s’ndar are dead because of humans?”
“The Conglomerate seems to think that if we hadn’t been sent in to stop your civil war for you, there’d be millions dead.”
“The human presence on S’ndar-khk is immoral,” she replied. “By intervening in our affairs, you deny us our divine right to order our own lives and our world according to s’ndaran destiny.”
“You won’t get any argument from me,” I said. “I couldn’t care less about you or your fucking planet. But seizing the senator won’t get the Expeditionary Force to budge. They’ll come after you with everything they’ve got.”
My own words surprised me. I didn’t owe the senator anything. But he’d seemed an earnest man, and I’d already seen too many friends die. Somebody had to pay.
As if sensing my rising anger, the two s’ndar flanking the priestess suddenly exposed and charged their weapons.
“Are you threatening me, Staff Sergeant?” said the priestess.
“I’m in no position to threaten you,” I told her. “I’m just stating a fact.”
The priestess stared at me for several seconds then turned and left the cell, guards in tow.
They locked the cell door behind them, and I was left alone.
My left arm ached. It wasn’t from the chains. There was a scabbed set of fresh stitches directly over where my Conglomerate-made ID chip had been implanted before leaving Earth. Every member of the military had one, to prevent us from going Missing-in-Action. But these s’ndar had been smart enough to cut the device out of me, lest it give my position away to the Conglomerate satellites in orbit.
I sighed. No hope of a quick rescue now.
Minutes crept by in silence. I shouted, hoping to get a response from any other human that might hear me.
No response.
It’s amazing how long an hour becomes when you are deprived of typical sensory input. The cell became deathly quiet. There was no noise from beyond the iron door, no music, no human or alien speech, nothing to look at except the circle of light that slowly inched across the cement floor as the day dragged on and turned into night.
I grew thirsty. Only a prolonged and significant amount of clanging with my chains attracted the attention of the guards, who brought me a portable light and two buckets: one to fill up, and one to empty.
Guards removed the manacles from my wrists and ankles, and then brought an even longer chain, which they connected to a collar they placed around my neck. The other end of the long chain was attached to a cleat in the floor, and I was able to walk and move for the first time in almost twenty-four hours.
They left me in the dark again. When the sun came up the priestess reappeared, only this time without her escorts. She kept well away from me, but her posture expressed curiosity.
“What now?” I said.
“If seizing or killing your senator yields an effect opposite of what we desire, consideration must be taken as to how to proceed next. We do not ordinarily keep prisoners.”
“What’s this for then?” I demanded, yanking the chain on my collar.
“Human prisoners,” she replied.
“You have the senator,” I said, “so what happens to the rest of us?”
“We used forbearance during the ambush, at the cost of many s’ndaran lives. Your squad still lives because I wish it, in spite of the feelings of many others who would just as soon see you all dead. After all, you are aliens. Everything about you is alien. You have no business being here. We want you off our planet, but before that can happen there are a few of us who believe we must understand you first. The better we understand you, the better we will be able to determine by what leverage you are moved.”
I stared at her. “Seizing hostages won’t do it, that’s for damned sure. We’ll have every available troop scouring this planet for Senator Petersen. Once they find him, it won’t be very pleasant for his captors.”
“We will make your masters understand us,” the priestess said, advancing close to me. She stabbed a foreleg into my chest. “You do not belong here.”
“Tell that to the Conglomerate,” I said.
“You are the Conglomerate!”
“No, we’re just humans from Earth.”
She stared intently at me. “Explain.”
“It’s simple enough,” I said. “Earth’s government cut a deal with the Conglomerate.”
“What does that mean?”
I explained the essentials of the situation. Earth needed what the Conglomerate had to offer, and as long as that remained true, the United Nations would keep the Expeditionary Force on S’ndar-khk.
“We never knew any of this,” the priestess said.
“You never asked,” I said.
The next day of incarceration passed with numbing sameness. As did the next. And the one after that.
Then the priestess reappeared, only this time she had several other s’ndar with her. None of them were armed, though they hardly needed their weapons against a chained and defenceless prisoner. They all stood near the door, well out of the radius of the chain that kept me anchored to the cell floor.
“You were right,” the priestess informed me. “News of the senator’s abduction has caused human activity on S’ndar-khk to increase precipitously.”
“That’s hardly a surprise,” I said. “They’ll be looking for Petersen, me, and my whole squad. The Army doesn’t leave its men and women behind.”
“You are that valuable?”
“Every soldier is valuable,” I said.
“Even those who are inferior?”
“Subordinate, not inferior,” I said. “There’s a big difference.”
“We wish to know more of this deal humans have with the Conglomerate,” said one of the priestess’s companions. “At what point will it be satisfied?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Until someone in the Conglomerate decides the job is done, I suppose.”
The s’ndar began skittering and scratching excitedly, and my TAD muted due to overload.
“If you really want humans gone,” I said, “you could do yourselves a favour by not acting like such a bunch of bloodthirsty animals.”
“I do not expect you to understand the complexities of inter-hive politics,” she said, “nor do I expect you to grasp the richness and depth of my people. To us it is you who are the animals. You come without being invited or wanted, and enforce your version of ‘peace’.”
“Agreed,” said a different s’ndar.
“Like I said before,” I replied, “tell it to the Conglomerate.”
The priestess circled me, her forelimbs folded thoughtfully. “Our history with the Conglomerate is complicated,” she said. “When the Conglomerate made its first contact with us, many hives spurned its overtures, declaring that we have the right to live without alien interference. When its overtures became demands, we destroyed their probe ship in orbit. An additional series of probe ships were sent, and we destroyed them too. Then, a few years later, your human armies arrived.”
“But not by our own means,” I pointed out. “The Conglomerate brought us here to do a job. When they think it’s done, they’ll take us back home and you’ll never have to see another human again. If you weren’t so intent on slaughtering each other – and slaughtering humans in the process – we’d be gone by now.”
The group chattered and clacked, and the priestess faced me squarely.
“So strange,” she said. “You repulse and fascinate me at the same time.”
“The feeling is mutual,” I said.
She waited while we glared at one another, my human eyes and her multifaceted insect’s eyes. Then she clacked her mandibles once, very sharply. Suddenly the entire lot of them fell silent, and began filing out of the cell.
“Hey!” I said to the priestess as she was leaving. “You want to start proving how civilized you really are, give me something to clean up with.” I was over four days out of a shower. I stank.
The priestess paused, then waved a forelimb at me and left. A minute later the guards brought me cold water in a ten-gallon-sized tub, with a brick of industrial soap. There was no towel.
I scrubbed happily, ignoring the chill.
Repeated requests to see Senator Petersen, or anyone from my squad, were flatly denied. I began to wonder whether any of them had really made it. There was no reason to believe that the priestess, or any of the others, had been telling the truth, though why they’d keep me alive and kill the others just didn’t make any sense.
Time dragged on. Week one became week two. Then three. Then a month. For the first time in my life, I had a full beard. I did body-weight exercises in my cell to try to keep myself fit, and to keep from going insane with inactivity.
At night, when the dark closed in and I had to curl up on the hard floor, I hummed all my favourite songs until slumber finally overtook me and gave me an illusory form of freedom. I dreamed of all the neat places I’d ever been as a kid, all the neat and interesting people I’d ever met. I dreamed of all my favourite shows and movies, and especially of my favourite foods: mashed potatoes, buttered green beans, crisp corn on the cob, fried chicken, broiled T-bone steak. Anything but the damned half-rotten vegfruit the s’ndar – being a herbivorous race – preferred.
I also dreamed of home, and family. Of my sister Karen and me when we’d been kids, playing in our grandparents’ backyard. A few times those dreams seemed so real that when I woke up I had tears in my eyes.
I grew to greatly resent the moments when I was awake.
I also began to cinch my belt tighter and tighter. The lack of protein in my eager diet was costing me muscle as well as fat.
My requests to see the priestess or any other authority figure were alternately denied or ignored. My TAD battery ran out of charge and wasn’t replaced, so I was reduced to yelling at my guards, who neither understood nor cared.
I’d lost count of the weeks when the attack came.
A concussion lifted me up off the floor. I’d been fast asleep. I screamed and rolled onto my back, observing rivulets of dust spewing from cracks in the ceiling – cracks I was positive hadn’t been there before, because I’d already memorized the existing cracks.
THUD.
More cracks shot across the ceiling, and a hunk broke loose and smacked into the ground near my head.
I leaped up from where I’d been lying and crouched in the circle of sunlight, hoping to get out from under any additional debris.
THUD – THUD – WHAM.
I couldn’t tell if the explosions were coming from beyond the hole in the ceiling or outside the iron door. I felt them as much as I heard them.
The door to my cell burst open. A horde of s’ndar rushed in, snapped the collar off my neck and shoved me outside at gunpoint. The corridor beyond was crawling with s’ndar and humans. There were faces I recognized, far gaunter than I remembered them. “Sergeant Colford!” said a desperate voice.
I turned and found myself face to face with Senator Petersen.
He looked like a shaggy ghost of his former self. His gleaming teeth had yellowed, his breath smelled and his face was a hollowed-out, grey-haired mask that barely resembled the confident politician who’d visited my intersection … who knew how long ago.
“Move!” commanded a s’ndar, its TAD dialled up to shouting volume. The Senator and I were roughly shoved down the corridor with the other humans. I saw Corporal Kent up at the front of the line, and tried to shout for her, but was silenced by another barrage of concussions that almost knocked us off our feet.
“What’s happening?” Petersen said in my ear.
“Ours,” I replied. “Air strike.”
“They’ll kill us!”
“They probably don’t even know we’re here,” I said. “Something or someone must have tipped off the Expeditionary Force that there was a resistance stronghold in this area.”
“Silence!” snapped an armed guard.
We twisted and turned our way frantically down a further series of corridors. I couldn’t quite tell, but the floor seemed slanted. We could have been going up or down, I wasn’t really sure.
Then we suddenly emptied out into the blindingly bright sunlight, all of us cringing and raising our hands to shield our eyes.
A quick look around revealed the rubble of what had once been a s’ndar industrial district. I actually laughed as I realized we’d been prisoners right under the Expeditionary Force’s nose the whole time. The district had been levelled in the first month of the occupation, and declared off-limits. Barring occasional patrols, no human or s’ndar went in or out, except for these resistance fanatics, who’d obviously found a way to operate without being detected.
Until today.
A flight of jets screamed overhead – wide-winged ground attack planes with their payload doors hanging open. A cluster of bombs released and carpeted across the crushed factory complex from which we’d just exited. The blasts were deafening and the ground bucked hard under our feet.
I wondered if we could attempt an escape, and decided there were too many s’ndar for us to make it. Our duty hadn’t changed: we had to keep the senator alive until we could transfer him to friendly hands.
We passed wrecked and burned-out vehicles, and the dried shells of s’ndar who’d been left where they’d fallen – their silenced mandibles hanging slackly by threads of dry tissue.
Then we were being herded down into a dry sewer, crouched and shuffling, while the round sewer pipe was somewhat more accommodating to the shorter, squatter s’ndar.
After twenty minutes the s’ndar ordered a rest, and we stopped.
I tried to push up to where Kent was, but was shoved back and ordered not to move.
Petersen was doubled over, gasping.
“Sir,” I said. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” he said. “Just out of shape. It was the cell … the damned cell … nothing to do but go crazy.”
He looked into my eyes, and I realized the senator might not have been speaking metaphorically. His gaze was awful. Stricken. Not quite there somehow. It occurred to me that, for all his slick, football-player toughness, Petersen had probably never endured real deprivation before. Certainly not on the scale we’d been suffering since our capture.
I turned to the s’ndar. My TAD was gone, but theirs worked. “That air strike was just the first phase,” I told them. “They’re softening up the target before our rifle platoons get sent in to clean up. They know you’re here, and they won’t stop until they find you.”
A single s’ndar shape pushed its way back towards me. I recognized her torn raiment; it was the priestess.
“We will move forward rapidly now,” she said.
“Look at us,” I told her, waving my hand at Petersen for emphasis. “We’re in no condition to keep up the pace. In another hundred metres you’d be dragging us. So we’ll have to go slow. I hope that doesn’t scare you too much, but that’s the way it is.”
The priestess appeared to sag in on herself, if only a bit. “Yes,” she said. “We are scared.”
She studied my face. “You hide it well, but my fear makes you happy.”
“Only because you’re the enemy,” I answered. Then I sighed deeply. “The shame of it is, you didn’t have to be. There was no reason for it.”
“I agree,” she said. “But of course I would: you invaded us. It is you who are the enemy.”
And suddenly I knew who the real enemy was.
“My sister died here,” I said, as the low rumble of more bombs filled the sewer pipe, then fell silent. “She was excited by the idea of your alien culture, and she was killed for her enthusiasm. But she wouldn’t have been here at all – none of us would be here – if not for the Conglomerate playing us off against each other.”
“The ‘deal’ you spoke of,” said the priestess.
“Yes,” I said. “Back on Earth we treat the Conglomerate like saviours. You know something interesting? We’ve never even seen them.”
Her eyes widened. “Never?”
“Just radio transmissions and text messages, and those robotic transport ships that show up in orbit. If they’re so advanced, it should be an easy thing for them to pacify a planet with or without human help. So what’s in it for them, using us like this? And why couldn’t they just leave your world alone? Why do they care if you’re at war?”
“Our particular hive has never known these answers,” she said. “And since the arrival of humans, we’ve never cared to know. We want you gone. That is the sole thing that concerns us.”
“Have you ever stopped to ask why humans would even want to be on your planet in the first place?”
The priestess was silent. As were every other s’ndar and human in the sewer. Petersen just looked at me, his limbs slightly shaking as the adrenaline from exertion began to wear off.
“We’re here because of them,” I said. “You’re fighting an invading force because of them. Maybe it’s time for both sides to take a deep breath and think about that.”
She stared at me. “Go on,” she said at last.
“If you stop fighting, my people have no reason to be here.”
“A truce?”
“It would give us time to find out what the Conglomerate really wants,” I said.
“And to prevent them from getting it,” added the senator, who was quick on the uptake despite his condition.
She turned to the senator. “Do you have the power to order a ceasefire?”
He nodded his head. “I outrank every general officer on this planet,” Petersen said, seeming to regain some of his former stature. “I’m sure I can convince our side to enter a temporary ceasefire.”
“What good is temporary?” she asked.
“It gives us breathing space while we each try to talk our superiors into making it permanent.”
“My superiors will assume you are lying to us,” said the priestess.
Suddenly Petersen smiled. “When we stop talking war and start talking negotiations, now we are in my bailiwick,” he said. “I propose a trade.”
“A trade?”
“I want you to come back to Earth with me as a goodwill ambassador of your race, someone who can confirm what I have to tell them. View it as a public display of friendship and mutual trust.” He turned to me. “And Sergeant Colford here will stay behind in the same capacity and speak to your people.”
“Why me?” I demanded.
“Because you lost a sister in this war, and were incarcerated for some months. If you can forgive them and point to the real enemy, I think it will bolster the arguments of whatever s’ndar is speaking to his people on our behalf.”
I considered. Could a ceasefire agreement – made in a sewer pipe between a staff sergeant, a priestess and a senator who were light years from Washington – actually have any legs?
We’re now in the process of finding out.
I hope my sister didn’t die for nothing. I hope my months of being chained in solitary served some purpose. I hope the priestess can sway her people and the senator can sway his. I even hope that someday I find out what the Conglomerate wants, and that I stop thinking of them as the enemy.
Mostly, though, I hope I can stop being a peacekeeper …
… and start being a peacemaker.