"Later, Sergeant," Ilyan said, the serious expression on his face again. "When we meet your colleagues. Then I'll tell you and them why I have the blood of millions on my hands.
Chapter 4
"Five hundred years ago humanity accepted its destiny."
Ilyan stood in front of an infantry platoon. Most of them sat on the ground. In the dark and under their helmets and armour I could barely pick out the men from the women. Could pick up their attitude though. They were sitting still for the crazy spook cabaret act only because their officer ordered it.
"Humans are good at fighting, we've always been good at it. Why not accept that and profit from it?"
"We all went to school, pal," someone shouted out.
"Yeah, cut to the chase, bud."
"All right." The glow of a lantern threw Ilyan's refined features into sharp relief. Behind him deep in shadow Maiga lurked, scanning the crowd. She didn't seem to be listening to him. Heard it all before, I guess. Me, I leant back on my pack, listened to the speech, and wondered who would laugh first.
"I am an intelligence analyst. I made predictions about where trouble would break out. That way our envoys could be in place quickly to negotiate a deal. To get us the job of fighting the war for one of the sides. It doesn't matter which side. Whoever pays the most."
I yawned. We know all this too. We're a mercenary army, a mercenary species. We get it. The other grunts had started fidgeting. At least a couple of them were asleep. Behind me a woman giggled. Not at Ilyan, more at something somebody was doing to her.
"I was good at my job," Ilyan went on. "So damn good I started to get suspicious of myself. How could I have a hundred percent success rate?"
Hundred percent? Bloody hell.
"Predicting the future can never be an exact science. There are too many variables. Yet everywhere I said trouble would happen, it happened. My colleagues started to call me a prophet." I glanced at Tesla who sat at Ilyan's right.
"So I tried an experiment. I picked a place where there was some tension, but that I believed had no immediate likelihood of violence. I wrote a report predicting imminent conflict. I listed the various things that might trigger a war."
He paused and looked around, his face pained now. But he had the full attention of the grunts. He sure had mine.
"A month later the war started. Out of a clear blue sky a skirmish over a family feud escalated into full scale conflict. And we had a man there on the spot, ready to negotiate a contract." He gave a bitter laugh. "But of course we had a man there. He went there to make the trouble happen. I had believed that my work predicted where trouble might happen. But in fact my superiors used it to identify where trouble could be made to happen."
The other soldiers had gone real quiet now and sat watching him intently.
"I wrote that report ten years ago, six months after I started working for intelligence. After the war that I had manufactured broke out I confronted my superiors." The bitter laugh again. "They congratulated me on working out the reality of our work faster than most and offered me a promotion."
Ten years ago? I had expected him to say he had only just figured it out. Not that he'd worked for them for ten years knowing what he knew.
"And I accepted it. You see they explained things to me. They made me believe what we do is justifiable. I talked myself into believing them. Yes, I accepted it for ten years. And then I made a new prediction…"
He started talking about the "prophecy" he'd already explained to me, and the grunts sat spellbound. Not me though, I stopped listening. And not because I already knew about the prophecy but because I started remembering something.
Five years ago I'd been wounded and laid up for a couple of months in a hospital back on Earth. For weeks I lay by a window watching the blue sky, feeling the cool breeze and smelling the sweet grass. Hospitals are about the nicest places on the planet. I didn't want to leave. But in the end I had to and on my first mission back on active service I served in a small squad, acting as bodyguard to a spook going for a meeting. High in some mountains on Kitsnujitar he met a bunch of guys that looked like bandits. Hard to say with the Kits. Their dark grey fur and pointy teeth makes me think of wolves.
At the time I thought they probably had some kind of intel to hand over to him, but I remember that he didn't talk to them for that long. They didn't give him anything. He gave them something though. A box, with locks on it, which the leader of the group handed straight over to the biggest bastard in his gang to carry.
A few days later I heard over the broadcasts that Kit 'terrorists' had blown up a temple or some such place and killed a bunch of other Kit folks. And another couple of weeks after that the whole region was in flames and our "envoys" were deep in negotiations with both sides over who bought our services. "Envoys" is a really just a polite word for 'salesmen'
I remember at the time thinking how dumb the Kits must be, fighting over whose god is best. We kicked the whole religious crap into touch centuries before. Waste of time. But I never gave a second thought to the spook and his meeting in the mountains and his locked box. Never thought that had anything to do with the place suddenly exploding. Now I saw it clear as day. We paid the bandits to destroy a carefully chosen target, pretending to be terrorists. We caused the war, just so we could sell our services to fight in it.
This was why the big four would turn on us. They'd finally figured out that we'd kept them at each other's throats for five hundred years, so we could make money off it. "Let us fight the wars for you," we said. "Let us train you. Let us lead your soldiers in battle." We neglected to mention, "by the way we started this conflict." If just one of them worked it out and got together with the others long enough to compare notes... well you could see how they'd be a bit pissed off.
I looked up at Ilyan. He was explaining something about his data, some evidence about secret talks between the Chias and the Okis. I couldn't really take in the words, my eyes just riveted on his face, his shining eyes. He's not insane, I knew, right then. It's much, much worse than that.
He's right.
****
That night I dreamt of the blue sky. The sky I watched from that hospital bed. The sky I used to watch as a boy, lying on the grass outside the school barracks. And I dreamt of the eagle. Some of the other kids wanted to go and find its nest. But I knew the eagle lived somewhere in the mountains whose foothills we trained in. We'd never find the nest. I didn't want to, content just to watch it glide and swoop in the sky, watch it stoop and dive.
Sky, so blue, filled my vision until I woke to green Qacian sky and the sounds of the infantry unit packing up ready to head out. Ilyan sat near me, staring ahead. The dark circles around his blue eyes told me he hadn't slept.
I got up and put my boots on. Ilyan didn't seem to notice. The grunts had food on the go, so I wandered over and scoffed some fresh bread and bacon and grabbed a couple of big mugs of coffee. I sipped one as I walked back to where Ilyan sat. When I nudged him with my knee he looked up, startled, and I handed him the mug.
"Thank you," he said, with a weak smile. He held the mug with both hands, warming them, chasing away the morning chill.
I sat down beside him, didn't speak for a moment, just drank coffee and stared. Between the pair of us we had a classic case of the early morning stares.
"You worked for them for ten years," I said, quietly. "You worked for them all that time knowing that you were causing the wars."
He looked at me, and then nodded. He understood. No more small talk.
"Yes."
"It's not only aliens die in those wars." I looked around at the grunts breaking camp.
"I know." His voice nearly a whisper.
"What now?"
"Now I go on. To the next unit, to the next planet and I try to make them understand, try to make them do something about it."
"Do you think it will work?"
He put his head down. "I have to try."
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, you do." He look
ed up at me again. I got up and started to gather my gear.
"Well, good luck, Jadeth," Ilyan said, sadness in his voice. "I enjoyed meeting you."
I clicked my tongue and shook my head as I fastened the chin strap of my helmet.
"I thought you were meant to be clever?" I shouldered my pack and walked over to Maiga who was stood talking to the infantry unit's commander.
"Morning, Captain. Which big fucking rock are we heading for today?"
****
By lunchtime I'd started wondering what the hell I'd done. A morning's stroll with the weirdo squad left me wishing I'd stuck with the infantry, got my arse back to base and just forgotten about Ilyan.
Maiga had been giving me the evil eye since we'd started. When I told her I was tagging along permanently she'd taken Ilyan aside and flapped her lips at him for a good ten minutes. Too far off for me to hear, but I guessed she wasn't telling him what a brilliant idea it was for me to join the party.
Tesla spent the morning glowering when he wasn't actually whining. He slowed the whole group down. Even more than the star ship officers, who at least were fit.
Along with the doc, Tanashi, and the tasty Arab bird, named Jia, there was a boy, well barely more than that, an ensign, called Vimal. Vim they called him. He was full of vim all right.
Then we had the interchangeable marines, Rish and Rin, the only thing you could use to tell them apart was their skin colour. One each of black and white. Maybe I'd eventually remember which colour went with which name.
I took my lunch away from the others, found myself a nice flat rock to sit on at the edge of the forest clearing where we'd set up a temp camp site.
I needed some time alone to think about an important question. Why the hell am I teaming up with these crackpots? Okay, so I thought Ilyan may be right. Okay, maybe I even felt sure of that. But so what? Did I really think I could help him do anything about it? What the hell could a ground pounding death technician do for an officer spook like him?
Why did I even care? Another important question. So humans died in the battles that we caused. So what? I remembered when I was a kid, maybe nine years old, being told my mother was listed KIA. I didn't even blink. I hadn't seen her in years. I barely even recalled her face. She'd once hinted at something that made me think I might have an older sister, but I'd never had any confirmation of that. My father was a total mystery. So if I didn't even care about my own mother getting killed why would I care about people I never met?
I leaned back on the rock to enjoy the heat of the sun and something dug into my side as I lay down. I fished it out of my pocket. My busted Snapper. I turned it over in my hands a couple of times, looking at the shrapnel. I could be lying dead on the mountainside now with whatever did the same job as ravens fighting for my eyeballs. And I'd have died painful and slow with this piece of metal in my guts. But the Snapper got in the way and, deep thinker that I'm not, my only thought had been that I'd better take it back so I didn't get charged for a new one.
"Jadeth?"
I looked around to see Ilyan approaching me smiling.
"Is this an LFR then, Jadeth?"
"Huh?" Then I laughed as I got it. Little fucking rock.
"Right now it's an LFR catching the sun."
"Mmm, yes." He laid one hand on the rock, felt the warm surface. Then he pulled himself up to sit beside me, crossed his legs and sat facing me. I sat up, cross legged too. Like a couple of kids about to play patty cake.
"Jadeth, I wanted to say how pleased I am that you've joined us."
"Yeah." I shrugged. "I guess I can see you're right. And, well, you lot need all the help you can get, because you've got no clue about surviving out here. The Captain knows what she's doing, but the rest of 'em..."
"I know." He looked at me for a while, long enough that I got embarrassed and looked away. "You're having doubts," he said.
I looked back at him, frowned. "Thought you were a Prophet not a mind reader."
"All of them had second thoughts after joining up with me, it's only natural."
"Thing is, thing is. Well, I'm not sure what I can really do for you. I'm a soldier aren't I? That's all I know. Fighting is all I know how to do."
"Yes." He looked down for a moment, at his own hands. Then he held them out. "Take my hands."
"What?" I gave a nervous laugh.
"Go on, take them."
I did, not sure what his game was. His hands weren't small, but they felt almost childlike in mine and I handled them carefully.
"What do you think of my hands? What do they tell you about me?"
Now I felt really awkward, I looked away from him, embarrassed again. "I dunno."
"Yes you do. Tell me. Be honest, I won't be offended."
I looked back. Well he asked for it.
"They're soft. You've never done a day's work in your life. You've never cleaned a rifle or dug a latrine. You've never had to scrub blood off these hands." I cringed at that last part, remembering what he'd said yesterday about the blood of millions. "Sorry."
"Don't be sorry."
I tried to pull my hands away but he resisted and I left them there.
"Everything you just said is true. Jadeth, you are a soldier and that's what I want you to go on being. Not just to help us get through the wilderness, not just to protect me and the others. But because I'll be talking to men and women who are like you. Whose hands are as rough as yours and who have no reason to listen to a soft handed spook who doesn't even know what a BFR is."
He took his hands away finally and when he did I was suddenly sorry. His right hand swept his hair back where it had fallen over his face.
"But if they see that someone like you thinks I am worth listening to, then you will be more valuable to me than ten officers. I don't want you to stop being a soldier, Jadeth. I just want you to be a soldier for me."
I sat silent for a moment. He had a way with words. Either with a crowd, or twelve inches from your nose he had a way of talking right to some bit of your brain that gave you your orders and decided you were going to do what Ilyan asked.
I stood up and he leant back to look up at me standing tall and high on the rock. I'd picked up the Snapper as I rose, feeling the shrapnel in it that could have killed me and killed the machine instead.
Fate.
Because the shell hit I didn't get fragged by the lizards. The shell should have killed me but it didn't because of the Snapper. But because the Snapper didn't work any more I got lost. And because I got lost I found the weirdo squad and Ilyan.
Fate put me here, at this man's side. Why? Well I guess I'd just have to wait and see.
I wound up and tossed the Snapper deep into the forest. It vanished among the trees. I grinned. That felt good. I stepped off the rock, landed light and turned back to offer Ilyan a hand down.
"My friends call me Jad."
Chapter 5
"Hey, Rish." I beckoned over the marine.
"I'm Rin," he said scowling.
"Yeah, whatever. Take a look at this." I'd taken point again. Maiga had intel of another infantry unit in this general area and needed someone with a clue to track them.
Rin looked at the patch of ground I pointed out. "What?"
"Boot print, part of one anyway," I said. "See there?" He still looked baffled and shook his head.
"I don't see it." He got out a scanner and started testing the air.
I rolled my eyes. Damn marines relied too heavily on technology if you ask me. Use a scanner too much and you forget how to use your eyes and nose and ears.
I heard Maiga come up behind us and smirked to see Rin jump when she spoke.
"Found something?"
"Yes, Captain." Rin showed her his scanner readouts. "Humans definitely passed here around six hours ago."
"Excellent." She looked at me. I didn't bother mentioning the boot print. She probably wouldn't be able to see it either. "Lead on, Rin." She glanced over her shoulder as the rest of the party appeared through
the trees and spoke to me quietly. "Jadeth, keep an eye on him."
Call me the babysitter. I set off in the wake of the jarhead and his box of lights. The rest followed.
"Keep up Tesla!" Maiga shouted back at them. "Ilyan, keep him moving, for fuck's sake. It's nearly dark."
Bossy cow. Yeah, Tesla's slow. So's Ilyan actually, though he doesn't whine as much as Tesla. But what the hell does Maiga expect of them? Desk jockeys don't turn into hardened vets overnight. Poor bastards were footsore and worn out.
"I think we should make camp now," I said. "Before it gets too dark. We're not finding these grunts tonight."
"Good idea, Sergeant!" Tesla agreed with me enthusiastically.
"And they'll be that much farther away tomorrow," Maiga said scowling at me.
"Maiga." Ilyan walked up to her and spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him. "Tes is tired, so am I. We need to rest."
She didn't look happy about it, glared around at everyone and treated me to an extra special dirty look. Last time I'd had that look from an officer I'd been beasted for the rest of the day. Well she couldn't do that to me here. I'll admit to enjoying giving her the backchat knowing she can't do a damn thing about it. Ilyan wants me here, and though she likes to throw her weight around, I know he's the one actually in charge.
"Okay," she said finally. "Let's get off this track and set up camp. Jadeth, you'll patrol the perimeter."
"Sounds like my dream come true, ma'am."
****
We got off the trail and erected the tents, made dinner. Once everyone bedded down Maiga took the first watch in camp. As I patrolled the perimeter I noticed Tesla had stayed up talking to her, their heads close as they sat by the fire.
By the time Vim relieved me, Tesla had gone into his tent and Maiga sat staring into the fire, alone. She didn't speak to me as I came back into camp and got my head down, falling asleep quickly.
The eagle soared and I ran through the long grass, racing it. And heard…
I woke with a gasp. Always did before the dream went any further. Can't go there again. I sat up shivering, wanting to move closer to the fire. Jia sat up on watch now and her smile chased away some of the chill.