The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (4 page)

“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.

FROM OUT OF THE SUN, ENDLESSLY SINGING

Simon R. Green

The second of our stories original to this volume is cosmically lyrical and legendary in the way, perhaps, of Cordwainer Smith, while it deals death lavishly, as might be expected from the author of eight novels in a Deathstalker series, not to mention twelve Nightside books and other series; “trilogies are for wimps,” says Simon R. Green. Born and based in Britain, which explains his devotion to tea and his acting in open-air productions of Shakespeare, to which he travels by motorbike, his novelization of the film
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
sold a third of a million copies.

T
HIS IS THE
story. It is an old, old story, and most of the true details are lost to us. But this is how the story has always been told, down the many years. Of our greatest loss and our greatest triumph; of three who were sent down into Hell for ever, that the rest of Humanity might know safety, and revenge. This is the story of the Weeping Woman, the Man With the Golden Voice, and the Rogue Mind. If the story upsets you, pretend it never happened. It was a very long time ago, after all.

This goes back to the days of the Great Up and Out, when we left our mother world to go out into the stars; to explore the Galaxy and take her fertile planets for our own. All those silver ships, dancing through the dark, blazing bright in the jungle of the night. We met no opposition we couldn’t handle, colonized every suitable world we came to and terraformed the rest, remaking them in our image. It was a glorious time, by all accounts, building our glittering cities and proud civilizations, in defiance of all that endless empty Space. We should have known better. We should have sent ahead, to say we were coming. Because it turned out we were trespassing, and not at all welcome.

They came to us from out of the Deep, from out of the darkest part of Deep Space, from far beyond the realms we knew, or could ever hope to comprehend. Without warning they came, aliens as big as starships, bigger than anything we had ever built, and far more powerful. Endless numbers of them, a hoard, a swarm, deadly things of horrid shape and terrible intent, blocking out the stars where they passed. They were each of them huge and awful, unknown and unknowable, utterly alien things moving inexorably through open Space on great shimmering wings. They came from where nothing comes from, and they thrived in conditions where nothing should live. Their shapes made no sense to human eyes, to human aesthetics. They were nightmares given shape and form, our darkest fears made flesh. We called them the Medusae, because wherever they looked, things died.