Oblivion, page 16
“They’re fierce,” Fred said. “I’ll give them that.”
“They’re idiots.” Kelly began to lay her own weapons at Fred’s feet. “Sooner or later, I will grow tired of having my helmet rung.”
“Let’s start by disarming them,” John said. “It might be easier to figure out what’s going on here if we don’t kill them.”
Another stone sailed from the girl’s sling and bounced off Kelly’s breastplate.
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” she said. “But I see no harm in trying.”
John turned his palms out, then spread his arms and began to circle toward the kids’ left flank.
“Blue Four,” he said over TEAMCOM, “advance to the next access point, then climb out of the canyon and take overwatch. There are still four spider machines out there, and I don’t want them coming back to protect their friends with those microwave blasters.”
Linda’s LED flashed green.
Kelly mirrored John’s gesture and circled toward the children’s right flank. The girl slung another rock at her, and the boy threw a stone at John, and the kid on the ground immediately raised his hands, handing another rock to each.
“Now,” John said.
He and Kelly dashed in, grabbing the kids by their throwing arms. John lifted the girl off the ground and quickly retreated a half dozen steps, far enough to encourage a sense of separation yet let her see that her friends were not being harmed.
“Let me go, scab!” She swung a foot up, kicking the inside of his elbow so hard he heard a toe pop. “I’ll cook you good!”
Not releasing her, John activated his voicemitter. “I can understand you.”
She stopped struggling, then studied him out of narrowed eyes. “Why wouldn’t you? I have a tongue.”
John looked across at Kelly, who was holding the boy at arm’s length and ignoring him.
“Don’t ask me,” she said over TEAMCOM. “I’m no good with children.”
John turned back to the girl, trying to decide what he should ask. While he had been trained in five different interrogation techniques, they all assumed at least some knowledge about the enemy. In this case, he wasn’t even sure the prisoners were an enemy . . . but the first step was always to establish control.
John reached up with his free hand and pulled the scarf away from the girl’s face. With sunken cheeks and a face so gaunt it was almost skeletal, she looked so malnourished that he could not even begin to guess her age. She could have been eight . . . or eighteen.
“What’s your name?”
“Lena,” she answered. “And you’re called . . . ?”
John thought for a moment. The girl and her companions were behaving like enemies, but there wasn’t any reason they needed to be—at least, not that he could see. And he wasn’t about to use any coercion techniques on a child, hostile or not. Nor was there time for domination and control. So that left rapport-building and deal-making.
“John,” he said. “I’m called John.”
“John?” Lena pronounced it Yon. “Your name is John?”
“Affirmative.”
“If you say so.”
“I do, because it is,” John said, coming to the realization that she didn’t believe him. “Why wouldn’t my name be John?”
Lena looked away. “No reason.”
“No,” John said. “Tell me.”
“Well . . .” Lena gave him a cagey smile. “John is a strange name for an alien, yes?”
Fred snorted, and Kelly groaned.
“We’re not aliens,” John said.
Lena looked away, and the boy hanging from Kelly’s grasp said, “You have to be aliens.”
“Why?”
“Look at you,” he said. “People are never that tall.”
“Some people are,” Fred said.
“No way,” the boy said. “And nobody can run that fast—not for that long.”
“And people can’t wear heavy metal suits,” said the other boy. “Not without getting cooked.”
“What if I told you that we can run fast because of the metal suits?” John asked. “And that we don’t get cooked because the suits keep us cool?”
The boy snorted and said, “I wouldn’t believe you. We’re not stupid.”
John turned to Fred, then said, “Show them.”
Fred turned his faceplate toward the boy with the injured knee. “If you throw a rock at me, I’m going to crush your head like an egg.”
“What’s an egg?”
“It breaks easy—and then gooey stuff runs out. No tricks, okay?”
Fred reached up with both hands, then slipped his fingers under the helmet’s chin guard and ran them around to the back, separating the systems-sock from the inner layers beneath the rest of the suit. All three kids went wide-eyed, as though expecting something horrible to be revealed when the helmet came off. Once Fred reached the back of his neck, he used both hands to disconnect the neural interface, then carefully rocked the helmet forward and pulled it away like a mask.
The face he revealed was slender and strong-featured, with black brows above blue-green eyes, a blade-thin nose, high cheeks, and a broad mouth over a square chin. He still had the wrinkle-free brow and smooth face of a fifteen-year-old adolescent, but everything else about him—especially his rugged features and penetrating gaze—hinted at the hardened soldier he already was.
John looked back to Lena. “What do you think?” he asked. “Human enough?”
“I’m . . . I’m not sure what to think.” She looked from Fred back to John. “Are all of the people from your world so big?”
“Not all of us,” John said. He lowered Lena until her feet were back on the ground. “Can we talk now? No fighting? No running?”
Lena nodded. “I think we don’t have any choice. If we fight, your friend will break our heads until the gooey stuff comes out.” She glanced toward the boy with the knee injury. “And if we run, we leave Arne to be cooked.”
“You should run anyway,” Arne said. “There’s no reason to let them cook us all.”
“We’re not going to cook anyone.” John was beginning to wonder if cook was more than the local slang for kill. “We don’t even want to hurt you.”
“Then why are you chasing us?” Lena asked.
“We’re not chasing you,” John said.
“And yet . . .” Lena spread her arms, a gesture that encompassed everyone in the area. “Here we are.”
“Because you were trying to ambush us.” John motioned Kelly to release the third kid, then asked him, “What’s your name?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“So I know what to call you.” John was beginning to think he should have tried a coercion technique—establishing rapport was proving more difficult than expected. He pointed at his own companions. “He’s Fred, she’s Kelly.”
Lena’s gaze swung toward Kelly. “You’re a girl?”
“A woman, but yeah.” Kelly looked to the third kid. “And John asked your name.”
“I heard him.”
Lena sighed. “Oskar, if they wanted to cook us, we’d be dead now.”
Oskar glared at her. “Think, Lena. They want us all. The whole camp.”
Kelly spoke over TEAMCOM. “This is going nowhere fast, and we have a mission to complete. We need to get back on the trail.”
The heads of all three children snapped toward Fred’s open helmet, but they looked more surprised than alarmed. John hoped that meant they had only been able to hear Kelly’s voice, not understand what she was actually saying.
Unable to respond over TEAMCOM without drawing more attention to Fred’s helmet, John spread his fingers and made a small, horizontal waving motion—a signal to be patient. Oskar was a little antagonistic, but he was making progress with Lena, and that meant he had a pretty good chance of striking a bargain to help the rest of Blue Force.
Or at least get Blue Team to the target faster.
John turned to Oskar. “You’re wrong about wanting to . . . cook you,” he said. “We don’t want to cook any of you—but if I were in your position, I’d be thinking the same thing.”
Oskar smirked in Lena’s direction. “You see?”
Lena rolled her eyes and looked away.
“So let’s make a deal here.” As John spoke, he motioned for Fred to put his helmet back on. “We’ll patch you up and put you back in your riding spider—”
“What’s a spider?” Arne asked.
“Your people carrier,” John said. He pointed toward the spider machine. “The thing you were riding.”
“We call them mountain runners,” Lena said. “I’ve seen spiders in learning pictures, but they didn’t look big enough to ride.”
“I’m sure they didn’t,” John said. He had a thousand questions about these kids and why they were on a supposedly uninhabited world and didn’t know what eggs or spiders were, but he also had a mission to complete—and time was running out. He returned his focus to Oskar. “We’ll fix you up and return you to your mountain runner. Then we’ll continue on our way, you rejoin your parents—”
“Our parents?” Oskar burst out. He turned to Lena. “You see?”
Lena went pale and nodded.
“I don’t understand,” John said.
He truly didn’t. Like all Spartans, he had been taken from his own parents when he was six—a highly classified fact that usually elicited shock and disbelief from anyone being briefed on it for the first time. They always seemed to think he should feel angry and resentful about what had been done to him, but he didn’t, because he had been conscripted into a top-secret development program that had turned him into the bioengineered super-soldier that he was today. But he had a few vague, pleasant memories of his parents, and most of the people he knew who had been raised by parents seemed to have very fond memories of them.
“Don’t you want to go back to your parents?”
Lena’s eyes lit with understanding. “John, you’re offering to kill us. Our parents are dead.”
“Dead?” He looked from Lena back to Oskar. “All of them?”
“Yes, all of them,” Oskar said.
“What happened to them?” Kelly asked.
“They died,” Arne replied. “They starved or fell sick, or got hurt or too thirsty or too hot. Take your pick. Something always happens.”
“Always?” Kelly said. “Surely, that’s an exaggeration.”
Arne and Oskar just looked at each other.
“None of you have parents?” John asked. He didn’t see any indication that they were lying—he just couldn’t believe what they were telling him. “Really?”
“I remember mine,” Lena said. “My mother, at least. I think she had green eyes.”
“You don’t actually know?” Fred asked.
“I was young,” she said. “I had just learned to walk.”
“Okay, I’m starting to get the picture,” John said. “Parents die young on Netherop. So who takes care of you?”
“We’re not babies,” Oskar said.
“I mean when you are babies,” John asked. “Before you learn to walk.”
Lena looked at him as though he were crazy.
“Somebody has to do it,” John said. “No one is born walking.”
“Of course not . . . but what an odd question.” Lena made a circling motion with her finger, taking in herself and the two boys. “We all do . . . the whole camp.”
Oskar scowled and leaned forward. “Why are you so interested in our babies, John?”
“I’m not, really,” John said. “It’s just . . . different. And I’m sorry about mentioning your parents. I didn’t mean we were going to send you to join your ancestors, only that you would be free to go—as long as we all agree to leave each other alone.”
“Why should we trust you?” Oskar asked.
“Because the gooey stuff is still inside your head,” Lena said. “And I am ready to crack your egg.”
John smiled inside his helmet. “That’s the gist of it.” He picked up one of the rocks they had bounced off his armor earlier. “You try to ambush us again, and . . .”
He closed his fist and crushed the stone.
Oskar’s eyes grew round. “That seems fair,” he said. “As long as you stop chasing us.”
“We were never chasing you.” John pulled a med-kit out of a load-carrier compartment, then dropped to his knees and pointed toward Oskar’s wounded hand. “Now, let me see what I can do about that shrapnel. It looks painful.”
Oskar shot a furtive glance toward Lena, who caught it and pointed him toward John.
“Go,” she ordered. “It has to be better than a mudpack.”
Oskar came over and presented a hand he was lucky to still have. The antenna shard was about five centimeters wide, and it had pushed clear through his hand. John examined the shard, then grabbed the thin part on the back of the hand and snapped it off.
Oskar howled in pain and tried to pull away. John held tight and reached around under the palm with his free hand, then drew the shard free. Oskar howled again, but did not try to withdraw his hand this time. John turned it over and examined the wound. There was a wide hole through the center of the palm, and through the blood, he could see that many of the bones had been shattered so badly that the middle two fingers were hanging only by flesh and muscle. It would take more than John’s first-aid skills to make it usable again, but he could ease the pain and help prevent it from getting infected. He pulled the biofoam out of his med-kit.
“So, how long have you been on Netherop?” he asked.
“That’s a dumb question,” Oskar said.
“Don’t be nasty, Oskar.” Lena was facing away from Oskar, her head tilted back while Kelly cut the blood-matted hair away from her scalp wound. “He could crush your head, and I wouldn’t care.”
Oskar sighed, then said, “Our whole lives. What’s it to you?”
John began to squeeze the biofoam into Oskar’s wound. He wasn’t particularly careful about avoiding shattered bones.
“Then you must know the area pretty well,” he said.
“We know what we need to,” Oskar said. “And what we need not to know. There are plenty of places we just can’t go.”
“I imagine,” John said. He continued to work the biofoam nozzle back and forth, packing the wound with what would serve as a temporary plug until Oskar received proper medical attention. “Have you seen the wreck yet?”
“What wreck?”
There was a confused note in Oskar’s tone that made John realize he had phrased his question poorly. There had been lots of wrecks in the area lately, starting with the Night Watch, the Wheatley’s Pelicans and fighter complement, and a bunch of Covenant craft.
“The big frigate,” John clarified.
“What’s a frigate?”
John sighed. “Never mind.” He finished up with the biofoam, then said, “You’re a tough guy, Oskar. That has to hurt.”
“It’s starting to,” Oskar said. “But at first, I didn’t even notice it until I saw the blood.”
“Bad wounds are like that,” John said. “The nerve shock lets you keep going for a few minutes. But when that wears off . . . well, don’t do anything where you need to stay conscious. The pain will knock you out.”
“Then you have been wounded before?”
“Once or twice,” John said. “But I was never more than a few hours from the infirmary, so I didn’t suffer the way you’re going to.”
Fred’s voice sounded inside John’s helmet. “I see what you’re doing,” he said. “Clever . . . and kind of cruel.”
“No choice,” John answered, also over TEAMCOM. “We have a target to capture—and these kids have a mountain runner that can get us there. See if you can win your kids over too.”
Fred’s and Kelly’s status LEDs winked green, and they each began to talk about how bad their patients’ wounds were.
John returned his focus to Oskar. “How long will it take you to reach an infirmary?”
“What’s an infirmary?”
“A medical center,” John said. He was only pretending to think Oskar would have access to modern medicine. Mountain runners aside, there was nothing about these kids that suggested they came from a civilization advanced enough to have anything but primitive treatments. “You know, where they’ll do the surgery to fix your hand.”
“What’s surgery?”
John sank back on his heels. “You don’t have an infirmary, do you?”
“I don’t think so,” Oskar said. “Is that bad?”
“It wouldn’t be, if you were coming with us.” John pulled a bandage from his med-kit and began to wrap it around Oskar’s hand. “But since you’re not . . . well, you probably won’t be able to use your hand anymore.”
“No?” Oskar’s face went pale. “So then . . . what if I did? Come with you?”
“Then one of our surgeons could fix your hand,” John said.
“And Arne’s knee,” Fred said. He was holding Arne’s leg in both hands, and Arne was leaning back on his elbows, his eyes rolled back in pain. “I have it back in the socket, but there’s bound to be a lot of ligament damage. If he’s ever going to walk right again, he’ll definitely need surgery.”
John looked across at Lena, who had just had her hair cut away from the shrapnel wound and was having biofoam sprayed into the laceration.
“Doesn’t your colony have any kind of doctor?”
“Colony?” Lena replied. “Why would anyone build a colony on this place?”
“We’ve been asking ourselves the same question since—” Fred broke off, no doubt deciding it might not be wise to mention the two riders who’d vanished in the Night Watch shockwave. “Since we first noticed you.”
“They wouldn’t have built a colony here.” Kelly’s tone was suddenly sympathetic. “You’re not here by choice.”
“No way,” Arne said. “We’re castoffs.”
“You mean castaways?” John asked. “Your ship crashed here?”
“He means ‘Castoffs,’ ” Lena said. “That’s what we call ourselves.”
