Nightflyers & Other Stories Read online

  We move off, the Gut leading, the rest of us strung out behind. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. I don’t care. I just want this to be over with. Only a handful of hours to midnight now. Then another day, and another midnight, and the weekend’s over. And the drop-chopper returns to collect us. Me. I made it this far. Maybe I can make it all the way.

  Next weekend, back to tennis. I don’t need this. Maybe Stancato does, but he’s sick. I don’t. This is where Birch gets out.

  Yes. I can do it. The thought soothes me. I clutch my gun and walk more quickly.

  * * *

  We march for hours, silent except for heavy breathing and the crunch of new-formed ice underfoot as it gets colder. I forget about the war, Stancato, everything. Except my feet and the cold. My boots have been soaked through and through, and the wetness has seeped in. My feet hurt for a long time, but now they’ve stopped. Numb. But tomorrow there will be blisters. I hate blisters. I’ll bet Stancato never gets blisters. I’ll bet he never had a blister in his life. Or a pimple, for that matter. He’d be a lot more bearable if he’d grown up with a face full of pimples like any normal person.

  The wind is blowing very loudly, shrieking around the pines, slicing through this shitty little uniform something awful. In a world of red and black, the biting cold is strangely out of place. Blue and white are the colors of cold. This is all wrong. But I feel it all the same.

  We walk. Aimlessly? Probably not. But aimless to me. Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching. This is war. What ah overrated gyp.

  The thought comes, goes. Then my mind wanders back to my feet and the cold. As always. Nothing else can hold me. The gun is very cold now, the plastic almost freezing. Maybe it’s frozen to my hand. That should keep me from dropping it when they start shooting again.

  More walking. All in silence. Breathing and footsteps ahead and behind me. But I don’t know what’s going on. It must be past midnight now. It must be. The war seems to have stopped for the night. I can’t hear anything. But maybe my ears are tired, like the rest of me.

  Fuck it all. Who cares. I’m cold. Fuck you, Stancato. And you, Dolecek. And you, Gut. All of you. Idiots.

  Maybe it’s near dawn. We’ve been walking a long time.

  The idea excites me. I halt, very briefly, lift my visor. But there’s no light to the east. The stars are still up. Orion riding high, his dogs at his heels. Brilliant points in the black. I can see his sword. I can never see his sword in the city.

  The stars look cold. With the visor up, I can see the cold as well as feel it. I suck in a chunk of ice, feeling strangely restful.

  Something shoves me from behind Stancato. “C’mon, Andy,” he says, voice urgent. “Don’t give up. We don’t want to fall behind and get lost.”

  I growl at him and stumble ahead. Give up, hell. I wasn’t giving up. I just stopped to see if it was dawn. That fucker. Doesn’t he give me any credit?

  We walk some more, through woods and mountains that look much like the woods and mountains we’ve already walked through. Through an icewater creek that wakes up my feet to sudden screaming pain. Then back into the woods. We walk. The night is silent, but far away a flight of skimmers flame across the sky and drip fire. Black fire, to us. We watch. We walk.

  Finally, finally, rest. The Gut has found a cave. No, not a real cave. Just a small hollow in a wall of rock. But shelter. He slings off his pack, growls something to the Gawk, spreads out his groundcloth, and lays down. Instantly he is asleep, snoring. I’m exhausted. I lay down next to him. The others drop to their cloths, and stretch out.

  The Gawk tells me I have the first watch.

  I get up and watch, my muscles protesting, my mind blank. When the others are asleep, I slip up my visor and watch the stars. And the skimmers. The western horizon is the one that’s light, shining with orange flame and bright white flashes that grow and die against the mountains. A battle somewhere. I listen for the sound of the guns. Dimly, far off. I can hear it.

  They’re all asleep now. The Gut looks like a sack of laundry, and he snores like a bellows. The Gawk is all curled up in the corner, a frightened little boy. The other guy, the hunk of cannonfodder, sleeps with his mouth hanging open. But Stancato looks good. He’s stretched out sort of casual, as if the cold doesn’t touch him, his face composed, breathing light and regular. Alert, I’ll bet. He won’t be taken by surprise if the Concoms come at us.

  Briefly, I consider that. What would happen if I left here? Maybe the Concoms would come. Wipe them out. Get some killpoints. It’d be easy.

  No. I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. Besides, what if the Concoms didn’t get them? Then I’d be in trouble good. Besides, I can’t leave men to die. Not even Stancato. Can I?

  Well, maybe Stancato.

  If I’d played tennis, I’d be home now, asleep probably, in a warm bed with Miriam. Not that she’s that exciting. I married her on the rebound anyway, after Glenda left me for Stancato. Tall, blond Glenda. Always so nice until he came along, then turning on me, siding with him, cutting me down when I tried to keep her. She made a big mistake. I would’ve married her. Stancato just digs her body.

  So Glenda lost. And me too, I wound up with fat, dull Miriam. Only Stancato wins.

  I could shoot him. I wonder if he knows that. I could kill him right here, as he sleeps. They’d never suspect. He’d be just another casualty of the war.

  Or would he? They must have some way to tell who shot who. Else how could they keep track of the killpoints? I could let him have it from behind, but they’d find me out. Concom bullets must be different, or something like that. I’m sure it has something to do with the guns. I know they can find you when your time is up, if you’ve still got the gun. Maybe the same gadget keeps track of who you shoot.

  I kill Stancato, and he gets me from beyond the grave. Shit. A final victory. I’m not going to give him that too.

  I shove the thought aside. I’m not going to kill Stancato. I’ll be lucky if I kill anybody. I’ll probably freeze again. One way or the other.

  I stand there and think on that and watch the night. Hours pass. Finally, I wake the Gawk to relieve me, and sleep comes. On a bed of ice-slick stone.

  * * *

  Awareness returns with a backache and a scream. I jerk up, groggy, confused. Someone is screaming. I look at the entrance, blink. Bullets whine around me.

  The Concoms are outside.

  We’re trapped, locked in. Dead men. They’re going to kill me. Fear comes in great waves. I stare, shake.

  Stancato is on his stomach near the front of the hollow, sweeping his gun back and forth, laying down withering fire in great moving arcs. They are bodies outside. And one half-inside. The nameless beef boy. He got more than one slug. His body is in two parts. The bottom half is near the exit. The rest is all over the cave.

  There’s blood on my clothes. I study it, sick. I want to go to sleep again.

  Something explodes just outside our shelter, and fragments tear into the cave and bounce off the rock. Nobody buys it, though. There’s a lot of screaming going on, outside and in. I can’t make any sense of all the noise.

  The Gawk is lying next to Stancato, his back to the door, clicking a new cartridge chamber into his gun. He looks at me, snarls. Then he gets up, grabs my gun, shoves it into my stomach. “Shoot. Fight, you fucking green asshole—shoot!”

  He turns back to the door, drops to his knees.

  And catches a bullet right in the neck. Spurting blood, screaming, he falls back onto me.

  He’s dropped his gun. I pick it up and hand it to him, but he won’t take it.

  “Andy,” Stancato says. “Down. Down before they get you.” He fires as he talks, never stopping. So efficient, so calm. He doesn’t look frightened. The killing machine, the hero, the great warrior.

  I decide to show him. I drop the Gawk to lie in his own blood, lie down next to Stancato, bring up my gun, wrap my finger round the trigger.

  Outside, dawn breaks. Sunday da
wn. Halfway home now, but they’re after me. I can’t see them, though. Just points of light from two-three spots, where their fire rakes the cave mouth. And the positions move.

  I fire. Bullets spray out in a steady stream. There’s no kick. The gun just warms slightly. I shoot, not at anything, just wiping out the trees. Maybe I’ll hit something, but I don’t especially want to.

  My firing has given Stancato his chance. He stops to reload, sliding back in the cave a little, keeping low, taking the cartridge chamber from his belt and calmly fitting it into the gun. No fumbling, no hurry. No mistakes. In a second he’s next to me again, and we rake the trees together.

  Somebody screams. “We got one,” I say, and stop firing.

  “Maybe they want us to think so,” Stancato says. “Want us to come out. They can’t get in, but they know we’re trapped.”

  Trapped. Yes. I remember that. We’re trapped. The Gut, the great vet, our fearless buddy, he got us trapped, probably got us killed. I’m furious. Stancato is firing alone.

  Then I realize that the Gut isn’t in the cave.

  “Where is he?” I demanded of Stancato. I don’t know the Gut’s name. Strange. I thought I did. Stancato seems to.

  He doesn’t answer. He’s stopped firing, too. He waits for someone to move.

  We wait a good five minutes in silence. Hoping they’ll come out to see if we’re dead. They don’t buy it. Instead they let their guns play over the rock, again and again, and bullets whine around us. Finally someone lobs a grenade. We have to give ourselves away. While I stare, Stancato grabs it and lobs it back. Right where it came from. He pitches for the office softball team, that Stancato. Good, of course. Very good.

  The grenade explodes, tearing a gout out of the forest and the mud. Almost simultaneously, someone else opens up from the side. Screams. We got them.

  A Concom staggers from behind a rock, bleeding from a hole in his chest the size of a fist. He gets two feet before the fire from the side cuts him down, hanmering him ruthlessly as he tumbles and lays twitching. I watch with sick fascination as he screams and dies and clutches at the air. A thin, short black man, he dies hard. Ashamed, I realize that I have a hard-on. God. I’m sick. As bad as they are.

  The Gut steps from the side, gun under his arm. “All clear,” he shouts. “We got all of them.”

  Stancato rises and goes to him. “How many were there?”

  “Eight,” he says. He laughs. “Eight killpoints now. How’s our side?”

  I leave the cave, the blood-filled cave. Stancato and the Gut watch me approach, wordlessly. The answer to the Gut’s question.

  “Damn.” That’s all he says. He wanted me dead. Just like Stancato. I’m a coward, a sick coward, no good to them. The better men are dead. That’s what the Gut’s thinking.

  “How—?” I say feebly. I can hardly think.

  “I was coming on guard,” the Gut says. “They opened fire on both of us. Got him, but I dropped down real quick-like and got into the bushes. And by then your buddy here was up and shooting at them, so they couldn’t all go looking for me.” He grins. “You shoot good,” he says to Stancato. “You got a couple right off, and that’s what saved us.”

  Saved us? Stancato saved us? Does he always have to be the hero? Something tightens within me. I turn away from the two of them, leaving them there to smile at each other, to grin and congratulate themselves on the blood they’ve spilled. The butchers.

  The body of the black man lies near a clump of bare bushes and the branch of an evergreen. It’s stopped moving now, but blood still drains slowly into the mud. His hands are old—lined leather hands too small for his great, baggy gray uniform.

  I bend to him, to the man whose death I enjoyed. Nearby, half under the tree, I see his gun. I drop my own and reach for it.

  The Concom guns are molded from greenish plastic, but otherwise they’re the same. Of course. The weapons have to be the same, or the war wouldn’t be fair. Underneath, there’s a serial number, and a legend that says PROPERTY OF CONSOLIDATED COMBAT, INC.

  You pays your money and you takes your choice. Fight in the mountains, Maneuver against Consolidated Combat! Try a jungle war, General Warfare versus Battlemaster! Slug it out in the streets of the city, Tactical League against Risk, Ltd. There are thirty-four war zones and ten fighting clubs. You pays your money and you takes your choice. But all the choices are the same.

  I stand, the Concom gun in hand. And something comes at me.

  He jumps out of the dim-lit dawn greenery, and I take him in in a blink. Gray uniform, black face, young—younger than me. A kid, a bloody, wounded kid. We didn’t get them all. This one just lost his gun. He comes at me with a upraised knife.

  I watch him come. He must cover several yards to get me. He comes swiftly, but not swiftly enough. I raise the gun.

  And I can’t fire. I can’t fire. I can’t fire.

  When he’s almost on me, Stancato guns him down from the side. Very efficiently. He curls slowly, drops gently into the mud. No screaming for this one. His knife falls near my foot.

  Stancato has saved my life again.

  I turn and look at him. He’s smiling, and his gun smokes. Another killpoint. He’s good at this. He’ll get a big discount next time. Me? No. No way. They’ll take away my license. They won’t let me play. I get hard-ons from watching men die, but I can’t kill them.

  Stancato steps towards me, starts to say something. I look at my gun, avoiding his eyes. It’s a Concom gun. Shoots Concom bullets. Maybe they can’t tell who shot who except for the bullets. Stancato has saved my life twice. I can’t stand it. He’ll tell everyone.

  As he walks toward me, I raise the gun, quite calmly, and shoot him. I think I do it very well.

  He doesn’t have time to look surprised. The Concom gun shoots a stream of bullets, real fast. His chest just explodes, and I turn the nozzle up, and the bullets keep coming, and his dark handsome calm smiling efficient face disintegrates into bloody meat.

  The Gut is standing there, mouth open, screaming. “You shot your buddy!” he screams. “You shot your buddy!” I turn the gun and shoot him too. The hell with his vet marks. He isn’t so hard to kill.

  * * *

  I’ve been marching all day, alone, through the woods. My feet are cold, but I don’t mind. I have a Maneuver gun under one arm and a Concom gun under the other. I’m piling up killpoints. If I get enough, maybe next week I can sarge it.

  Chicago

  April, 1973

  And Seven Times Never Kill Man

  Ye may kill for yourselves,

  and your mates,

  and your cubs as they need,

  and ye can;

  But kill not for pleasure of killing,

  and seven times never kill Man!

  —Rudyard Kipling

  Outside the walls the Jaenshi children hung. A row of small gray-furred bodies still and motionless at the ends of long ropes. The oldest among them, obviously, had been slaughtered before hanging; here a headless male swung upside down, the noose around the feet, while there dangled the blast-burned carcass of a female. But most of them, the dark hairy infants with the wide golden eyes, most of them had simply been hung. Toward dusk, when the wind came swirling down out of the ragged hills, the bodies of the lighter children would twist at the ends of their ropes and bang against the city walls, as if they were alive and pounding for admission.

  But the guards on the walls paid the thumping no mind as they walked their relentless rounds, and the rust-streaked metal gates did not open.

  “Do you believe in evil?” Arik neKrol asked Jannis Ryther as they looked down on the City of the Steel Angels from the crest of a nearby hill. Anger was written across every line of his flat yellow-brown face, as he squatted among the broken shards of what once had been a Jaenshi worship pyramid.

  “Evil?” Ryther murmured in a distracted way. Her eyes never left the redstone walls below, where the dark bodies of the children were outlined starkly. The sun was goi
ng down, the fat red globe that the Steel Angels called the Heart of Bakkalon, and the valley beneath them seemed to swim in bloody mists.

  “Evil,” neKrol repeated. The trader was a short, pudgy man, his features decidedly mongoloid except for the flame-red hair that fell nearly to his waist. “It is a religious concept, and I am not a religious man. Long ago, when I was a very child growing up on ai-Emerel, I decided that there was no good or evil, only different ways of thinking.” His small, soft hands felt around in the dust until he had a large, jagged shard that filled his fist. He stood and offered it to Ryther. “The Steel Angels have made me believe in evil again,” he said.

  She took the fragment from him wordlessly and turned it over in her hands. Ryther was much taller than neKrol, and much thinner; a hard bony woman with a long face, short black hair, and eyes without expression. The sweat-stained coveralls she wore hung loosely on her spare frame.

  “Interesting,” she said finally, after studying the shard for several minutes. It was as hard and smooth as glass, but stronger; colored a translucent red, yet so very dark it was almost black. “A plastic?” she asked, throwing it back to the ground.

  NeKrol shrugged. “That was my very guess, but of course it is impossible. The Jaenshi work in bone and wood and sometimes metal, but plastic is centuries beyond them.”

  “Or behind them,” Ryther said. “You say these worship pyramids are scattered all through the forest?”

  “Yes, as far as I have ranged. But the Angels have smashed all those close to their valley, to drive the Jaenshi away. As they expand, and they will expand, they will smash others.”

  Ryther nodded. She looked down into the valley again, and as she did the last sliver of the Heart of Bakkalon slid below the western mountains and the city lights began to come on. The Jaenshi children swung in pools of soft blue illumination, and just above the city gates two stick figures could be seen working. Shortly they heaved something outward, a rope uncoiled, and then another small dark shadow jerked and twitched against the wall. “Why?” Ryther said, in a cool voice, watching.