about it.” He smiled again. His fingers toyed with the lektra, and a plaintive wail ran over my skin, a single, pure note.
“You know, it’s remarkable,” Coolhand added. “His people are hostiles, marginally allied with the Priests. And Deadeye said their council was going to meet on whether or not to surrender to us. The Taka don’t believe in words, they believe in deeds. We kill the exos, and return their boy. He confirms it. That’s all they need. All of them may surrender to us shortly. And all because of this boy.”
A silence settled over us again. The glow from the monitors added an eerie quality to our gathering. Another magic note arose from Coolhand’s lektra, like a bell sounding once in a still, cold night.
“How many more hives are there, do you think?” Warhound asked.
“Plenty,” Merlin replied. “Enough to keep us gainfully employed for quite awhile.”
Warhound sighed. “When I was in there,” he said, jaw muscles tightening, “I wanted to kill everything that moved. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just stay upstairs, and fill all the tunnels with gas, and explode it. I didn’t really believe anyone could be alive down there. Not until I saw it with my own eyes.”
“The Takas think the same way you do,” Coolhand commented.
“Take a look,” Coolhand said. He set aside his lektra, and spread a fotomap over the tacsit console, a brightly colored tacmap of the Sunmarch, Andrion 2’s primary continent. “The red areas represent exoseg territory-that’s the death zone. The Taka don’t go in there.”
“It’s quite an empire,” Ironman said.
“Right. And growing all the time. This is just an estimate, of course-but we’ve got a pretty good idea from debriefing the Takas.”
“What’s the purple area?”
“That’s the Realm of God. It has also been expanding-until recently. They’re pushed out by the exos, you can see. But check out the chronology-you can see where the exosegs appear to have started from.”
Someone read the legend out loud, “The Forest of Bones?”
“That’s what they call it. That’s our next target. It’s going to be a big op.”
“Terrific. Can’t you get us put back on Taka duty?”
“Sorry, gang, I just work here. Besides, it’ll be fun.”
“Right. I’ll get my party hat.”
The others drifted off to the lounge to sleep, leaving me alone with Priestess. I sat close beside her at the console and put an arm around her shoulders. I felt as if I were floating, alone with an angel, my own angel.
“What are we going to do, Thinker?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What are we going to do about Valkyrie?”
“How’s your eye?” I massaged the back of her neck.
“It’s better,” she said. “Do you think I was wrong-to love you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t even want to think about it.
“We’re only human,” Priestess said. “Is it wrong to fall in love?”
“We’re not human,” I responded. “We’re soldiers of the Legion. Nothing we do is sane. I don’t blame us for falling in love. I don’t blame Valkyrie for being upset. She’s perfectly right. And we’re perfectly right as well. We’re all insane-understand?”
“You say such strange things sometimes, Thinker. I’ve always believed in the Legion.” She paused, her eyes unfocused, staring into an unseen world. “Will you always be mine, Thinker?”
“We’re immortals. We’ll live together for a billion years.” We kissed, and I closed my eyes, and the world spun softly around us.
She let go, gently, and sank back into her chair. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears.
“Why are you crying?” A stupid question to ask a girl.
“I’m not crying.”
“All right, you’re not crying.”
I stood and picked up my E from the weapons rack and went outside, leaving the door open behind me. A faint breeze rushed lightly over my skin. The east glowed purple but the west remained cold and black and full of stars. I sat down on the steps, the E in my lap. Priestess joined me, hugging herself in the sudden cold, eyes sparkling.
“I was very lonely in Hell,” Priestess said. “I was just trying to keep up with everyone. I thought I wasn’t good enough-I had these nightmares where people would be crying out for the medic and I would be paralyzed with fear, or too exhausted to move. Terrible nightmares. I was always afraid that I would fail-and I thought everyone knew it. I thought they knew that I was too soft, too weak.”
“What nonsense. You graduated Planet Hell, along with everyone else.”
“Yes, and I was terrified the whole time.”
“You think everyone else wasn’t terrified? Remember the snake cliff? Remember the swamp suckers? I’ve still got the scars.”
“People were always helping me. I never could have done it by myself.”
“That was the whole idea-working as a team. Everyone helping everyone else. Now we don’t even think about it, we just do it.”
“I used to dream about you at night,” Priestess confessed. “Remember the Wilderness? When the whole world was on fire? Sometimes you’d sleep nearby, and I would dream that you would come to me in the night, and make love to me.”
“Yeah, that’s funny. I was too tired to move.” But I had been dreaming of Priestess as well. I looked up and could almost feel the starlight, hitting my skin. A billion stars, glittering cold and hard, an endless, milky stream of stars. I did not want to face the future without Priestess. She gave me something to live for. I wanted to live a million years just like this, with Priestess’s hypnotic eyes burning into mine. A meteor shot across the sky, trailing a sparkling wake through the dark.
“Oh, it’s lovely.” Priestess seemed totally relaxed.
An alert tone pinged once. Behind Priestess, the tacsit console suddenly glowed red. She got to her feet and went back into the tac room. I followed.
“What’s this, Thinker?” Priestess stood poised over the main screen, reading the data. I joined her.
Two targets glowed on the screen. Humans, obviously, moving slowly through the forest along the ridge that faced us across the valley. I read through the data.
“What’s that they’re carrying?” Priestess asked. She settled into the duty chair.
ANOMALY, the screen told us. UNIDENTIFIED DEVICES, AS MARKED. UNSTABLE READINGS, UNKNOWN MATTER. The visuals showed the targets as heat images, humans, each carrying something that registered as an irregular, shifting blob of light.
“The sensors can’t ID it,” I said.
“It just means we haven’t seen it before,” Priestess commented.
“Still, it’s odd.” We watched them, two glowing heat images, moving up the forested slope, heading up to the ridgeline. I picked up a comset.
“Deadeye, Thinker.” I spoke in Taka. “Come in, Deadeye.”
“Deadeye here! Speak, Slayer!” Deadeye loved the comset. He thought it a marvelous device. He slept with it.
“Deadeye, are any of your people on the ridge across the valley? We see two unknowns in the forest, climbing up to the top of the ridge.”
“Is it the ridge with the yellow stone?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“No, Slayer, we have no warriors there.”
“Well, there’s two people there. Near the top.”
“The top! We will catch them, Slayer!”
“Let us know what you find.”
“Thinker, Deadeye out, tenners, tenners! Goodbye, Slayer.”
Deadeye’s auxiliaries camped not far from us. They would certainly track down these two intruders-probably Cultist stragglers, out to recon our squadmod. They just wouldn’t give up.
