He grabbed the struggling figure as carefully as he could but it apparently wasn’t carefully enough as the person let out a squeal of pain. He’d grabbed a forearm and apparently a bit too hard.
It was the squeal that triggered his recognition.
He was holding a girl. One with bright red hair and very pretty blue eyes.
The girl tried to kick him in the crotch. Okay, so romance probably wasn’t right around the corner.
“Holy fuck!” Rawls shouted. He’d been hit three times by the club before he could even react and was cut in each spot. If he hadn’t been guarding his neck, one of the hits might have gotten through to his carotid.
He didn’t want to hurt the guy but with the clubs being this vicious, he wasn’t sure what to do. He also wasn’t sure he was dealing with a human. The guy looked more like a Darhel and was both blindingly fast and, from the power of the strikes, remarkably strong.
Mike tossed his catch to Corporal Murray and walked over to where Rawls was struggling with what certainly looked like a Darhel. But while Mike had heard rumors they could fight, seeing it was something else.
But the more he watched, as Rawls learned to block the club a bit better, he realized it couldn’t be a Darhel. The body was way too stocky, the musculature was all wrong.
What he was looking at was a human somehow changed to look like a Darhel. Or sort of Darhel.
Mike watched for a moment longer then his fist flashed out…
Urnhat groaned as Swodrath fell to the ground. The short figure had only hit once but the Huntmaster had been knocked backwards several feet. He still lived, it would take more than that to damage a Gamra, but he was out of the fight and with his fall their fates were sealed.
She stopped struggling then struck the armored suit one more time in frustration. Her right arm was either broken or badly bruised and now her left hand felt the same.
“Streunten take your souls!”
“Shelly, you making anything of this gabble?” Mike asked. The prisoners were now examining them sullenly but they had been speaking. Mike wasn’t sure how good AIDs were at translating alien languages. It had never come up. There were the Galactics and there were Posleen. Humans or pseudo-humans speaking alien babel had never come up.
“Yes,” the AID replied.
“Can you translate it?” Mike asked.
“Yes.”
When AIDs got monosyllabic it was bad. Mike was well aware that AIDs had lots of secrets they wouldn’t or couldn’t share with humans. When they got monosyllabic you were getting close to one of them.
He’d have to think on that. But given that there were humans on a planet a long way away from earth, one of them looked like a Darhel but wasn’t, the local Darhel had gone into lintatai and his AID was getting less helpful… Things were starting to add up in a “oh, shit” way.
Mike was not stupid. There was more than one reason he’d stayed as far away from central command as he could possibly arrange. Once upon a time he’d had a very good friend and commander named Taylor. General Taylor had been commander of all US defenses on Earth. One day he turned up dead after asking too many questions about an incident where the AID net had been, apparently, hacked. Shortly after that a bunch of Darhel had either gone into lintatai or ended up quite spectacularly dead. And a previous special operations unit, the Cyberpunks, had gone rogue.
Mike had heard the rumors, including some that he put more credence on than others. The Darhel weren’t entirely friendly to humans. They had, quite clearly, hamstrung human operations during the war. And they continued to manipulate governments and the military. Push too hard at Darhel secrets and you didn’t last long.
Unfortunately, it looked as if Mike had ended up square in the middle of one or his middle name wasn’t Leonidas.
“Well, Shelly, why don’t you go ahead and translate for me.”
“Cometh all friends,” the smallest of the suits said. It had a monsterous form painted on its suit, a creature out of nightmare. All the other suits were bare of all but the most minor symbols. Urnhat wasn’t sure if that meant a more senior one or not. The voice seemed male, though, and speaking in an archaic dialect that was hard to understand.
“Then let us go so we can tend to our leader,” Whiet replied.
“Very well,” the suit boomed. Almost instantly all three of the hunters were released.
Urnhat ran to Swodrath and knelt by his side, feeling at his chest for the beat of a heart. It was strong, thank Skelight.
“He is fine,” the suit said. “I pulled my punch.”
“Pulled it?” Urnhat said, standing up and rounding on the being. “He was thrown a yur!”
The suit, which had no visor and no way to see its eyes, appeared nonetheless to contemplate her for a moment then turned. One fist flashed out and all the way through the young bole of a tonser tree. The being then ripped the tree from its rather deep roots and tossed it down the slope.
“Pulled it,” the being said, reaching up and lifting off the helmet.
Urnhat gasped in surprise as a human head was revealed, its scalp covered in a strange ripple of silver.
“Lieutenant General Michael O’Neal name is. Truth. We come in peace.”
“This is impossible,” Admiral Suntoro said. “There cannot be humans on this planet. You are mistaken.”
“Well, Admiral, I might be,” Mike said. From the admiral’s image he was about to have a stroke. “But science don’t lie. These are humans down to the 99th decimal. DNA matches up exactly. The local tribe is called the Nor. They control the upper third or so of this valley. There’s one further down south that’s called the Charan. Apparently the Posleen arrived within the memory of some of their middle aged types and started their usual slaughter. But the humans managed to hold them from taking all this range. Some of them held part of the valley for a while but they managed to kill them off. Since then the mountain tribes send fighters down to the lower reaches and to this valley and the Posleen send some of their fighters up and it got to be almost stylized from the sound of it. Probably the reason this planet never entered ornadar. The Posleen had somewhere to bleed off the excess that couldn’t be sent to space.
“So what are they doing here?” Suntoro asked. “How did they get here? They couldn’t have walked.”
“Yeah, that’s the rub,” Mike said, rubbing his head as if in response. He pulled out a pinch of dip and stuck it between his cheek and gum, contemplating the Skoal can balefully. “Admiral, figure it’s time to say some of this in front of an AID. You’re not stupid. We both know the Darhel ain’t what I’d call fully open and honest.”
“The Darhel are our supporters,” the admiral said, stoutly. “They saved us from the Posleen through their aid and support.”
“Yeah, except for, you know, most of the world,” Mike said. “And they’ve managed to keep us pretty much under the yoke since. And we both know that there are things they don’t want us to know about that.”
“I will hear no disrespect spoken of the Darhel,” the admiral snapped. “That is treason.”
“Nah, just honesty,” Mike said, sighing again. He suspected that under Galactic law it just might be treason. “Problem is, this is one of those things I’m wondering if they ever wanted anyone to find out. And trust me, I wouldn’t have poked if I knew about it. But here we are. The term ‘fucked’ comes to mind.”