“Come on, Father! We’ve got to get back to the road!
It’s almost dark! We’ve still got some basic medicinals, I think. Come! Can you walk?”
“I—I think so. Please—help me to my feet.”
The priest was unsteady, but he managed, and they walked back to Kat Socolov, who was just staring now, apparently all cried out.
“Kat—you have to come with us,” Harker said as gently as possible.
She trembled a bit, then looked up at him. “They’re just children, Gene! Little girls! What have these bastards done to our children?”
“Come on! From the sound of things, we have at least one more wounded. Hamille, thank you. Are you all right?”
“Some punctures. They will heal,” the creature responded. “Tasted terrible, too.”
Back at the old roadbed, they found Colonel N’Gana tending to his sergeant. Mogutu did not look very good. He didn’t look good at all.
Socolov kept trying to get control with deep breaths and finally managed it. “The larger wounds need cover,” she managed. “We don’t have major bandages, or a portable surgical kit that works, so we’ll have to make do with what’s here.”
“The skin’s almost flayed in areas,” N’Gana noted. “What can we use that could cover them all and allow healing without infection or bleeding?”
“Mud,” she answered. “We have plenty of it. Gene, come on—you can be both bodyguard and mud carrier. We have to get a lot of it from the river, preferably just inside the waterline. We want it thick, goopy, and organic. Come on! I’ll show you how!”
It probably looked awful, but they could barely see. Both the wounded men were placed in a sheltered area underneath the remains of the roadworks. If they were lucky, the night’s storms wouldn’t wash away the mud packs.
“You really think that’s going to work?” Harker asked her.
“No, but it’s all we have and it’s a traditional treatment. We have no idea how much damage was done internally or how much blood was lost or whether or not those things were also poisonous, but if we’re lucky it can work. It’s an ancient remedy.” She sighed. “Now you know why I’m along!”
“I doubt if this was anticipated, but I’m still glad you’re here,” he told her.
It was pitch dark, and there was the rumbling of thunder and the flash of lightning not far away.
He sat there next to her and for the first time put his arm around her and gave her a hug. “You did good, kid. From the very start.”
“I brought them on us,” she retorted.
“No, they were stalking us from the start, I think. We forced their hand. I think they were going to wait until dark, or maybe even until the storm, and then jump us. When you consider their single-minded homicidal maniac approach and if you saw the eyes you’d know they can probably see okay in the dark, at least in starlight or moonlight. No, I think you saved all our lives.”
“But not deliberately,” she replied, unwilling to grant him a point.
“That’s the way it is in a war or any operation. What’s intended isn’t the point. The only things that count are success and the objective. At least we know one thing now that the whole Confederacy didn’t know before.”
“Huh? What?”
“The Titans know we’re here. They know us, maybe all too well. You don’t evolve like that in under a hundred years, and you sure don’t see that kind of consistency in mutation. I didn’t really have much time to study them, but I swear those two were twins. Identical twins. There’s only one way you can get that kind of change in a short time—they were bred. Bred to be just what we saw. Genetically reengineered and, when they had what they wanted, probably cloned.”
“But why? Why would they do it?”
He shrugged. “We still know nothing about them, and we may never understand all their motivations. Still, I can think of some practical reasons. Surely they know that some humans survived and still survive in tribal groups. If you wanted to keep the population down and ensure only the strongest survive, that’s one good way to do it.”
“But why not just wipe every survivor out? They could do it in a moment and you know it.”
“True, but I don’t think they want to. Why? Again, if we understood them maybe we could find a way to at least hurt them. Maybe we’re good lab animals, or maybe pets. It might be as simple and cold-blooded as that. Sheer sport. Or it might be that they want a sampling of only the strongest and best for their own use. Whatever the reason, I don’t know any way of asking them and getting an intelligent answer.”
The rains came at that point, making it useless to keep talking. She didn’t really feel like talking anymore, either. For the first time on the trip she needed something more from Harker, and she made it perfectly clear to him in the rain.
“You were right about the cloning,” Kat Socolov told Harker in the morning, after they had examined the remains of the fight. “I looked at the pattern on the big toe of both of them and it’s identical. So is just about everything else I could find. I also examined them as much as I could. I wish we had a medical doctor along or could get these two to an autopsy room. Neither of them have any grinders at all. All canines. And the tongues are smooth and extremely long. The whole mouth structure suggests that they can eat only meat. Ten to one they can only digest meat. They’re not only bred to be killers, they have to kill.”
He said nothing to that, but he did have a wider concern. “I wonder if anybody here is still human? That’s only one variety, I suspect, but what about the others? They preyed on somebody. Were the prey bred, too? This is getting more complicated than we figured.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s so much we just don’t understand of all this.” She came over close to him and said in a lower, softer voice, “Thank you for last night.”
He smiled and shrugged. “Anytime.”
“I don’t want you to take it any way but one, though. I—I just needed it. It was pretty strange, really. It happened once after I heard that my father died, but that was the only other time. It’s a strange reaction.”
“It’s a human reaction,” he assured her. “It’s nothing to feel guilty about. It’s just a part of being human. This is greater stress than even I ever thought I’d be under, and I always thought I was a gutsy type of guy. I can even see it getting to N’Gana, and I always thought of him as an organic machine.”
Again they said nothing for a bit, then she asked, “That woman Marine you talked about. Bambi something or other?”
“Yeah? What about her?”
“You ever do it with her?”
He thought that an odd question, but he answered it anyway. “No, of course not.”
“She doesn’t like men?”
“Oh, I think she likes men all too much. And almost anybody and anything else when off-duty. No, she’s an enlisted soldier. Officers and enlisted may have respect for one another, or contempt, but they don’t get personal. There’s good reasons for that. Nobody can sleep their way up the chain of command, nobody can use sex to force someone else to do what they don’t want to do, and, on a different level, you don’t want to have a personal relationship if you can help it with anybody you might have to order into possible or probable death.” He sighed. “I wish I had her here, though. She was damned good at her job.”
Even though it was a part of his life, it was hard to think that he was separated from her and his old shipmates by almost three years, even though it had been only a matter of weeks to him. The realization made their isolation on Helena seem even more acute.