There was a moment of strange almost- silence then, the only noises the harsh breathing of the soldiers trying to catch their breath and the faint sounds of the mass of Izkop fading into the night. Sergeant Singh spoke first. “I’m moving to the door. I’m there. All the Izkop here seem dead. Burgos is on the threshold. She’s got a dozen spears in her. No pulse. Everybody else report.”
“Johansen here,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Got a bad wound in one thigh. Everything else seems minor.”
“Adowa. Got one or two deep cuts in my right arm and lots of minor stuff.”
“Nassar. Just small stuff. I’ll live.”
“Goldera. Small cuts. Except I think maybe I lost a finger. Oh, man, I lost two.”
After a pause, Singh called out. “Stein. You still with us?”
The answer came from Nassar. “Here he is by the window. Oh, hell. Stein’s dead, Sarge. So’s that civ, Scorse.”
“Damn. Archer? Archer?”
No answer.
“We need to find Archer, people,” Singh ordered. “Adowa, Johansen, Goldera, you three patch each other up enough to stop major bleeding. Nassar, look for Archer now unless the other three need first aid help. I’ll keep an eye on the outside.”
They fumbled in the darkness, cursing, until Singh told them to use hand lights. “The Izkop know we’re here. Use enough light to take care of bad wounds and find Archer. She must be buried under some of the dead Izkop. And make sure all of those Izkop in here are dead.”
Half an hour later, med patches melding into their skin to seal off the worst injuries and stop bleeding, the five remaining soldiers halted their search of the building. “She’s gone, Sarge,” Nassar said. “Archer’s not here. They took her.”
“The comm unit is gone, too,” Adowa reported. “Why’d they take Archer?”
Goldera replied in a bone-weary voice. “Why not ask why they stopped and left? We were all dead in another minute or two. Why’d they stop?”
No one tried to answer that. Johansen sagged against a table, looking out into the darkness, feeling no hope, no curiosity, just tiredness and a resigned sort of fear.
An inside door opened, spilling pale radiance across the front room littered with dead. Ariana stood in the doorway, her breath catching at the sight of them still standing. “The children are scared. They heard all the fighting. What do I tell them?”
“Damned if I know, ma’am,” Singh said. “I guess all you can tell them is that we’re still here.”
“That’s a lot,” she finally replied. “They still believe in heroes.”
Johansen felt himself straightening up at her words, standing a little taller despite his weariness and injuries, and noticed the others doing the same.
After Ariana had closed the door again, Nassar gusted a single soft and sardonic laugh. “If we got to die anyway, it’s nice to know someone appreciates it.”
Sergeant Singh nodded, his expression impossible to make out in the dark. “We got one more fight left in us. Two-hour sentry duty, one soldier on at a time so the others can rest.”
“You don’t think they’ll come again tonight, Sarge?” Goldera asked.
“I still don’t know what they’ll do, let alone why they’re doing it. All we can do is protect those kids for one more night, and hope that effort of ours somehow matters to the Izkop when they’ve got the kids at their mercy.”
Johansen had the watch when the sky began paling with dawn’s light. He sat on the floor, leaning against the wall next to the window, looking outward, an Izkop spear in one hand, as the growing daylight began turning the vague, gray shapes of night into clear objects with color and meaning. The med patch kept his thigh numb, and while that served as a reminder of the wound it covered, it also meant that when just sitting here he could pretend it wasn’t a bad injury. Sitting quietly felt right anyway. In that strange stillness that dawn always held, there might have been nothing else living on the entire planet except for themselves and the distant shape of one of the local flying predators wheeling across the sky.
Silence and stillness. The right and left hands of death, someone had called them. She had died, too, on a planet far distant, gone cold and quiet like the mounds of Izkop here lying forlorn in the growing light. He thought about other dawns to come, without him around anymore. The idea felt impossible, and strange, even after all he had seen.
Archer was out there somewhere, but he tried not to think of that, except to wish that she got it like Juni had, a quick death before any mutilation.
He heard soft sounds behind and looked quickly to see that Ariana had come out of the back. She seemed to be emotionally used up and physically exhausted from dealing with the children, but that really shouldn’t matter much longer. “Mornin’,” Johansen whispered to her, pain stabbing through the numbness inside him as he thought about Ariana dying, too. One more person he couldn’t save.
She reached the wall and leaned next to him, her eyes on his face. “Good morning. Are they out there?”
“I expect. Can’t see any of them, of course.”
Rising up a bit, she looked out as well, their shoulders touching for a moment before Ariana slumped back again. “I thought soldiers had all sorts of special equipment built into their bodies, to let you see in the dark and do other things.”
“No, that’s just in stories,” Johansen said. “In real life, they kept finding out that implanting gear into people, biomechanicals and stuff, created a huge Achilles Heel. Anything like that could be hacked or intruded or jammed. One good hack could take out an entire force. Eventually, they decided the only firewall good enough was maintaining physical separation between human and equipment.”
She actually smiled slightly. “No secret superpowers to save the day?”
“Nope. Just the same old, same old as back at Troy.” Johansen tapped his spear.
“Does that make me Cassandra?” Ariana sighed. “What were you thinking about before I came out here?”
He hesitated before answering. “I was thinking how strange it is to know that this is the last sunrise I’ll ever see. I mean, there’s always a chance any sunrise will be your last, but this time it’s certain. Kind of a weird feeling. At least it’s a pretty sunrise.”
“Yes, it is. Are you sorry you came here?”
“Well, yeah.” Johansen glanced at her. “Not that we came to this spot. We would have died anyway, and at least coming here meant a chance for you and the kids. But this planet I could have done without.”
Ariana stared at the bodies of Burgos, Stein, and Scorse against the far wall as if unable to believe that they were real. “I thought they’d last the longest. Scorse, I mean, and that woman soldier.”
“Burgos?” Johansen shook his head. “She was pretty certain to die early on. After the massacre in the valley and watching Ramada gutted, all Burgos cared about was killing Izkop. Your Scorse seemed to be the same way.”
“But if they wanted to keep killing—”
“I said that was all they cared about. They didn’t care about living any more, just killing. People who get like that don’t tend to last too long, because self-preservation just doesn’t occur to them.”
She gave Johansen a quizzical look. “But you want to kill Izkop, too, and you told me that you don’t expect to live.”
“No, but you see I only want to kill Izkop so I have a chance to live.” Somehow Johansen mustered a small smile as he watched the sun rising over the bluffs. “Get me out of here in one piece and I’d be happy never to kill another Izkop. But not Burgos and Scorse. They’d have jumped right back in.”