Prophet of ConFree (The Prophet of ConFree) (39 page)

"Oh Ice. Oh Ice! Oh my God! God, how could you do this?" She turned her cloaking off, stunned.

"Saka's dead, too," I said.

"Oh no. Oh no. She crawled over to Saka on hands and knees, hesitant to believe it. "Oh no. Oh no."

"Delta, maintain your positions! Scout, you're in charge." There was still a lot of shooting going on but Doggie was suddenly there, accompanied by Blackie, armored up in a dog vest. Doggie turned his cloaking off, and I did the same. It was hard to see what you were doing when the cloaking was active.

"Is there any hope for either of them, Bees?" Doggie asked.

"Oh my holy God, please grant Ice and Saka eternal rest and peace and eternal love," Bees said. She was praying, her armored hands held together like a church steeple. "They are your holy soldiers, died in service, please honor and praise them, please grant us victory and vengeance, Lord. Have you deserted us? How could you leave them, Lord? How could you?"

Off to one side, somebody else was down. What the hell? It was that luminous soldier who had been attacking the D's. I stood up and walked over to look at him. He was sprawled in the mud, his brilliant armor showing several bad hits in the chest area. I went to my knees, exhausted. He was still moving. His right hand was trembling. His left fumbled at his helmet. A visor snapped open. I looked in. He appeared to be…luminous. Bright. Of course, these were the Brights. He looked almost human – an old, tough soldier, resigned to his fate. His right hand closed over a flask that might have been a canteen. He struggled to get it to his lips but he could not do it. He was fading fast. I reached for his canteen and my hand covered his. I lifted the canteen up to his lips and put my other hand in back of his helmet to hold his head up so he could get at the canteen.

"My God, Prophet, don't touch him!" Doggie warned. "He's going into Dimension X!" The Bright soldier had the water now. He took several long sips, and I removed my hand from the canteen. It dropped away. I reached for it, but the old soldier ignored it. He opened his hand and reached out for me. His eyes were blinking, but he was looking right at me. His hand was trembling. I took his armored hand. It gently closed over mine. A warm tingling rushed over me – peace and love. He was dying. Holding my hand.

"Let go of him, Prophet, damn you! Delta, maintain your positions and continue firing!" I could hear the battle dimly, tacstars, antimats, the startling cracks of those Bright lightning bolts. A distant music.

The Bright was flaring up now, blinding, magnificent. Going somewhere else. I reluctantly released my grasp and fell away from him an instant before he disappeared with a loud bang.

Bees was prostrate over Ice's body, embracing that shattered A-suit, sobbing and shuddering. I wandered over to Saka's body and knelt by him and looked around at the battle. I would have to tell both Kwan and Lan Hwa that their eternal loves were dead, their bright futures gone. There would be no darling children, no happy family. Only a dead, dark eternity as the clocks wound slowly down. The night sky was burning, the battlefield was burning; it sounded like a million rounds of x were all impacting at once. But the D's were not coming at us anymore.

"Prophet, take your position and continue firing," Doggie said.

"My position is right here, Doggie," I said. "I'm guarding my squadies." No, I was not going to move.

"Rich, are you all right?" Arie asked on private. I did not reply.

Blackie was sniffing at Ice and Bees. Then he went over to investigate Saka.

A couple more Bright soldiers appeared. Blinding – magnificent. Maybe they'll shoot me, I thought hopefully. Put me out of my misery. Then I'll be with Ice and Saka – my squadies. Blackie stood there on alert, looking them over. Doggie kept a wary eye on them, but did not appear particularly concerned. "Bees, pull yourself together." He said, huskily. "Call for an evac. We're not leaving our comrades behind."

One of the Brights came right over to us. The other one just stood there, as if on guard. The first Bright stood over Ice's smoking A-suit, then knelt by it. Bees looked up at him, stunned and silent, but remained at Ice's side. Surprisingly, I did not feel any alarm at this Bright intrusion. The Bright looked into Ice's bloody helmet, then put one glowing armored hand in there to touch Ice's shattered skull. His brilliant fingers ran red with bubbling blood. His other hand touched Ice's helmet gently. He did not move for some time. Bees was seemingly paralyzed. Doggie stood there mute. Blackie watched the Brights as if fascinated. When the Bright finally removed his bloody hands from Ice, he made a gesture over her, stood up, and walked over to Saka. Then he kneeled and put one hand on Saka's bleeding shattered head and the other on his helmet. When he was through he made the same gesture as before, then stood up and walked away, re-joining his companion.

"Ice is alive!" Bees shrieked. "Oh my God, she's alive! She's breathing!
EVAC EVAC EVAC EVAC EVAC
, critical! Bird, get down here right now! Oh my God!" She leaped up and ran over to Saka. "Alive! Alive! Saka is alive!
BIRD. BIRD
. Where the hell are you! You bastard, get here right now, she's alive, he's alive, both of them! Triage, Bird, take them to triage!"

A great windstorm swept over us. The
Ruthie
was winking in and out of invisibility as Bees and Doggie and I loaded Ice and Saka into the assault door. Ghostly auto xmax rounds floated past us. A couple of evac medics inside the ship got to work on them both immediately before the door slammed shut and the invisible Phantom flashed away on its way to the
Wasp
.

"Bees, you join Prophet on left flank," Doggie said. "Get back to work, both of you. Scout, what's been happening?"

"We're advancing. Get your cloaking back on, for God's sake. What’s the story with Ice and Saka?"

"They're both seriously wounded. They've been evaced. Pray for them."

Bees came over to me and we embraced, a clash of armor. She was crying with joy. So was I.

"I thought she had left me," Bees choked. "I thought I was all alone. I thought God had cursed me. I thought He had abandoned us all. I was selfish – selfish! Oh dear God, forgive me for I have sinned. Your glory is clear for the whole galaxy to see. I thank you Lord. I thank you I thank you I thank you!"

"You're not alone. Bees," I replied. "Ice is alive. So is Saka. And I'm right here."

"Did you see them? Did you really see them? Those Brights?"

"Yes. I did."

"They're angels, Prophet. They're angels. The Brights are angels. Angels of the Lord."

Δ

We got back to work, killing D's. Their wave attacks had ceased. The D's seemed to be in retreat. The Brights had vanished. Nobody seemed to know where they had gone. They had turned the tide, then disappeared. My mind was inflamed with rage. I wanted to see dead Demons. Our drones and fighters were blasting the landscape, showering the D's with antimats. The saucers had for the most part fled. The sun peeped over the bloody horizon as if terrified at what it was revealing. The A's had joined us in gunning down surviving D's. We had given them our individual cloaking technology so they were just as invisible to the enemy as we were.

Nearing the starport, we figured victory was close. The surviving D's were indeed surrounded, and a whole field of saucers was burning brightly, casting a black cloud over everything. An Assidic squad was just to our left as we moved cautiously forward, using the rubble as cover, blasting away at the surviving D's. A group of three D's sprinted for cover. They were unarmored, clad only in coveralls. I gunned them down with auto x, then switched to laser and sliced them up. The A's were firing too. There was nothing left by the time we ceased firing. I felt nothing but hatred for them. The info folks would have to get their enemy info sources from somebody else besides me. Every Demon I saw was going to die real quick.

"General alert. Biogen units are landing to assist us against the enemy. The First Expeditionary Scouts have landed and are attacking the enemy. Biogen units are marked in gold."

Biogens! I was thrilled. I knew they had their own world now; they had torn it from their former human Systie slavemasters, just as we had done in ConFree. They had transformed their own world and now they were our allies. Standing with us, against the D's! How many human worlds had done that? Only the A's. I knew our alliance with the biogens was going to be eternal. Bleed for ConFree, and ConFree will bleed for you. Blood is the mortar that builds strong alliances. I had studied the history of ConFree, and that's what it said.

The D's were holed up in the starport terminal building and also in a whole lot of underground bunkers they had carved out, all over Eden. Delta took on the terminal building. Smiley fired auto tacstars into the huge doorway and the A's joined us. The building exploded and crumbled, a fiery holocaust, entombing the Demons in an eternal hell. From time to time some desperate A-suited Demon would stagger out of the flames in a brightly glowing A-suit, and we would gun him down without mercy.

When the flames died down a bit, Arie and I made our way to the highest smoking rubble pile and stuck a tall metal pole into the rubble. It had a ConFree flag at the top. Doggie had supplied the flag. We looked up at it. It looked so damned good, that wonderful black flag flapping in a hot breeze against that smoky sky. It was the flag of victory. And it looked downright glorious.

Some Assidic rangers saw us and climbed up after us and planted their own flag next to ours. Later a couple of biogens appeared and brought their own colors and ran them up beside the others.

Then we had breakfast, sitting in the smoking rubble chewing cold rations. It was 0615. I was exhausted.

"The D's work fast," I replied, looking over the cavern. I noted some movement from a tangled pile of bodies. A Demon, no armor, blood all over his face, still alive. I walked over there and shot him in the face. He stopped moving. Blackie charged up and growled at the corpse.

"Prophet, report!" Doggie demanded.

"Sorry, Doggie. I found one alive. He's dead now."

"Fine. Keep me informed, all right?"

"Yes sir."

"Our apologies, sir." It was one of the biogens. She was clad in black camfaxed armor very similar to our own. Her visor was open. She was so pale and beautiful and captivating it was downright spooky. She had golden hair and icy blue eyes. My heartbeat sped up. It was like talking to an angel. "We thought we had killed them all," she said. "We plan on burning them once we get a chance."

"Were you in on the attack? It must have been a challenge, cleaning out this nest."

"It wasn't really that hard, sir. We lobbed in a barrage of tacstars, then roasted them with plasma. Then we moved in and shot anything that moved."

"Please don't call me sir. My warname is Prophet."

She stunned me with a dazzling smile. "Yes sir – Prophet. My warname is Mercury. Yes, we didn't know about the captives when we used the plasma. But luckily they were not harmed. Are you with the Legion?"

"Pleased to meet you, Mercury. Yes, I'm a Legion trooper. The Condor Regiment is at your service. What are these captives?"

"There they are. Your medics have them now." A long line of females was snaking out of the bowels of the installation, accompanied by the medics from the
Andrion Deep
. The rescued females were all pale, dirty, clad in torn clothing and seemingly stunned and exhausted.

"All females," I said. "What did the D's want with them?"

"The same thing all males want," Mercury said, with a slight touch of steel to her voice. "Rape and degradation."

I looked at her in shock. "You're not serious."

"I am very serious. Talk with them if you don’t believe me."

"Oh, no, I believe you. But I mean – good Lord, that's terrible."
Sex you rearend!
I could hear it echoing in my head. They were serious!

"They're all pregnant, you know," she said, quietly.

"What! But the Demons are aliens. How can they…"

"Our physicians examined them. They say the D males produce a mixture of sperm and eggs and that's what they deposit in both D females, and females – or even males – of other species. The new fetus can survive without a womb if necessary. It will survive and grow inside its host as a parasite. When it grows to term it will eat its way out of the host, killing it. So, it may be technically wrong to say those girls are pregnant. But they are carrying Demon parasites. That's what our physicians say."

I was stunned into silence.