Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (36 page)

“Who the hell you are?” I demanded.

My TAD scratched out a translation. I was thankful both the device and its requisite headset were still on my person. That meant my captors wanted to talk; not just kill me.

“I am not authorized to tell you,” answered the
s’ndar
, its own TAD turning clickety-clackety mandible movements into human speech.

“The timing of your ambush couldn’t have been accidental.”

“You are correct.”

“What has happened to Senator Peterson and my squad?”

“No one has been harmed,” the creature said. “You must realize that if we’d wanted to we could have killed you where you stood.”

“Okay, you could have killed us and you didn’t,” I said. “What now?”

The
s’ndar
turned and left my cell for a moment, the crude iron door hanging wide open, then returned with several others. Including a larger, older female who wore the colorful cloth raiment of a priestess.

Great,
I thought.
Someone who knows God is on her side.

Among the usual squabbling of the various hives, there was a particularly absolutist sect of
s’ndar
fanatics who considered the human presence on their world to be a literal desecration. They were the ones still fighting guerilla-style even when most of the other resistors had been bought off at the bargaining table, or beaten down into submission by the Expeditionary Force.

“We are holding your Senator,” said the priestess. “Do you understand what this means?”

“Yes,” I said. Capture or assassination of the leader of a rival hive was a time-honored tradition among the
s’ndar
. Kill or incapacitate the queen bee, and the hive falls apart. A simple yet effective strategy—if you grew up in a hive. “But I don’t think
you
understand what it means.”

The
s’ndar
remained silent, watching me with alien incomprehension.

“When word gets back to Earth that the Senator has been taken hostage or, worse yet, killed, there will be a demand for justice.”

“Justice,” the priestess repeated. “By whose definition? How many thousands of innocent
s’ndar
are dead because of humans?”

“The Conglomerate seems to think that if we hadn’t been sent in to stop your civil war for you, there’d be
millions
dead.”

“The human presence on
S’ndar-khk
is immoral,” she replied. “By intervening in our affairs, you deny us our divine right to order our own lives and our world according to
s’ndaran
destiny.”

“You won’t get any argument from me,” I said. “I couldn’t care less about you
or
your fucking planet. But seizing the Senator won’t get the Expeditionary Force to budge. They’ll come after you with everything they’ve got.”

My own words surprised me. I didn’t owe the Senator anything. But he’d seemed an earnest man, and I’d already seen too many friends die. Somebody had to pay
.

As if sensing my rising anger, the two
s’ndar
flanking the priestess suddenly exposed and charged their weapons.

“Are you threatening me, Staff Sergeant?” said the priestess.

“I’m in no position to threaten you,” I told her. “I’m just stating a fact.”

The priestess stared at me for several seconds, then turned and left the cell, guards in tow.

They locked the cell door behind them, and I was left alone.

My left arm ached. It wasn’t from the chains. There was a scabbed set of fresh stitches directly over where my Conglomerate-made ID chip had been implanted before leaving Earth. Every member of the military had one, to prevent us from going Missing-In-Action. But these
s’ndar
had been smart enough to cut the device out of me, lest it give my position away to the Conglomerate satellites in orbit.

I sighed. No hope of a quick rescue now.

Minutes crept by in silence. I shouted, hoping to get a response from any other human that might hear me.

No response.

It’s amazing how long an hour becomes when you are deprived of typical sensory input. The cell became deathly quiet. There was no noise from beyond the iron door, no music, no human nor alien speech, nothing to look at except the circle of light that slowly inched across the cement floor as the day dragged on and turned into night.

I grew thirsty. Only a prolonged and significant amount of clanging with my chains attracted the attention of the guards, who brought me a portable light and two buckets: one to fill up, and one to empty.

Guards removed the manacles from my wrists and ankles, and then brought an even longer chain, which they connected to a collar they placed around my neck. The other end of the long chain was attached to a cleat in the floor, and I was able to walk and move for the first time in almost 24 hours.

They left me in the dark again. When the sun came up the priestess reappeared, only this time without her escorts. She kept well away from me, but her posture expressed curiosity.

“What now?” I said.

“If seizing or killing your Senator yields an effect opposite of what we desire, consideration must be taken as to how to proceed next. We do not ordinarily keep prisoners.”

“What’s
this
for then?” I demanded, yanking the chain on my collar.

“
Human
prisoners,” she replied.

“You have the Senator,” I said, “so what happens to the rest of us?”

“We used forbearance during the ambush, at the cost of many
s’ndaran
lives. Your squad still lives because
I
wish it, in spite of the feelings of many others who would just as soon see you all dead. After all, you are
aliens
. Everything about you is alien. You have no business being here. We want you off our planet, but before that can happen there are a few of us who believe we must understand you first. The better we understand you, the better we will be able to determine by what leverage you are moved.”

I stared at her. “Seizing hostages won’t do it, that’s for damned sure. We’ll have every available troop scouring this planet for Senator Petersen. Once they find him, it won’t be very pleasant for his captors.”

“We will make your masters understand us,” the priestess said, advancing close to me. She stabbed a foreleg into my chest. “You do not belong here.”

“Tell that to the Conglomerate,” I said.

“You
are
the Conglomerate!”

“No, we’re just humans from Earth.”

She stared intently at me. “Explain.”

“It’s simple enough,” I said. “Earth’s government cut a deal with the Conglomerate.”

“What does that mean?”

I explained the essentials of the situation. Earth needed what the Conglomerate had to offer, and as long as that remained true, the United Nations would keep the Expeditionary Force on
S’ndar-khk
.

“We never knew any of this,” the priestess said.

“You never asked,” I said.

• • •

The next day of incarceration passed with numbing sameness. As did the next. And the one after that.

Then the priestess reappeared, only this time she had several other
s’ndar
with her. None of them were armed, though they hardly needed their weapons against a chained and defenseless prisoner. They all stood near the door, well out of the radius of the chain that kept me anchored to the cell floor.

“You were right,” the priestess informed me. “News of the Senator’s abduction has caused human activity on
S’ndar-khk
to increase precipitously.”

“That’s hardly a surprise,” I said. “They’ll be looking for Petersen, me, and my whole squad. The Army doesn’t leave its men and women behind.”

“You are
that
valuable?”

“
Every
soldier is valuable,” I said.

“Even those who are inferior?”

“
Subordinate
, not
inferior
,” I said. “There’s a big difference.”

“We wish to know more of this deal humans have with the Conglomerate,” said one of the priestess’s companions. “At what point will it be satisfied?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Until someone in the Conglomerate decides the job is done, I suppose.”

The
s’ndar
began skittering and scratching excitedly, and my TAD muted due to overload.

“If you really want humans gone,” I said, “you could do yourselves a favor by not acting like such a bunch of bloodthirsty animals.”

“I do not expect you to understand the complexities of inter-hive politics,” she said, “nor do I expect you to grasp the richness and depth of my people. To us it is
you
who are the animals. You come without being invited or wanted, and enforce your version of ‘peace’.”

“Agreed,” said a different
s’ndar
.

“Like I said before,” I replied, “tell it to the Conglomerate.”

The priestess circled me, her forelimbs folded thoughtfully.

“Our history with the Conglomerate is complicated,” she said. “When the Conglomerate made its first contact with us, many hives spurned its overtures, declaring that we have the right to live without alien interference. When its overtures became demands, we destroyed their probe ship in orbit. An additional series of probe ships were sent, and we destroyed them too. Then, a few years later, your human armies arrived.”

“But not by our own means,” I pointed out. “The Conglomerate
brought
us here to do a job. When they think it’s done, they’ll take us back home and you’ll never have to see another human again. If you weren’t so intent on slaughtering each other—and slaughtering humans in the process—we’d be gone by now.”

The group chattered and clacked, and the priestess faced me squarely.

“So strange,” she said. “You repulse and fascinate me at the same time.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I said.

She waited while we glared at one another, my human eyes and her multi-faceted insect’s eyes. Then she clacked her mandibles once, very sharply. Suddenly the entire lot of them fell silent, and began filing out of the cell.

“Hey!” I said to the priestess as she was leaving. “You want to start proving how civilized you really are, give me something to clean up with.” I was over four days out of a shower. I stank.

The priestess paused, then waved a forelimb at me and left. A minute later the guards brought me cold water in a ten-gallon-sized tub, with a brick of industrial soap. There was no towel.

I scrubbed happily, ignoring the chill.

• • •

Repeated requests to see Senator Petersen, or anyone from my squad, were flatly denied. I began to wonder whether any of them had really made it? There was no reason to believe that the priestess, or any of the others, had been telling the truth, though why they’d keep me alive and kill the others just didn’t make any sense.

Time dragged on. Week one became week two. Then three. Then a month. For the first time in my life, I had a full beard. I did bodyweight exercises in my cell to try and keep myself fit, and to keep from going insane with inactivity.

At night, when the dark closed in and I had to curl up on the hard floor, I hummed all my favorite songs until slumber finally overtook me and gave me an illusory form of freedom. I dreamed of all the neat places I’d ever been as a kid, all the interesting people I’d ever met. I dreamed of all my favorite shows and movies, and especially of my favorite foods. Mashed potatoes, buttered green beans, crisp corn on the cob, fried chicken, broiled t-bone steak. Anything but the damned half-rotten vegfruit the
s’ndar
—being a herbivorous race—preferred.

I also dreamed of home, and family. Of my sister Karen and me when we’d been kids, playing in our grandparents’ backyard. A few times those dreams seemed so real that when I woke up I had tears in my eyes.

I grew to greatly resent the moments when I was awake.

I also began to cinch my belt tighter and tighter. The lack of protein in my meager diet was costing me muscle as well as fat.

My requests to see the priestess or any other authority figure were alternately denied or ignored. My TAD battery ran out of charge and wasn’t replaced, so I was reduced to yelling at my guards, who neither understood nor cared.

• • •

I’d lost count of the weeks, when the attack came.

A concussion lifted me up off the floor. I’d been fast asleep. I screamed and rolled onto my back, observing rivulets of dust spewing from cracks in the ceiling—cracks I was positive hadn’t been there before, because I’d already memorized the existing cracks.

THUD.

More cracks shot across the ceiling, and a hunk broke loose and smacked into the ground near my head.

I leaped up from where I’d been lying and crouched in the circle of sunlight, hoping to get out from under any additional debris.

THUD-THUD-WHAM.

I couldn’t tell if the explosions were coming from beyond the hole in the ceiling, or outside the iron door. I
felt
them as much as I heard them.

The door to my cell burst open. A horde of
s’ndar
rushed in, snapped the collar off my neck, and shoved me outside at gunpoint. The corridor beyond was crawling with
s’ndar
and humans. There were faces I recognized, far gaunter than I remembered them. “Sergeant Colford!” said a desperate voice.

I turned and found myself face-to-face with Senator Petersen.

He looked like a shaggy ghost of his former self. His gleaming teeth had yellowed, and his breath smelled, and his face was a hollowed-out, gray-haired mask that barely resembled the confident politician who’d visited my intersection … who knew how long ago.

“Move!” commanded a
s’ndar
, its TAD dialed up to shouting volume. The Senator and I were roughly shoved down the corridor with the other humans. I saw Corporal Kent up at the front of the line, and tried to shout for her, but was silenced by another barrage of concussions that almost knocked us off our feet.

“What’s happening?” Petersen said in my ear.

“Ours,” I replied. “Air strike.”

“They’ll kill us!”

“They probably don’t even know we’re here,” I said. “Something or someone must have tipped off the Expeditionary Force that there was a resistance stronghold in this area.”