Lasertown Blues Read online

  Lasertown Blues

  The Sand Wars

  Book II

  Charles Ingrid

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  PART II

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Dedication

  To my editor, Sheila Gilbert, with many thanks, and to the wonderful Wollheim organization.

  PART I

  Chapter One

  “No suit, no soldier. It’s as simple as that.” The bullet-nosed D.I. looked down the row of men who sat before him, their shoulders bare and sweaty against a too white sun. “We can hand you a laser rifle, but you’ll never be a soldier.”

  It was not really as simple as that. It never was. Still, the men sat there, covered in alien dust, and listened to the D.I. One, a man not-old and not-young, shivered involuntarily, feeling naked under the Malthen sun, for he hadn’t been out of his armor much in the last six weeks. His skin, also too white, began pinking rapidly. They’d been shucked out of their armor after days on patrol, drilled and exercised while their equipment had been racked and taken away.

  Young men, not much older than boys, flanked him on either side, their gazes intent upon the drill instructor. But Jack Storm had been in this situation before and though his jaw tensed along with the others, he didn’t quite feel what they felt. He’d mustered up good enough to wear battle armor years ago—now he only wondered if he was good enough to join the Emperor’s personal guard. And unlike the others sitting in the rows in front of and behind him, he wasn’t here out of any patriotic sense that he owed his service to the Emperor. On the contrary. He felt keenly that the Emperor owed him.

  He was twenty years older than most of them. His body didn’t show it though, for he’d spent seventeen of those years adrift in cryogenic suspension. As he sat cross-legged in the courtyard and listened to the D.I.’s voice bounce off the incredible, forty-foot-high walls that surrounded them there on the parade grounds, the sweat dripped off his lean body and puddled to the ground. His sandy colored hair slicked back darkly. His high cheek-boned face was tanned, to the neckline, for the recruits only wore their helmets half-time, and the Malthen sun was quick to darken their skins any time they were exposed to it.

  Jack squinched his pale blue eyes closed for a second, shutting out everything. As quickly, he opened them, not liking what he’d felt for that fraction of a second. The dead blue-black sleep of cryogenics, cradling him, killing him, for seventeen years… He reminded himself that there were days when that curse was almost a blessing. A forty-odd-year-old body wouldn’t have made it through the last six grueling weeks.

  The man next to him shifted. He tossed a smokestick butt into the dust. “What’s he leading up to?”

  “You’ll see,” Jack answered quietly. He resisted the impulse to look back, and up two stories, to the offices overlooking the parade ground, where the whippet-lean man would be watching today, as he had every day, the volunteers in training. The man, a legendary mercenary hand-picked by the Emperor to form this guard, had no name, just as Jack Storm had no age. The Owner of the Purple knew Jack well—but even that friendship held no sway with the D.I.

  The D.J.’s arrogant gaze swept over them. “All right, men. We all know only one out of every four of you will make it to the Emperor’s Guard. What you don’t know is when or how that decision will be made.” He crossed his arms over his gleaming silver chest. “Today’s the day. You’ve been graded by your performance for the last few weeks. Today is wash out day. Your suits were given to you and you were shown how to maintain them. The final determination will be made based on the condition of your suits. They’re being stripped down and evaluated right now.”

  “Fuck,” muttered the redhead to Jack’s right.

  The sentiment echoed inside Jack, too. They’d just come in off three days’ patrol with no chance to charge or repair their gear. Just what the hell did these people expect?

  But under Jack’s first conscious dismay, a deeper thought channeled. The corner of his mouth quirked up in a wry smile. The man who respected his gear, who planned for and maintained a reserve, who could repair his suit better than an unfamiliar mechanic—that was the sort of man Emperor Pepys wanted at his back.

  And that philosophy just might have been the death knell to all of Jack’s ambitions. His suit was an antique compared to the equipment most of these youngsters used. His suit was the forerunner, the prototype that this new equipment was based on. His suit had gone to the Sand Wars and come back.

  And his suit was alive.

  Jack gave an involuntary shiver as the D.I. boomed, “Dismissed!” How deep into his suit could they delve? He licked his lips. They were dusty. He tasted an alkaline tang. The farm boy left behind in his past told him this soil couldn’t be fertile. It was a good thing they were soldiering on it instead. A shadow fell over his thoughts.

  A broad, callused hand reached down for Jack. He took it and got to his feet.

  “Cold beer?”

  Jack shrugged, as someone in the milling group bumped him slightly. “Why not. It’s going to be a wait. They’ve got over three hundred suits to test.”

  He fell in beside the chunky, dark-skinned man who’d stood over him. He didn’t know Daku well, although he was in his late twenties, one of the oldest volunteers there, outside of Jack.

  Rank hadn’t been allowed in basic training. Daku might be a five star general or a civilian. He’d worked, trained, shoulder to shoulder with Jack for weeks without a word. Now Daku looked across his shoulder at Jack. An unreadable expression flickered over his dark face. His broad nose wrinkled slightly at the bridge. “Worried?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  Daku nodded. “Although,” he observed, “there are some who should not wonder at their fate. Those that used their equipment roughly, figuring it will go to scrap, while they are chosen and go on to new suits and new ranks… well, for those, it will be a foregone conclusion.”

  They were buffeted by the ranks of the trainees as they reached the double doors to the outside. Daku took the crowding good-naturedly, even as Jack shrank back a little. He disliked crowds.

  Jack changed quickly in the locker room. He wore a pair of serviceable gray pants with many pockets, and a loose, flowing shirt. Daku wore dark colors, as dark as he was, and as Jack joined him, he reflected briefly that he wouldn’t want to meet Daku in one of Malthen’s back alleys. Hover taxis were waiting outside the lockers… in response to the scores of calls from the training grounds, a fleet of them had come to meet the obvious need.

  He and Daku picked an automatic unit and got in. Daku paused, his finger poised to punch coords into the computer board. “Where?”

  Jack shrugged. “Wherever.”

  Daku punched out a series and they sat back, speeding downhill from the Emperor’s rose-pink complex, toward the belly of the beast known as Malthen, the city for which the planet had been named.

  ***

  Daku waited until after the second round of beer had been served, then he leaned forward in the quiet bar. The booth creaked a little under his solid
weight.

  “And what about you? You don’t seem worried.” Jack flicked a nail against his cold glass. The neat scar along his right hand, where the little finger had been sheared off, ached. It served as a reminder that the frost of cold sleep could injure, even kill. He wondered what the other volunteer wanted from him—why Daku had singled him out. Even as Daku had been assessing him, Jack had been weighing the dark man. This was not a cheap bar. None of the other trainees had come here. Nor was it a street bar, filled with mercenaries and other outlaws, or street toughs. Jack looked up, wondering just how friendly he wanted to become with this potentially dangerous man. For a moment, he wished he had the Purple with him, but the commander had agreed their friendship would be off-limits during Basic. The Owner of the Purple had recommended Jack to Emperor Pepys himself, and gotten him the appointment to the training program. From there, Jack’s fate was in his own hands—just exactly where he liked it.

  A man walked in the front door of the bar and stood a moment, half-shadowed. He drew first Jack’s glance, and then Daku’s. Daku’s mouth quirked. “Just a Walker.” Jack stirred in the booth. The man was armed, discreetly, but heavily, and that nagged at him.

  Walkers were a radical sect that had sprung from the old Terran religion called Christianity, and they were dedicated to finding anthropological and archaeological proof that Jesus Christ went on to walk other worlds. Still, Jack had never seen an armed one before. The sight tugged at his mind. A militant Walker would be everybody’s concern. The man spoke softly to the bartender and then faded into one of the back rooms.

  Daku grunted. Then he emptied his glass. “Well, Jack, you’re taking it coolly. I might almost think you’d been through this before.”

  To keep his companion placated, he murmured, “There’s a lot at stake, but sweating won’t make it happen.” He had no intention of telling the dark man that he had been through all this before. He wasn’t listed in any of the Dominion computer records. Nothing existed to designate him as the last fighting survivor of the Sand Wars on Milos except his battle-scarred memories, and he intended to keep it that way. It had been twenty years ago, ancient history to most, but not to him. Not to a man lost in cryogenic sleep and hooked up to a military debriefing loop, where he relived every step of the Sand Wars in dreams to which there had been no end—no end to the point where he’d lost nearly every other memory of another life, of his existence before he’d become an infantry Knight. He existed now for one reason and one reason only. Revenge. All he had to do was keep finding the pieces and putting them together. He hoped this man was one of them.

  “That is true,” Daku replied. He lifted his glass and took a long draft of beer.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw a young woman come into the bar. She was lithe and graceful, and had the quickness of a street acrobat. Her tawny hair, wild about her pretty face, and her sleek, dark blue jumpsuit bespoke her reason for being in a bar this early. She had all the earmarks of a high-class prostitute. Jack frowned as her gaze flicked his way and then passed him by, as she went to the bar rather than a table and sat.

  Daku set the glass down. “So where have you come from, with such high hopes,” he prodded.

  Jack looked back to him. So this was going to be a show me yours and I’ll show you mine session, he thought briefly. He hesitated only slightly before pulling out a photo and slapping it down on the table, and answering, “I rangered there.” He watched for the other’s reaction.

  Daku sucked in his breath as his fingers pulled the photo closer. “Where did you get this?”

  “I bribed a member of the survey team.”

  “It’s not a pretty sight.”

  Jack didn’t respond. It wasn’t. The sight of a once verdant, beautiful planet reduced to a char was beyond description. To Jack, the only hope in the photo was that the dark blue seas and vaporous clouds still remained.

  “This place was firestormed.”

  “Yes.”

  Daku pushed the photo back. “The only one I’ve heard of recently was Claron. No warning.”

  “No reason.” Except perhaps to wipe out Jack. A nerve ticked along his jaw line. First Milos, to the Thraks, and then Claron, to firestorm. Vengeance needed, twice over.

  “There’s always a reason. We just don’t know it yet.” The dark face paled a little. Then Daku said, “That was a bad affair.”

  “Yeah.” Bad was an understatement. Memories flooded Jack, memories of waking up to a firestorm inferno and escaping while an entire planet burned. He pushed them back. “Where are you from?”

  “Africa Two,” the man said and it was Jack’s turn to feel surprised. The all black planet rarely dealt with the Triad systems. Segregated by choice and desire, African Twos were seldom friendly toward other systems. It seemed vastly out of character for a citizen to be interested in serving Emperor Pepys as a guard. Daku sensed his reaction and said, “I don’t like Thrakian warships in our space.”

  That was a philosophy Jack could second. Despite treaties, enemies should stay enemies. He did, holding up his glass. “Death to all Thraks,” he said softly, proposing treason in his toast. He cared little if he revealed himself. It was the threat of Thrakian swarms that had made him leave his farm on Dorman’s Stand and volunteer for the army in the first place. He had little enough memory left of his family and home planet.

  “Amen,” answered Daku and they drained their glasses.

  “Ever see a Thrakian sand planet?” Daku asked casually.

  Jack had. He’d been there on Milos, fighting, while the Thraks terraformed the planet into a vastness of dunes, sands to be filled with their eggs for hatching. But he couldn’t answer without giving himself away. He took a long draught of beer before answering, “No.”

  “I have. Dorman’s Stand, one of the last to go under. It’d eat away at you, tell you that. A dead planet now, for all that it’s a nursery to Thraks.”

  His home. His family. His fields and orchards, ground to dust and sand. His hand clenched around his beer glass, and to distract himself, Jack watched the amber-haired blonde at the bar shrug off a potential customer. Her gaze flickered briefly over Jack. He cleared his throat, hoping that Daku hadn’t noticed. He checked his watch as his drinking companion began to slip his card into the table slot to order another round of drinks. He held up his palm. “That’s enough for me. I want to get back.”

  Daku looked up. He smiled pleasantly. “But there’s no need to worry, Jack. You won’t be going back. I’ve been sent to turn you back into the clay we are all made of. Dust to dust.”

  He looked into a needle-nosed palm laser. Jack reacted before he knew he was going to react. He dropped down, kicked the table up into Daku’s teeth, and rolled out of the way of the spray of fire. The blonde at the bar screamed and tables rang as they overturned, the area clearing as customers hit the deck.

  As Jack dove into a shadowy corner and skidded into a crouch, Daku got to his feet. Blood poured from his upper lip. The palm laser shook.

  “You won’t get out of here. It’s not my job to let you go.”

  Jack ducked as laser fire crisped the booth behind his head. He kissed the floor as sprinklers went on and a fine mist drifted down in response to the assault. He could hear Daku move to another position.

  The blonde crawled over to Jack and slipped him a handgun. “What would you do without me?”

  “Live alone,” he said. “Now find a corner and stay the hell out of the way.”

  She gave him a pout and crawled past him as ordered.

  “I suppose you won’t tell me who hired you.” Jack paused and calculated possible moves.

  Daku just grinned. The blood from his lip stained his jowls a dark purple, giving him a feral look. He pivoted around, spraying deadly fire as he moved. But Jack had already jumped six feet to the left. A shielding table melted into a puddle of plastic which smoked and a choking smell filled the air.

  Daku crouched, believing he was out of Jack’s sight, and mop
ped his lip with the back of his hand. He checked the charge in his gun. Jack watched him uneasily, knowing that he could end it all right there except that he was against shooting a man in the back, and he wanted to know why he was a target.

  Jack dove for his enemy. He barreled into the assassin, sliding him out onto the floor. “Who hired you? Who did it?” He knew it was a mistake the moment he wrapped arms about the other. Daku bunched his shoulders and Jack felt the massive strength of the other as the killer’s muscles flexed. He wasn’t going to be able to hold on long enough to save his life.

  Daku twisted a forearm up, palm laser glinting in the half-light of the bar. He fired, twice, the laser fire scorching Jack with its heat—and piercing Daku’s own skull.

  “Dammit,” Jack whispered hoarsely. “Who hired you!” The light faded from scornful eyes before Daku could answer. Jack let go.

  The blonde was at his side before the body finished bouncing. “Let’s get out of here,” she nudged him. “This neighborhood has too much class to take this kind of action quietly. The Sweepers will be all over us.”

  Outside, in the hover taxi, he finally took a breath. “What made you follow me?”

  “Are you kidding? Wash out day and you’re not with me trying to find out what’s happening to Bogie?” She wrinkled her nose, suddenly looking like the street urchin she’d recently been, and much younger than her made-up face would indicate. “C’mon. I’m not psychic for nothing. Besides, Daku’s gone out of his way to ignore you for the last six weeks… now he gets chummy? So I knew that you had gone fishing and decided to see what you’d reeled in. What do you think? Assassin or just someone trying to eliminate competition for the Guard?”

  Jack took a disposable tissue from the hover taxi dashboard and held it out to her. “I think you’re wearing too much makeup. You look like a tart.”

  Chapter Two

  The Owner of the Purple sat, looking just as Jack had imagined him, whippet-lean and handsome, his silver hair combed back from his forehead. He drummed the arm of his swivel chair impatiently. From the darkened booth overlooking the parade grounds, Jack could see the men milling restlessly down below and a steady, antlike line of newcomers joining the waiters. He knew that test results would start dribbling in soon. The tension in the air was growing thick enough to cut. He watched the grounds, distracted, until Purple asked, “Is it paranoia, Jack, or do you think that Daku was out for you specifically?”