I take a breath; exhale. Another. It is not the moment before; that moment when I had living friends and living enemies. It is not the moment to come, when whatever it is that I must do has already been done. It is this moment. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to remember something comforting—something perhaps even useful—from The Talman.
How little of the book I know. My parent tried to teach me, but it was killed by the Front long before I completed my first year. I keep the golden cube of my parent’s Talman suspended from a chain around my neck, but I rarely read it. After all, it was the masters of the Talman Kovah who proved that this war cannot end. No adulthood rites, no presentation before the family archives, not for Yazi Ro. Not for any of us condemned to Amadeen. Our talma was to be sealed for eternity into hell.
Two humans are dead on the dusty cement floor at my feet. The older of the two caught the slice of my energy knife through the upper right quadrant of his head. The younger one is almost a child the way humans reckon such things. She was cut in two through the chest.
Bodies.
Nothing.
Two more corpses upon a mountain of dead.
There is a golden pendant on a golden chain around the neck of the young one. I expect it to be a cross, that sign of the human prince of peace. I see, instead, the cube of a Talman taken from some dead or captured Drac.
My rage paints everything in reds and blinding whites. Instinctively I touch the trigger on my knife and watch as her head rolls free from her torso. I take the chain from the stump of her neck and look at the cube. It carries a line sign, but I do not know it.
I look around inside the concrete and steel structure. Nothing but the mounts remain of the crew-served weapons that had been bolted to the floor. There are scraps of cloth hanging over the weapon ports. Human curtains. They are made from the tan, white, and red camouflage cloth the humans use. There are chairs very similar to Drac chairs, and a table very similar to the one I ate from before my parent, my siblings, and my home were destroyed so very long ago. The inside is blackened and chipped from weapons firing.
I am numb from fatigue and from the pains in my head. I wonder how many human homes and lives I have destroyed. Some things are beyond counting.
Something strange about the scene makes me pause. The chipping took place after the fire. The blackening is from burning, probably ignited by an energy knife. The chipping is caused by bullets. The Twelve had no rifles. The rifle fire had to have come from inside. Anta had said the humans might be fighting among themselves. Perhaps that is why so many of them were not in the bunker when we attacked.
I take another deep breath, and as I do so I vaguely remember the sensor. I look at it again and the orange dots are now larger, the walls of the bunker reflecting warm from the sun and the energy weapons. Two of the humans are still alive, and the only thing to be served on Amadeen is death.
Against the back of the firing gallery is a room. In it are six of the human beds, raised on legs, and draped with cloths. Three of the beds have bodies tossed across them. Three more bodies are crumpled on the floor near them. The ones on the beds carry knife wounds, the slashes and dismemberment unmistakable. The ones on the floor carry bullet wounds.
Another room to the left off the gallery is for food preparation. Nothing alive in there. The ones alive are hiding beneath the bed on the far right.
I place my weapon between my knees and hold it while I remove my helmet. The room smells foul, the human blood sickeningly sweet. Cement dust is in the air causing light filtering through cracks in the bunker to make dustbeams. The place is filled with greenflies, already feasting upon the pools of red human blood. Strange how the insects have an equal affinity for yellow Drac blood.
The Talman says that only form changes, nothing ever dies. It looks like a lot of death to me.
I look at the bed beneath which the two humans are hiding. There is a rifle on the tattered sheets, the stock shattered. The readout on my sensor shows one of the humans to be too small to be an adult. Of course, there are also very small humans called dwarfs and midgets who are just as deadly. Still, one of them might be a child.
Prisoners? By the bloody book, why burden myself with prisoners? It is so much less complicated if they simply die. Would they take me prisoner, or would they render me into muck and thank their bloody gods?
Perhaps they will, instead, kill me. It is time to ride the monster.
I hook my helmet onto my weapons belt. Holding my knife in my right hand, I place my left beneath the end of the bed. "Now is when you must kill me," I whisper.
I flip the bed over and bring my knife up to bear. All I can see is a single form. A human female from what I can see of her back. She is curled into a lump. She is not armed. "Get up," I order in English. "Get up and face me."
She doesn’t comply. Instead she shakes her head back and forth, a human sign of resistance. "Get up," I repeat.
I reach down to grab her shoulder, my knife pointing at her head. Just before I touch her, I hear a baby cry.
So easy to have a soft heart.
So easy to say, here is a parent and child. Take pity, Ro. What has a mere baby done to you? Have mercy.
How many Dracs have had their wombs ripped open, their barely formed children dangled by their umbilicals before the still-living eyes of their parents? How many humans have smashed the heads of how many Drac children upon rocks and exchanged money bets upon how far the blood splashes?
With all of my strength I grab her shoulder and throw her onto her back, her baby still clutched in her arms. I lift my knife to cut them both in two, then I see the baby. It is a Drac baby only a few days old.
The woman’s eyes stare at my face. Tears make her eyes glitter in the half dark. She knows she is about to die. She knows the baby is about to die. "Please," she whimpers. "Please."
What about the dead, I want to ask her. What about all of the dead? And how did you acquire a Drac infant, woman? Whose womb did you slit? Filthy, hairy, foul-smelling thing, what right do you have to ask pity from me?
I say none of it. I gesture toward the infant with my knife and say something very stupid. "It is not human."
She shakes her head. "No," she answers. "It’s mine."
Mine.
It’s mine.
I lower myself until I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, my knife across my knees. A howl begins from inside me, from deep beneath the core of my soul. It expands until it fills every crack and crevice of my being. When the pressure is more than mere will can contain, it explodes from my mouth. A bellow, a scream, a cry.
I cry for them, the human female and the abandoned Drac infant. I cry for the Twelve, for my parent and siblings. I cry for Planet Amadeen, and for one of its many weary soldiers, Yazi Ro.
TWO
"Its name is Suritok Nan. Its parent told me just before it died. Fourth in its line, but its parent told me none of the line names. No one will be able to piece them together now."
We sit outside the bunker on the rubble, the woman cleaning the face of the Drac child on her lap. I sit watching her, my mind far from a decision about her continued existence.
Her skin is smooth and the color of mud, the hair on her head short, black, and curled. She too has ear flaps and that bulb of a human nose, all of those fingers. The Drac child’s skin is the color of sunlight, its face smooth, hairless, and puffed with birth fat. I can see, though, that the woman only sees a child; that the child only sees a parent. It is something I cannot even imagine existing, but there it is. I look away. The woman and the child are not the only things that have been left undone. I must find the bodies of my comrades, take their Talmans, destroy their weapons.