Braddock turned to Mackenzie. “Looks like Father Hernandez got his bloody miracle, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, still not believing the incredible ferocity and power of the man who now knelt quietly among the dead. “I guess so.” Somewhere down the line of Marines, huddled against the stone of the chest-high wall, someone vomited, and Jodi fiercely restrained the urge to do the same.
“What do we do now?” Braddock asked, clutching his pulse rifle like a security blanket.
Jodi licked her lips, but there was no moisture in her mouth, her tongue dry as a dead, sun-bleached lizard carcass.
“Oh, shit,” she murmured to herself. There was only one thing they could do. She began to undo her helmet and the web gear that held her remaining weapons and ammunition. “I want you to keep everyone down, out of sight, unless I call for help,” she told him.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, suddenly afraid that she really had flipped. “You’re not going out there by yourself, are you?” he asked, incredulous. “After what we just saw?”
Shrugging out of her armor, glad to be free again from its clinging embrace, Jodi smiled with courage she didn’t feel inside and said, “That’s the point, Braddock. After what I just saw, I have no intention of giving him the idea that I’m a Bad Guy. I don’t know how he’s choosing his enemies, since he just waxed a wagon-load of what I suppose are – were – his own people. But walking up to him with a bunch of weapons in hand doesn’t seem too bright.” Finally free of all the encumbrances demanded by modern warfare, she fixed Braddock with a look of concern that failed to mask her fear. “If he polished off that crowd by himself,” she said quietly, “we wouldn’t stand a chance against him should he decide to turn on us. I don’t know who – or what – he is, but he scares the piss out of me, and I want to do everything I can to try and get us on his good side before he starts looking for some more trouble to get into.”
Standing up, she put her hands on top of the wall. She did not have the patience to walk the fifteen yards to the bolted gates. “Give me a boost, will you?”
“You’re nuts, el-tee,” Braddock grumbled as he made a stirrup with his hands to help lift her over the wall.
“Look at it this way,” she told him as she clambered to the top. “At least he’s human. Besides,” she went on with faked cheerfulness as she dropped to the ground on the far side, “I know his name. Maybe he’ll take me out for a beer.”
Worried like an older brother whose sister has a date with a known psychopath, Braddock kept an uneasy watch through the sight of his pulse rifle. He kept the cross hairs centered on the strange warrior’s head, as Jodi slowly made her way toward the bridge and the silent, alien figure that knelt there.
The closer she got to the bridge, the faster Jodi’s forced upbeat attitude evaporated. She was excited, which was good in a way, but she was also terrified after what she had just witnessed. The memory of this man holding her captive only a little while ago, holding her closer than she had ever allowed a man to hold her, overshadowed all her other thoughts. It was also a sliver of hope: he had not harmed her then, and she prayed to whatever deity might listen that he would not harm her now.
As she stepped onto the old stone blocks and saw more closely the destruction that lay just a few meters away, she stopped. The thought that one individual, wielding what she had always considered to be a very primitive weapon, a sword, had shed so much blood in so brief a time, was beyond her understanding.
But looking at Reza now, she saw no trace of the monstrous killing machine that had slain her enemies only minutes before. He appeared bowed under, crushed by some incredible pressure, as if his spirit was that of an old, broken man.
Stepping gingerly around the ravaged Kreelan bodies, Jodi slowly made her way toward him.
“Reza,” she said quietly from a meter or so away, trying not to startle him.
After a moment, he slowly lifted his head to look at her, and she cringed at the blood that had spattered onto his armor and his face, coating him like a layer of crimson skin. He stared at her with his unblinking green eyes, and she began to tremble at what she saw there, not out of fear, but with compassion for another human being’s pain. Kneeling beside him, she took the sweat-stained bandanna from around her neck and began to gently wipe some of the dark Kreelan blood from his face. “It’s okay now,” she soothed. “Everything will be all right now.”
Reza did not understand her words, but her feelings were as plain to him as if they had been written in stone. He had found a friend.
Eighteen
Fleet Admiral Hercule L’Houillier was not by nature an excitable man. Small in stature, but with the courage – or so some said, and he would sometimes allow himself to believe – of a lion, he had survived many long years of combat by maintaining his composure and his wits in the most desperate situations. His war record and an instinctive political savvy eventually had placed him in the position of Supreme Commander of the Confederation High Command, the highest military posting in the human sphere.
But today, during the emotional discussions and heated arguments that had swept over his staff and the other assembled notables sitting around the table, his normally placid demeanor had been shaken with the possibilities and responsibilities that now lay before him. Around him, the other members of the hastily assembled commission continued to argue while L’Houillier remained content to listen. He would take the floor when he judged the time was right.
“I tell you, this is the first and only opportunity of its kind! We must take full advantage of it, regardless of the consequences for a single individual.” Major General Tensch, a notable conservative on the crisis council that had been convened to review the situation, had echoed his sentiments with the dedication of a modern-day Cato. “The destruction of–”
“Yes, general, we know,” interrupted a woman with close-cropped blond hair who wore an extremely expensive – and attractive – suit of red silk. “‘The destruction of the enemy is the first and only priority,’” Melissa Savitch, a delegate from the General Counsel’s office, finished for him, rolling her eyes in disgust. “Your single-minded approach to the issue has been well noted on numerous occasions, general. However, there is more at stake here than the information you can pull from this man like juice squeezed from a grapefruit. Until we have all the facts at our disposal, we just don’t know what we’re dealing with, and this office will not support the kind of action you are advocating.” Looking around the table, careful to make eye contact with every one of the people gathered around her, she went on, “I would like to remind you, all of you, that we are discussing the future and well-being of a Confederation citizen here, not one of the enemy.”
“I think that has yet to be determined, Ms. Savitch,” interjected T’nisha Matabele, a young aide to Senator Sirikwa. She was standing in for the senator who was at the moment dozens of parsecs away on Achilles and unable to return in time for the meeting. “There is no evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, as your office loves to quote, that this – what’s his name – Reza Gard was forcibly abducted by the enemy.” She paused, confident now that she had everyone’s attention. She did not bother to feel foolish for momentarily forgetting the subject’s name. That wasn’t important. “At this point, there is no way at all to prove his identity, even if we had a DNA sample right here. All we have is a report that he presented local Marine Corps authorities with a letter allegedly written by a war hero who died over fifteen years ago in an enemy attack that has never been explained in terms of motive or method. Any records on this Reza Gard were destroyed there, and the chances of stumbling across any validating birth or orphanage records on another planet are slim, to say the least. In my estimation, the entire affair is simply too convenient. I think the enemy is trying to lead us on somehow.” She looked around the table, daring anyone to contradict her assessment of the situation. “While I sympathize with Counselor Savitch’s position,” she went on smoothly, wearing her conceit like an overpriced perfume, “I firmly believe, and am going to recommend to the senator as our course of action, that a deep-core brain scan is the best approach to deal with this… problem.”