Oh, yes, remember them all, Staffa. Remember, we laughed as we killed them. Hear the jokes in your damned ears? No wonder the shades haunt your horror-filled nightmares. And what if this is only my beginning?
She shrugged. "My maid died in my place. When his troops had ceased raping me, they sold me. A broker bought me and I ended up here. Had a nice household to work in until the landlord jumped me one night. Maybe I was tired of rape. I killed him and wound up here. Now Anglo rapes me every night and can't convince myself to die simply for the pleasure of killing him, too." She paused, her mouth gone into that hard pinch, the lines about her eyes deepening.
"And all this is the fault of the Companions?" He raised an eyebrow, a tingle of loneliness growing in his breast.
She snickered sarcastically. "That water we just crawled out of is Myklenian honey compared to the foulness that runs in their pus-choked veins. Them and Tybalt."
Staffa lowered his gaze at the hatred in her contralto voice. Why did this woman's words sting so? Maybe because she'd had the guts to crawl into that sewer. And I put her here?
She remained silent as the car swept them beyond the square buildings on the outskirts and into the open fields of the fanning community: Square plots of green tied to the
oasis of water. Ahead, on the horizon, he could see the glare from the fabled white sands of Etaria.
Perhaps there is justice in the universe, Staffa thought bitterly. He glanced up at the sun where it blazed out of a brassy sky and he sat in silence, soul as desolate as the endless sands they now flew over. The heat beat down unmercifully.
They crossed a line of sief dunes and dropped in a whirlwind of blowing sand beside a ditching crew. A hovercraft could be seen skimming in from the north, a long load of pipe dangling below it.
"Out," Morlai muttered.
Staffa winced as the sand burned into his raw feet. Kaylla had no such trouble; her bronzed legs and callused feet seemed inured to the terrain. Staffa could feel his white flesh turning red.
"Morlai! About time." A redheaded officer walked out from under a tarp. "What took you?"
"Picked up a new man and had a plugged sewer."
The redhead put a hand on Moa's shoulder. "Glad you finally made it. Have your people load the bodies. Cave-in this morning. Took half an hour to bank the sand and dig them out."
Six corpses, five men and one woman, lay bloating in the hot sun. Staffa followed Kaylla's lead as she bent to pick up the first one's feet. One by one they carried them to the aircar.
"Must have been deep in the trench," she told him, grunting.
"How's that?" Staffa asked, slinging the third body into the aircar.
"If it's shallow," she told him blandly, "they blow out a pocket and bury them. If it's deep, they pull tem out to clean up the trench. Morlai will kick them overboard halfway back to town."
"You seem unconcerned. It could be us next time." He bent to pick up the last.
"Might," she agreed. "Incidentally, this guy we're carrying was the Maikan ambassador to Tybalt. How's that for justice?"
Staffa looked into the sand-packed features of the man.
A curious foreboding began to corrode his self confidence. Death came so easily among slaves.
"Then he's one you can't blame on the Lord Commander," Staffa muttered as
he followed her back to the shade of the tarp while Moriai talked to the redhead.
She gave him a shrug. "Maybe not," she sighed, "but if I could have any wish, I'd like to see him here in this pain and heat and filth."
Perhaps you have more of God's ear than you know, Kaylla.
That night, looking up at the star-shot heavens, he saw a ship move into orbit and remembered Kaylla's words. The stars mocked him in the desert silence. He rolled over on the sleeping mat they'd given him and curled into a fetal ball. His last exhausted thoughts lingered on Skyla and how the light gleamed in her ice-blond hair.
The ghosts, the shades of the restless dead, didn't come until later. Terror brought him bolt upright in the sand. Blinking, he looked around, skin prickling as if ten thousand eyes stared in hatred.
Gasping in deep breaths, he realized that only Kaylla watched him, her eyes slitted where she lay in a hollowed spot several meters away.
Pinching his eyes shut, he settled himself again. Damnation by the dead — horrid as it was — weighed less than the hatred of the living. The dead had ceased to feel.
In the swirling midst of assaults and flanking fire, the Rebels died or fell screaming; but for the most part they ghosted away, scaling the mountain, taking bone-breaking paths down the rocks by sneaking past the Regan fire control positions and vanishing into the night. And at last, Sinklar ringed the remaining Targan core and demanded their surrender, his net drawn closed.
Dust and smoke burned the morning sun blood red. Sinklar squinted down toward where the last of the broken Rebel force had fled, trailing wounded and dead off into the smoke-purpled shadows west of the pass. The scenic setting had been sundered. The rough country off to the west look oddly pastoral compared to the devastation
wrought in his immediate vicinity. None of the pines remained. The brush had been scorched to ash. The rock had been scrubbed by blaster bolts and gravity disruption. The very earth had been churned.
He pulled his flask from his hip and tipped it so the last drops of energy-rich drink dribbled onto his hot dry tongue.
"Shiksta?" he rasped, vocal cords strained from the orders he'd bellowed during the heat of the fray.
"Here, Sink." That brief statement carried an incredible eloquence of exhaustion and strain and drained emotion.
"Did you get Kaspa? Did you raise headquarters?" Sinklar settled himself on a blaster-cracked rock, hardly aware of the heat radiating into his battle armor. Below him, Gretta followed her people as they combed the rocks for wounded or stunned Rebels. The blasters occasionally crackled in the still dusty air. Or, on rarer occasions, some dazed Rebel got prodded to his feet to be sent staggering under guard toward the perimeter to join the two hundred and some captives.
"Got them Sink. Somebody's confused. I can't get Division first Atkin. They keep wanting to transfer me to Second Division instead."
"Rot them all! We've got wounded to evacuate! Sinklar shouted into the morning air. "We've got over two hundred prisoners!"
"I know that, sir. I told them. They said they'd send a couple of LCs out." Shiksta's voice had gone dull, too tired to care if his sergeant raged at him.
"A couple of LCs?" Sink's anger deflated into despair. He dropped his head in his hands and rubbed his gritty grime-smudged face. A couple of silly LCs? He needed a thrice-cursed squad! How long since he'd slept? His belly thundered with hunger. His head hammered with a sudden ache behind his swollen eyes.
He must have dozed because Gretta's hand on his shoulder brought him wide awake, blinking and starting in the bright morning light.
"You all right?" she asked as she took his hands in hers. Her blue eyes looked pale and haggard in the sunlight.
He nodded numbly. "Tired."
"LCs are here. Mac put the wounded on the first and loaded a batch of prisoners on the second. They called for
more to complete the evacuation." Her expression soured. "They want you in Kaspa — soonest."
He sighed, wondering if the odor of smoke and death would leave a permanent taste in his mouth. On a sudden impulse he asked, "Want a chance at a hot bath, clean armor, and maybe a night on a real sleeping platform?"
"Thought you'd never ask!"
They slept during the flight into Kaspa.