"Here they come!" Farlo screamed and dropped the mortar round he was about to load. His eyes glittered with excitement in anticipation of the kill. He raised his ion rifle and took slow, deliberate aim at the first of three women. He intended to pick them off one by one. Then he would aim for the last moving target, a lone man carrying a small child under one arm.
Raider Orin Hart looked on with a combination of horror and outrage at what was happening. He was disgusted by the obvious pleasure Farlo took in killing, yet he couldn't look away. Orin prayed the women and man could run fast enough while he fought inside himself about what part he should play in the events before him.
Before Farlo could fire, the fair haired woman hit him in the chest with a wide beam from her hand laser. The shot took out most of his heart and lungs in the blink of an eye. The four refugees ran toward the small hovercraft about twenty meters from the low dome of their underground dwelling. It was a desperate, last-chance effort to escape the Tregans' attack.
Clenching his jaw until it ached, Orin kept praying that they would make it in time. He watched indifferently, however, as more of his comrades in arms fell in the deadly exchange of weapon fire. All he cared was that he was not one of them.
"No!" The word escaped as a guttural sound from deep in his throat. He saw two of the women cut down barely a meter from the craft. Then the man fell, dropping the little boy as gently as he could as he was dying.
Orin grunted in rage as he saw Damon taking aim at the little Zevian woman. She was completely defenseless as she paused to snatch up the child in mid-flight. Something snapped in Orin Hart as he realized she and the little boy would be killed, too.
Without considering the consequences, he raised his rifle for the first time since his company began its attack on the desert agricomplex about an hour before. He fired again and again ... on his own comrades.
The bronze skinned woman stumbled into the open craft, dodging rifle fire with the little boy still clutched in her arms. When the last man fell, Orin stood alone on the small rise. He watched tiny craft as it slowly rose into the air and shot off toward the west, disappearing over the horizon.
After he had taken time to bury the two women and the man, Orin decided to follow the woman and the boy. He knew they wouldn't make it across the desert alone in their badly damaged craft, and neither one looked fit for hiking.
The sun was high in the sky, nearing its red phase when he started his trek across the barren desert plain of Zevus Mar. Except for the lush desert agricomplexes; most of Zevus Mar was desert. Other than a large cache of Verlian crystals used to make the fuel cells that powered most of the current space crafts, there was little else to attract Tregans to illegally raid the tiny desert planet.
There was nothing Orin wanted. The totalitarian Tregan Government had forced him into the Empire's army and made him come to this godforsaken place to kill innocent people for those valuable rocks. Only Orin Hart had never killed anyone until today. Unfortunately, the Tregan Commander would be highly displeased by his actions . . . Enough so to provide Orin with an eminently slow and painful death---if they ever caught him.
As he was trudging out across the desert from the lush, green agricomplex, pushing steadily on---far into the desert, Orin wondered which of his reasons for leaving pushed him on with more determination. Was he more afraid of dying at twenty-four, or that the woman and boy wouldn't make it to the next oasis? When he found their downed hovercraft abandoned in the middle of the desert just after dawn, he realized it was the latter.
Sometime later, he spotted them in the distance, still nearly an hour's walk from the next complex. Considering that they would see only the Tregan uniform he wore, Orin approached cautiously. The child didn't sense his presence until his massive two-meter frame cast a formidable shadow over the two of them. A look of pure terror contorted his elfin features, and the little boy sobbed, tugging desperately at the bare arm of his fallen companion.
"Nalina! Nalina! He's here. He found us. Please---get up. We have to run." In desperation, the tiny boy reached for the laser on the belt slung loosely around Nalina's slim waist. But Orin clamped a big hand around his wrist and plucked the weapon from the boy's hand.
The boy landed a startling blow to Orin's cheek where the visor of his combat helmet didn't cover, then started to kick and scream in three languages for all he was worth. He couldn't wrench free from Orin's tight but gentle hold on him.
"I won't hurt you. I won't hurt you," Orin repeated in accented Aledan, one of three predominant languages used in trade on Zevus Mar. Gently, awkwardly, Orin cuddled the sobbing child against his shoulder, speaking softly to him in soothing tones like his own mother used to do with him when he was little.
With the child still clutched under one arm, Orin leaned forward and put his hand to Nalina's throat to feel for a pulse. It was faint but steady. Judging from her sun burnt skin, exposed by a frothy gown and dainty sandals, Orin figured she was probably overcome by heat exhaustion and exposure. She was clearly not accustomed to the physical hardships of the desert as he had become since his forced induction into the Tregan Army.
He sat the little boy on the ground beside him and knelt at the woman's side. He turned her over carefully, cradling her dark head on one arm, and brushed the dirt from her mouth and nose. Reaching for his canteen, he sprinkled a few drops of precious water on her parched lips. As she became conscious, she swallowed a few sips of water then lost consciousness again.
"Can you walk little one?" Orin asked the boy.
He nodded. "You talk funny," the boy remarked and paused to study him curiously through large violet eyes. "And I can't read you either. I should be able to read you like I could my father and co-mothers and Nalina."
Orin shook his head as he understood what the child meant. "I was bred to resist telepathic mind scans and most types of mind probing. I'll tell you about it later. Right now, we've got to get your friend out of the sun. Since you can walk, I'll carry her, and we'll go to that agricomplex. See it over there?" Orin pointed, resting his hand on the boy's shoulder. "We should be able to find water and shelter there."
"You didn't come to kill us?" the child asked suddenly. "No." Orin shook his head grimly. "I quit being a soldier. I'm sick of the senseless killing. I just want to help you and her if I can."
"What's your name?" the boy asked, watching him lift Nalina's slender form into his arms with no great effort.
"Orin Hart. And yours?"
"Lanimer."
"Well, Lanimer, let's go." Without another word, Orin started walking. Lanimer had to triple-step to keep up with the big man, but he made no complaints. Although the young telepath couldn't actually read Orin's mind, he was still somewhat sensitive to the big man's vibes. Lanimer felt that he could trust him. Even when Orin knew Lanimer meant to kill him, he didn't hurt him afterward. A real Tregan would have killed him.
Almost an hour later, Orin gently set Nalina down on the grass in the shade while he went in search of water about the deserted oasis. He left little Lanimer with her to keep watch.
There was no pool near the charred hole where the dwelling had once stood, yet the grounds were still lush and green. Orin knew there must be a well somewhere. With just a pint of water left in his canteen, he wished he had taken the scanner from Farlo's pack before he fled. It certainly would have helped. Too late now, he would just have to look.
In a little while, Orin gave up temporarily and went back to where he'd left the woman and the boy. He shrugged off his full pack and jacket and threw down his heavy helmet, revealing a head of thick, tawny hair. Before he left again, he took up the three weapons---two hand lasers and his ion rifle. Orin felt pretty certain that Nalina would take his presence the same way Lanimer had a first, and he wasn't in the mood to have a hole burned through his back.
After nearly an hour of walking in a wider and wider perimeter around the bombed out buildings, Orin finally found the sheltered mound that held the artesian well's auxiliary pump in a half buried concrete bunker.
There was a heavy metal door without a lock at its entrance. Orin moved toward it cautiously, pressing his ear to the cold metal as he drew his blaster. When he flung open the door, the light streaming in from the sun revealed a cool, damp room about three by four meters. There were a large pump and a mass of pipes at the far end, but space enough in front of the apparatus to provide adequate shelter. Orin quickly found the water outlet and filled his canteen, hiding his two extra weapons before he returned to Nalina and Lanimer.
Nalina was conscious but disoriented. She didn't recognize Orin as a Tregan Raider. She saw only a man whose gentle hands pushed back her hair and held her head so she could drink from the cool water in the canteen that he held to her lips. Murmuring something in Zevian, she drifted back into her feverish sleep.
When he had moved his charges to the shelter of the bunker, Orin pulled his compressed sleeping pallet from the pack and inflated it to make a comfortable bed for Nalina. After that, he gave Lanimer some food wafers from his rations. Then there was little else to do but wait.
For nearly three days and nights, Orin waited while Nalina lay in a fevered delirium, taking food and water less often than he thought she should. He sat for hours, watching her restless sleep and bathing her delicate face with a cool, moist cloth.
She isn't really pretty, Orin thought, but she has a nice face. Her hair could be beautiful if it weren't all tangled like that.
Nalina was a native Zevian, a member of a golden skinned race that had originally colonized the desert planet. Darkened by the Zevian sun, her skin was now a rich coppery brown, somewhat darker than Orin's own tanned fair skin.
Orin guessed that Lanimer's family were more recent transplants from one of the older colonies on Belderon or Aledus. The child would never say, but it was clear he wasn't a native even if he could speak the language like one.
"Is Nalina ever going to get better?" Lanimer asked on the third day as Orin sponged her face yet another time.
"I hope so," Orin answered in a grim tone. How the hell should I know? He was no physician. He had been a farmer before the Tregans dragged him from the only home he'd ever known.
"She can't die. Mother told me that she would take care of me before she died, and it was Father's wish, too. It came to me here." He pointed to his head. "... Before their essence left their bodies. Nalina has to be all right. She just has to."
"I'm doing the best I can," Orin told him. "But I don't have much medicine in my pack, and what I have isn't much good to Nalina. All we can do is wait."
Lanimer nodded thoughtfully. "Do you have parents, Orin?"
"I did once." Orin frowned and sadness filled his eyes. "I wasn't supposed to. Laboratory bred fighting stock aren't raised like other children. Only my host mother ran away from Tregas and the project before I was born. She settled on one of the farm colonies inside Federation Territory. The Tregans seized control of that system a few months ago, and they found me. The authorities hauled me away, but my mother and father escaped. I don't know where they are or if they still live." Orin sighed.
"They tried to make me a soldier . . . Tried to make me forget they tore me from my home. But all of their training and brainwashing couldn't make me forget or make me like the others ...." Orin stopped suddenly. His eyes narrowed, and his mouth tightened at the unspoken memories of torture that clouded his thoughts.
"Why?"
"I don't really know." Orin shrugged and slowly came back to the present. "The brainwashing didn't work. They couldn't make me a killer for their reasons---and it makes me sick to watch the others kill for pleasure. Killing isn't fun at all---not even when you think you have a good reason---I know that now."
"You killed the other Tregans, didn't you?" Lanimer asked suddenly.
"Yeah. It was the only way. I just couldn't watch them kill you and Nalina. "They had no right ...."
"I wish you had killed them before they killed my father and co-mothers. I wish they didn't die ...." Lanimer's eyes grew bright with tears that he blinked away, trying to hide them from his new friend. He wasn't a baby anymore.
"So do I, kid," he murmured huskily against the sudden tightness in his throat. "So do I."