Expendable - James Alan Gardner [42]
The admiral couldn’t do the work either. Whatever strength let him carry Yarrun into the woods had dissolved the moment I arrived. Now his face looked like brown chalk; his breathing sounded too deliberate, as if he was forcing himself to keep control. I gave him some excuse about wanting to deal with Yarrun myself and he didn’t object. He simply sat against a tree and watched with weary eyes as I did what had to be done.
Pushing Yarrun into the log.
Forcing his helpless body inside, among the ants and beetles and fungus.
Smelling the odor of punky wood strong in my nostrils, the scent mixed with the tang of Yarrun’s blood and my own stink.
Toward the end, it occurred to me to lock my own helmet onto Yarrun’s tightsuit, encasing him completely so that carrion-eaters would not sniff him out. Then I finished cramming the corpse into the shadows, stuffing the end of the log with dead leaves until I could no longer see him.
When it was all over—when I had done what I had to, and what I could—I turned away and threw up.
“That’s what fucking ‘expendable’ means,” I said as I wiped my mouth. “That’s what it really means.”
Impeccable Timing
Chee took my arm as we walked back to the landing site. I thought he was going to try to comfort me again; but he simply needed the support.
“You shouldn’t have carried him all that way,” I said.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “The kindest thing.”
“But it took too much out of you.”
He shrugged. “It gave me something to do. I woke up hours before you did.”
“You got knocked out too? How? You don’t have a throat mike.”
“They must have planted something on me earlier,” he answered. “Maybe they slipped it into my food back on the Golden Cedar. A little radio-controlled capsule no bigger than a grain of salt—the High Council loves to develop crap like that. Those bastards desperately need toys; and if the League of Peoples won’t let them build guns, they build nonlethal junk instead. Same time they triggered your throat-set, they put me to sleep too.”
“Mm.” Of course, the Admiralty would have to silence all of us at the same time; otherwise, there would be calls for help…demands for rescue. The Jacaranda would not be able to refuse a direct mayday, but if we all went off the air at once, Fleet policy was clear and precise. Don’t send more people into unknown danger. Report the situation and let your superiors decide what to do.
Our wonderful, benevolent superiors.
Chee’s grip around my neck tightened. “Ramos? I’ve been thinking of a lot of things since I got here. Old times.” He shuddered. “Maybe the council was right to dump me. My memory comes and goes—a lot of the time, when I’m making a spectacle of myself, it’s because I suddenly can’t remember who I am. It’s not like I forget my name, but I forget…important things in the past. You know? Things I sure as hell should have told you. But sometimes the memories just weren’t inside my head; and sometimes the memories were there, but the courage wasn’t.”
“Courage?” I thought he was rambling.
“It’s hard admitting past…failures. Ignoble surrenders. The times you should have been smarter, or braver…”
He stumbled over a stick hidden by leaves. I kept him from falling, but it took all my strength—he hadn’t made any effort to save himself.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He didn’t reply.
A thought struck me. “When was your last YouthBoost?”
“Two weeks, Ramos. One thing you can say for the council, they have impeccable timing.”
“Shit.”
“Oh Shit,” he corrected.
At Chee’s age, two weeks was the longest he could go between Boosts. Without a shot, he’d go downhill fast…and it didn’t help that he’d been drugged into unconsciousness, then wasted his strength carrying Yarrun a couple hundred meters. His entire metabolism must be stressed to the limit—a metabolism that would soon start feeling its full century and a half.
“How can they do this to you?” I demanded. “Sending you here in this condition was…sorry, but it was a death sentence.”
“The League won’t permit outright killing,” Chee answered, “but they