Children No More-ARC

  CHILDREN NO MORE-ARC

  A Jon & Lobo novel

  Mark L. Van Name

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Mark L. Van Name

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1188

  Wake Forest, NC 27588

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4391-3365-4

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-3365-1

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, August 2010

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: t/k

  Printed in the United States of America

  To David Drake

  Who understands

  Chapter 1

  Near the jump gate of planet Hardy

  "If I show you, you'll be in."

  Alissa Lim, the woman in the holo floating in the still air in front of me, paused and stared intently ahead, confident I would be listening, sure I would be focusing on her.

  She was right. I was.

  "I don't know where you are," she continued, "or when you'll find one of these messages, so maybe it'll be too late, and you won't have to make this decision."

  Another long pause. Another focused stare.

  "But if it's not, and if you watch any of the attachments, you'll find me, and you'll argue with me, but in the end you'll join me. That's even what I want, obviously, or I wouldn't have planted these recordings on every planet I could manage, but I guess I felt—" she hung her head "—I felt that you should know I have a sense of what getting involved might cost you. If I didn't think we needed you, I wouldn't ask, but we do. We need you, and we need Lobo."

  "Freeze it," I said.

  "Done," Lobo said, his voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, "but all that remains is a few seconds of her standing there."

  I got out of the pilot couch and approached the holo slowly, as if Lim might spring from it and attack me. Lobo had positioned it exactly in the center of his front cabin command area and angled her face toward me. He rotated it as I moved, until I said, "Leave it." I walked around it, examining the image from all sides.

  "There's nothing else to learn," Lobo said. "If someone made Alissa do this, they were wise enough to rinse this part of the recording of everything except her."

  Lim wore a plain black jumpsuit, no visible pockets, no logos, almost certainly armored. On most people it would have faded into the kind of bland garment you pass in a crowd and never notice. On her, it accented perfectly the richer, darker black of her long, straight hair, the almost glowing mellow golden tone of her skin, her full and wide and ever so slightly reddish lips. She was as astonishingly beautiful as the last time I'd seen her, a bit over three years ago.

  When she'd rescued me from a torturer.

  When she'd gotten shot helping me save a girl I'd inadvertently placed in harm's way.

  I owed her, and she knew it.

  I settled back into the pilot's couch.

  "Turn off the lights," I said.

  "You could heed her warning and stop watching," Lobo said. "We could jump to another planet and pretend we never saw this."

  "You know better," I said. Lobo wasn't just my ship, nor was he simply the most capable artificial intelligence ever created. He was also, after three years together, my closest friend.

  "Yes, I do," he said.

  The lights winked out.

  For a moment, I sat in total blackness. The soft couch gave me the illusion of floating in a silent, dark, and still nothingness, much as Lobo and I were suspended in space near the jump gate for Hardy, the planet where I'd spent the last six months staying as far from the attention of any planetary coalition as I could and wondering what to do next.

  "Play the first one," I said.

  Chapter 2

  Rebel jungle base, outside Ventura, planet Tumani

  "This devil helped the Tumani government kill your parents," the large man said.

  Easily the same two meters tall that I am, but at least twenty kilos heavier than my own hundred, the copper-skinned man spoke in a booming voice that matched well with his size.

  "Are you going to let him get away with that crime—with all those crimes?"

  No one answered.

  The man paced back and forth in front of a pale gray tree whose half-meter-diameter trunk stretched limbless from the ground to far above what I could see. The entire image shook slightly, as if the person recording it was trembling in fear. Whoever had edited this holo had left in panting that further suggested the recorder had been terrified.

  Tied to the tree with quick-clasp cables around his neck, waist, wrists, knees, and ankles was a darker man at least a head shorter and no more than half the weight of his captor. The man shook his head back and forth, his eyes bulging with effort, but the rag in his mouth stifled his attempts to scream. Strangled, unintelligible sounds emerged, more animal cries than words.

  "Are you?" the larger man screamed.

  The image jerked right and left as the recorder scanned the clearing. On both sides stood boys, at least two dozen of them, dressed in dirt-streaked and torn gray and green and tan and brown shorts and shirts, few with shoes, all at least as thin as the man tied to the tree, all visibly hungry, afraid, and angry, their faces tight with tension. The smallest couldn't have been a whole meter and a half tall, while the biggest was no taller than the terrified captive. They all looked younger than eighteen. Many appeared to be prepubescent. All were just kids, kids who should have been spending their days growing up with their families, climbing in trees, not watching the useless struggling of a man bound to one.

  "We are soldiers," the captor said, waving his arm to take in people on either side of him, people I could not see, "soldiers who rescued you before this man and his fellow criminals could kill you as they killed your families." He lowered his voice. "And now you are soldiers, too, safe with us, your new brothers." He spoke louder again as he added, "Does a brother let anyone who hurts his brother go unpunished?"

  He stared at each of them in turn, pausing a second on each face, his expression calm and resolute and strong. When he finished sweeping across the boys, he faced forward and screamed, his mouth twisting with rage, "No!"

  Wordless murmuring all around.

  He pointed again at the prisoner, who was now straining so hard against his bonds that muscles and veins stood out all over his body. "So I ask you, brothers, soldiers, men of the families this man stole from you: Will you let him get away with his crime?"

  "No!" a boy screamed. The image jerked to focus on one of the tallest of the kids. "No!" he said again.

  The large man nodded in satisfaction.

  "No," a small, pale boy standing next to the first responder said, his voice barely audible, tears making his eyes glisten. "My family is gone."

  The large man approached the little boy, kneeled in front of him, and put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Yes," he said, "the government devils—this demon" he pointed at the captive without taking his eyes off the boy "and his evil friends took away your loved ones." He stood, keeping his hand on the child's shoulder. "But now you have a new family. You have all of us." He turned the boy to face the others as his hand again swept through the air to encompass them all. "And will we let your suffering go unavenged?"

&nb
sp; "No!" several boys yelled.

  "Will we let the demons get away with murdering his family?"

  "No!" more voices screamed.

  "With killing all of your families?"

  "No! No! No!" The others joined, and the answer became a chant.

  The captor held up his hand.

  The boys quieted.

  "Who will be the first," the man said, "to show this government demon that he cannot break us, that no matter what he does to us or to our families, our brotherhood will prove too strong for him? Who will be first?" He looked down at the small boy standing next to him. He removed his hand from the boy's shoulder. "Who will it be?"

  The boy wiped his eyes and looked up at the man. "I will," he said, his voice quavering.

  The large man smiled and rubbed the top of the boy's head. "We have a warrior!" he said. "Size and age mean nothing to a soldier as strong and brave as this one." He ran his hand over the boy's head again, but this time he let it linger there long enough to turn the boy to face the captive. He advanced on the prisoner, his hand still guiding the boy, the boy trailing him with the unsure motion of one walking while not yet quite awake.

  When he and the boy were so close to the captive that they were almost touching the now sobbing man, he stopped and stepped away from the boy.

  "Hit him," the large man said. "Hit him for your family, for yourself, for all of us."

  The boy raised his fist but looked into the eyes of the captive and paused.

  "Hit him!" the large man screamed. "For your new brothers! So they all, all of the government demons, all of the people who killed your parents and brothers and sisters understand that we will stand together against them!" The boy looked at him for a moment. The man nodded and said, "Hit him!"

  The boy punched the prisoner in the stomach with the tentative, weak blow of a young child, his fist not even fully balled, the strike barely moving the writhing captive's shirt.

  The other boys whooped and yelled and cheered.

  "Who will join this warrior," the large man screamed, "in carrying our message to those who would hurt us, who would hurt our brothers?"

  "I will," said the tall boy who had first responded. He ran forward without prompting and hit the captive hard in the gut.

  The prisoner sagged as much as he could against his bonds.

  The boys cheered again.

  The little boy stared at the bigger boy and hit the prisoner again, this time harder.

  The boys yelled, wordless animal sounds.

  "Join them!" the large man screamed. "All of you! Show them your power as soldiers, as brothers!"

  One boy stepped forward, then another, and another, and in seconds all of them were racing forward, yelling and waving their fists. They fell upon the prisoner like a tsunami breaking on a shore. The recorder rushed after them, lagging most of the boys but now with them, a fist waving in front of the image, one more fist to join the barrage pummeling the captive, who no longer moved.

  The crowd parted long enough for me to see the blood-soaked prisoner, small bloodied fists pounding over and over and over into him, and then it froze, the frenzied beating boys and the tree-tied corpse motionless in the air in front of me.

  Chapter 3

  Near the jump gate of planet Hardy

  "Clear it," I whispered. "Leave the lights off."

  Blackness surrounded me. In Lobo's soundless interior, sitting in complete darkness, I still closed my eyes, as if doing so could somehow wipe away the traces of what I'd just watched. Dampness squeezed from under my eyelids and wetted my cheeks. I don't cry. I haven't since the day on Dump when I swore I'd never again give anyone the satisfaction of watching me sob, but sometimes I tear up, usually not knowing I've done so until I feel the moisture on my cheeks or realize that the world in front of me has blurred.

  I shook my head slightly. Either Lim's recording was real and she needed my help, or someone was playing me. The first order of business was to determine which.

  "You've checked the entire recording—not just what I watched, but all of it—for remnants?" I said.

  "Please," Lobo said, the sarcasm in his voice turning the word into two syllables, "what do you think I am? Some household comm antique with hundred-year-old software stupid enough to let a virus-laden message inside its firewall? Surely—"

  I cut him off. "I know, I know," I said. "You're a hyper-intelligent Predator-Class Assault Vehicle whose every molecule is a nano-enhanced computing system. Sometimes, though, it helps me to understand a problem if I work through the obvious questions."

  "If that's easier for you than thinking intelligently," Lobo said, "who am I to ask you to strain yourself simply to spare me annoyance? Why worry about my psychological well-being? Sure, if I were to snap, I could destroy an entire planet in the throes of my justifiable rage, but you don't need to worry about that. I'll be fine."

  "What has gotten into you?" I said. "You're normally dramatic, but suicide talk? Since when have you considered suicide or even come close to losing control?"

  "I didn't say I was considering killing myself," he said, "and my control is, as you are well aware, perfect, like so much of the rest of me. I was merely pointing out the risks should I—"

  "Ah, I understand." I shook my head again, this time at my own slowness, knowing he could see me in IR. "You've already watched the other attachments, and you're distracting me from them."

  He said nothing.

  "I don't need you to protect me," I said, "and I sure don't want you deciding what I should and should not see."

  "Are you sure?" he said. This time, there was no sarcasm, no irony in his tone. "How do you imagine this can end?"

  "Maybe we can help Lim," I said. Only in the silence did I realize how loudly I'd spoken, how tight my jaw was.

  "Maybe we can," Lobo said, "but at what cost to us, to you? Does Alissa have any idea what she's asking? Do you even know where Tumani is?"

  Alissa Lim and I had served together in the Shosen Advanced Weapons Corporation, the Saw, a group that was for my money the best military force in the universe. We were leading our squads into a battle on Nana's Curse, a sparsely populated planet being raped by a fanatic army, to secure a small collection of huts that passed for a village. What we'd found instead of a fight was a horror show: a few pantless enemy soldiers, a stack of dead bodies, and several raped and killed children.

  We executed those men then and there. In the process, Lim lost something of herself. I'd had to pull her off the last of them and force her to leave.

  "Yes," I said, "yes Lim does." After a moment, I added, "And, no, I don't know anything about Tumani."

  "It's as sad and backward a planet as exists in all the human worlds," Lobo said. "Its one large land mass features a desert on the west, a coast of unusable cliff beaches on the right, and a vast jungle in the center. Other than wood, it has no special natural resources worth the cost of retrieving and shipping them. Its jump gate has two apertures, one that links to an Expansion Coalition planet and the other to a Frontier Coalition world. Its population is under three million, and they and it matter so little that neither the EC nor the FC has ever pressed them to join. It's an independent world no one wants."

  That was rare, because the three planetary coalitions were nothing if not acquisitive.

  "Fine, it's a pit of a planet. Why does that matter?"

  "Because we should know what we'd be risking ourselves for. Because not every fight on every planet is ours. Because whether the government or the rebels win their war is not our problem."

  "You think I don't know that?" I said, again louder than I'd intended. "And it's not about their war, not if I know Lim. It's about the children."

  "Of course it is," Lobo said, his affect completely flat.

  "We didn't seek this problem, but a friend brought it to us, and she asked us for help." I paused and forced myself to continue more calmly. "She asked us, and those children need someone. Are you suggesting we not go?"

&nb
sp; "Would it matter if I were?" Lobo said. "That's a rhetorical question; I already know the answer. And to answer your question, no, I'm not."

  I nodded my head and opened my eyes to directly confront the blackness. "Good. So let's get on with it. What else was in the data stream?"

  "Some contact info woven fairly cleverly among the images. Anyone who found one of these messages and managed to get by the authentication protocol would still have to work to find her."

  "Where does she want us to meet her?"

  "Macken."

  So she was still working where I'd last seen her, where she'd been shot helping me, where I'd met Lobo. I was surprised that three years later she was still there, but it had been a beautiful planet, and her security company had gotten the Frontier Coalition contract to police the colonized portions of that world. Though I'd always thought of her as being one of those people, like me, who never settles anywhere, I realized I had no basis for that assumption; I had projected my own feelings onto her.

  "Get us in the queue to jump," I said. "We're going there."

  "Executing."

  "How many more attachments?"

  "Two," Lobo said, "but if we're already committed to heading to Macken, there's no need to watch them."

  I was squeezing the arms of the couch so hard my forearms hurt. I forced myself to let go of them and put my hands in my lap. I took a long, slow breath.

  "Show me the next one."

  Chapter 4

  Unnamed village, outside Ventura, planet Tumani

  Gray and brown mottled the air in all directions. The viewpoint bobbed and spun as the recorder ran around the circumference of the rough circle that the dozen small huts formed. The wood and thatch structures oozed smoke like blood from wounds. Two still blazed here and there. Three boys and a grown man with blankets and fire extinguishers methodically exterminated the remaining flames.