Read Online Swords and Saddles by Jack Campbell - Free Book Online

right arm and lots of minor stuff.”
    “Nassar. Just small stuff. I’ll live.”
    “Goldera. Small cuts. Except I think maybe I lost a finger. Oh, man, I lost two.”
    After a pause, Singh called out. “Stein. You still with us?”
    The answer came from Nassar. “Here he is by the window. Oh, hell. Stein’s dead, Sarge. So’s that civ, Scorse.”
    “Damn. Archer? Archer?”
    No answer.
    “We need to find Archer, people,” Singh ordered. “Adowa, Johansen, Goldera, you three patch each other up enough to stop major bleeding. Nassar, look for Archer now unless the other three need first aid help. I’ll keep an eye on the outside.”
    They fumbled in the darkness, cursing, until Singh told them to use hand lights. “The Izkop know we’re here. Use enough light to take care of bad wounds and find Archer. She must be buried under some of the dead Izkop. And make sure all of those Izkop in here are dead.”
    #
    Half an hour later, med patches melding into their skin to seal off the worst injuries and stop bleeding, the five remaining soldiers halted their search of the building. “She’s gone, Sarge,” Nassar said. “Archer’s not here. They took her.”
    “The comm unit is gone, too,” Adowa reported. “Why’d they take Archer?”
    Goldera replied in a bone-weary voice. “Why not ask why they stopped and left? We were all dead in another minute or two. Why’d they stop?”
    No one tried to answer that. Johansen sagged against a table, looking out into the darkness, feeling no hope, no curiosity, just tiredness and a resigned sort of fear.
    An inside door opened, spilling pale radiance across the front room littered with dead. Ariana stood in the doorway, her breath catching at the sight of them still standing. “The children are scared. They heard all the fighting. What do I tell them?”
    “Damned if I know, ma’am,” Singh said. “I guess all you can tell them is that we’re still here.”
    “That’s a lot,” she finally replied. “They still believe in heroes.”
    Johansen felt himself straightening up at her words, standing a little taller despite his weariness and injuries, and noticed the others doing the same.
    After Ariana had closed the door again, Nassar gusted a single soft and sardonic laugh. “If we got to die anyway, it’s nice to know someone appreciates it.”
    Sergeant Singh nodded, his expression impossible to make out in the dark. “We got one more fight left in us. Two-hour sentry duty, one soldier on at a time so the others can rest.”
    “You don’t think they’ll come again tonight, Sarge?” Goldera asked.
    “I still don’t know what they’ll do, let alone why they’re doing it. All we can do is protect those kids for one more night, and hope that effort of ours somehow matters to the Iskop when they’ve got the kids at their mercy.”
    Johansen had the watch when the sky began paling with dawn’s light. He sat on the floor, leaning against the wall next to the window, looking outward, an Izkop spear in one hand, as the growing daylight began turning the vague, gray shapes of night into clear objects with color and meaning. The med patch kept his thigh numb, and while that served as a reminder of the wound it covered it also meant that when just sitting here he could pretend it wasn’t a bad injury. Sitting quietly felt right anyway. In that strange stillness that dawn always held, there might have been nothing else living on the entire planet except for themselves and the distant shape of one of the local flying predators wheeling across the sky.
    Silence and stillness. The right and left hands of death, someone had called them. She had died, too, on a planet far distant, gone cold and quiet like the mounds of Izkop here lying forlorn in the growing light. He thought about other dawns to come, without him around anymore. The idea felt impossible, and strange, even after all he had seen.
    Archer was out there somewhere, but he tried not to think of that,