Chapter 7

The season of the Great Migration was upon them.

Of course, on this world, where the sun hung motionless on the horizon for a lifetime, concepts such as days or seasons had nothing to do with astronomical phenomena, but were instead tied to the rhythmic patterns of Minvali life. Thinking about it some more, Lami concluded oatam probably shouldn’t be translated as “season” at all, but for now, it was the closest match he could come up with.

This particular pattern had everything to do with the habits of the baorua, the gigantic herbivores—large enough to make the Minvali war beast look like puppies next to them—that the tribe depended upon for bone, tusks, meat, and hides. The herds spent their time walking across the great plains, from the mountains in the north to the ice fields in the south, always walking in a straight line along the terminator. Once they reached their goal, they turned around and continued their eternal journey in the opposite direction.

Which meant once every season, the gargantuan beasts were close enough to the village for the Minvali to hunt them. Once every season, the stocks could be filled up again with their stringy meat, kept frozen in the larders until the time came for the next Great Migration.

For five months, Lami had been riding with the war band. At first, some of the men—like War Commander Nale—had snickered and made fun of him, refusing to take a “woman” with them on their patrols.

Nale could refuse all he wanted—he wasn’t in charge. When War Leader Navá made it clear to him that Chief Sote had made his final decision regarding Lami’s status as a Minvali, Nale simply had to obey, whether he liked it or not.

The war commander still made fun of Lami. But as the months had passed, his comments had transformed from derisive remarks into good-hearted banter.

He was still nicknamed lalaul—The Woman—by the men riding in the war band. But that, Lami thought, was a whole lot better than ilahu.

The day before—that is, the waking period prior to the last sleep period—the war band had managed to separate a baorua calf from the herd. Taking great care to stay out of reach of its immature but still formidable tusks, they had driven it into a wide rift in the ice. For hours, the war band had pushed the magnificent beast farther and farther in. As the rift narrowed around them, the calf eventually became trapped between the ice and the encroaching war beasts.

At that point, the riders had thrown their long, ornamental spears at the large animal. Lami had thrown his as well, but had been careful to moderate the force he used to launch it. This was not a life-or-death situation for the Minvali, and there was no reason for him to use the full extent of his strength for the hunt. It wouldn’t be good for the villagers to start depending on his superior capabilities.

Protected from the worst of the blizzard by the tall ice walls of the rift, the war band had butchered the baorua, careful to make the best use of most of its parts. Its tall leg bones were to be used for tools and structural support, its tusks for weapons, and its hides for clothes and building materials.

And most important of all, its meat would feed the village during the months to come. The only things they would leave to the scavengers were the skull, the spine, and the intestines.

With the rich bounty from the kill strapped to the sides of their war beasts, the band now marched home, slowed down by the heavy weight they carried. Still, they kept a strict triangular formation, with War Leader Navá at the front, followed by the rest of the pyramid his nine war commanders formed behind him.

“Lalaul!” War Commander Notu shouted through the storm from his position one line in front of Lami. “Isn’t it about time you find yourself a good, strong husband?”

To his right, War Commander Nive chuckled, eager to participate in the joke his colleague made at Lami’s expense.

“You’re looking to have an affair with me?” Lami replied, turning the joke back on the war commander. “I don’t think Lati would approve.”

Nive chuckled again, just as eager to taunt Notu as he was to make fun of Lami.

Around them, the fog was as thick as ever, a white wall that made their whole universe seem to end at arm’s length. The only thing piercing it was the eternal blizzard, the ice shards it carried glittering in the air as the howling wind threw them like tiny knives at the war band.

Lami pulled his hide coat closer around his neck. Though he could turn off the sensation of pain at will, that ability was meant for Sunguard missions. Now, he was a member of the Minvali tribe and didn’t want to rely on such tricks. If the wind was cold, he wanted to feel it—though not more than necessary.

When it came to their safety, he had no qualms about using his abilities, though, as long as he didn’t have to use a gun. The entire time the war band had been riding, Lami had operated in infrared mode, scanning the horizon for threats. Out there, hidden by the impenetrable mist, there could be goarua or kaotora silently stalking them, just beyond visual range of the war band.

His focus on unseen enemies on the horizon almost became his undoing.

With a shriek much like that of an eagle, though significantly deeper in tone, a heavy dark shadow fell on him from above. The sharp claws of the creature ripped his coat open and cut a deep gash in his right shoulder as the predatory bird slammed into him and threw him off his war beast.

The maramura had been stalking the ten riders for hours, floating on wings the size of a small airplane, unseen and unheard, hidden in the low clouds above them. For much of the past half hour, its large yellow eyes had been focused on the smallest—and thus, in the maramura’s mind, weakest—member of the herd, anticipating and planning for the right time to strike.

The large predator landed on him, pressing him to the ground with the full weight of its body. Its beak—sharp like an ice pick and the size of a man’s arm—was hoisted into the air above him, ready to strike at his shoulder. Should it do so, the razor-sharp edges of the beak would probably sever the sinew and muscles there, rendering his arm useless until it healed.

But that would take days, and while he was healing, he could not offer the tribe the protection he felt they deserved.

The giant bird struck at him, but before its beak connected with his body, Lami kicked its legs, making it lose balance slightly. Momentarily, the pressure on him let up, and he rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding being skewered.

From the depths of the snowstorm, Lami heard the rumbling sound of a war beast running at full speed across the ice field. Like a purple train shooting out of a tunnel, his loyal companion appeared out of the fog, its yellow eyes locked on the large bird that was trying to make a meal out of its rider.

His war beast slammed into the maramura with the force of a large truck, knocking it away from Lami’s small body. With a shrieking sound, the bird righted itself again. Spreading its wings, it started to run and jump off the ground, gaining speed with each step.

The animal was large, but having evolved for flight, its body was not of sturdy build. It could not afford a confrontation with the much more massive war beast, and now it chose to retreat. The small prey mammal it had been stalking was not worth the risk of injury.

With a final push from its strong legs, the maramura lifted into the air, its immense black wings carrying it upward as it disappeared into the opaque clouds.

* * *

The hours following the attack had been mostly uneventful. As the war band drew ever closer to their home village, the mood among the riders grew lighter, their fear of unknown dangers lurking in the mist diminished by the familiarity of the landscape they now rode through. Remembering the laughter of their children and the warm embraces of their wives, the men urged their war beasts to walk as fast as possible, despite the heavy loads they were carrying.

With discipline fraying at the seams, the triangular formation of the war band began to lose integrity. Eventually, Lami, whose war beast was smaller than those of the other war commanders and therefore carried a lighter load, found himself riding at the front of the group, next to War Leader Navá.

It was then that he saw her.

Out of the blizzard, a shadow materialized into the silhouette of a small woman.

A woman clad in a thin gray jumpsuit with red stripes running along its sides, the tips of her ginger-copper-red hair sticking out from beneath the hood that covered her head.

Raising his hand, Lami shouted a command to the rest of the men in the war band to halt. Against this new threat, there was nothing they could do. The woman standing before them was no ordinary predator.

She was a Special Agent. The Sunguard had found him again.

And with that realization, the carefully constructed fantasy of paradise he had built around himself over the past five months came crumbling down like a house of cards caught in a hurricane.

“Stay where you are, Sunguard!” Lami shouted into the blizzard, putting the full weight of his authority into his voice. “You are not welcome here!”

The woman began to speak, but the infernal roar of the ever-present wind drowned out her words.

Suddenly, she took a step forward. With reflexes optimized by the best technicians in the Terran Federation, Lami reacted almost instinctively. He grabbed the large Minvali spear he carried with him on his war beast and threw it with the full force of his biotic muscles at the other Special Agent. His physics prediction cortex coordinated the movements of his arm with perfect precision, guiding the spear to strike the woman in her abdomen.

The long spear pierced her skin and muscles, cut through her stomach and spleen, and exited on the other side of her body, slicing her open in the process.

Being a Special Agent, the damage would, of course, incapacitate her for only a short time.

The woman grabbed the spear with both hands and, with a jerking motion, pulled it from her body. As she did, she grunted, but her face did not betray the slightest hint of pain. Once free of the Minvali weapon, she dropped it to the ground and sprinted to the left, toward the shelter of a snow-covered sand dune to the side. Behind her, a wide trail of blood-red blotches marked the path to her new hiding place.

Safe on the other side of the dune, she squatted with her back toward Lami, resting her battered body for a short moment before continuing the fight. Once she had caught her breath, she turned around. Still squatting, she shouted her orders at the former Special Agent.

“Sunguard Special Agent Myan Lami!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Stand down and surrender your weapons, now!”

His reply was short and to the point.

“Never!” he barked at the female Special Agent who had come to end his freedom.

She would not take no for an answer.

“Sunguard Special Agent NL-27, surrender immediately!” she repeated. “This is your final warning. Failure to comply with the given orders will result in the use of force.”

He had expected as much. This was the moment he had dreaded ever since that fateful day five months ago when he had left the Sunguard. This was the logical consequence of his actions.

He was ready for what was to come.

The woman waited for his response, perhaps longer than Lami would have expected. But eventually, when it became clear he would not follow her order, she reached for the high-powered gaser rifle she had previously stashed behind the dune.

With the fluidity of motion that could only come from biotic muscles guided by a physics prediction cortex, she swept the rifle from the ground and rose to her full height, the barrel of the gun already aimed with perfect precision at Lami’s right shoulder.

The rifle was already synchronized with her nervous system. There was no need for her to move her index finger to fire it. The mere thought of activating the gun sent a signal rushing at nearly the speed of light along the nerves in her arm and into the weapon’s electronic hub, triggering the shot.

The beam of coherent gamma rays that emerged from the barrel of the gaser rifle excited the atoms in the air, causing them to glow with an eerie blue light as the high-energy ray suddenly painted a horizontal streak of brilliance from her gun to his chest.

Lami’s right shoulder joint exploded in a fountain of boiling blood and shredded muscle. Pieces of molten titanium, glowing bright from the heat, flew through the air from his wound.

With his main arm now disabled and no spear left to throw, Lami was—for the moment—incapacitated. But worse than that, he feared the woman might be carrying Project 47. If she did, and she managed to reach him, he would be a dead man walking. Within hours, it would all be over for him, as the biotic bacteria genetically tailored to him infected his body and eventually, in a single coordinated strike, eradicated every last one of his cells.

All his dreams of freedom had now been ground to dust by the Sunguard Special Agent standing before him. The Terran Federation would never let him go.

From the dense layer of clouds above, an enormous black shadow suddenly descended upon the woman, its sharp claws tearing her body open as its yellow beak struck at her neck, nearly severing it from her shoulders.

The maramura was back.

With some effort, Lami climbed back onto his war beast, knowing the reprieve he had been granted was only temporary. He did not know how long the other Special Agent would be out of commission, but he was certain of one thing: she would, eventually, return.

The thought weighed heavily on his mind as he quickly rode back to the village, the rest of the war band in tow.

For Myan Lami, life would never be the same again.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While Choices of Steel is entirely standalone, I think you’ll particularly enjoy Soldier of Steel, which serves as a prequel to this story, and Conscience of Steel, which is something of a sequel.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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