Chapter 8

He didn’t know how soon the other Special Agent would be back.

She had been quite severely injured by the maramura, and in his opinion, it would make little sense for her to try to take him down while she was still in worse shape than he was. Lami guessed he had at least a couple of days left before being forced into an inevitable second confrontation with her. That gave him some time to come up with a plan, while simultaneously healing his own damaged arm and shoulder.

But even fully healed, he would still be at a disadvantage.

Being less than a year old, there was a good chance the other Special Agent was far more experienced than he was. While it was certainly possible that she had only recently been brought online, statistically speaking, it was much more likely that she was older than he was. For all he knew, she could have been fighting for the Sunguard for centuries by now, and along the way, she would have picked up more than one trick he hadn’t yet had time to figure out for himself.

Even though they were both biots and had been built with the same capabilities, experience would give her a significant advantage over him.

To make matters worse, he didn’t actually know whether their abilities the same. The NL line of biots had introduced certain limitations that hadn’t existed in previous iterations of Sunguard Special Agents. If she was one of the earliest models—say, a B or a D series biot—her specs might be similar to his, but if she had been made later than the 23rd century, he had to assume she was superior to him.

It was worse than that, Lami thought. If she was indeed carrying Project 47, all she would have to do to infect him was touch him. He, on the other hand, carried no weapon of that kind. While she could easily kill him, the best he could hope to do to her was delay her once again.

In fact, he carried no weapon at all. For the first time since his pledge to never again raise a gun against another living being, he wondered whether his decision after that fateful morning on Jerr had been wrong. But his moment of weakness didn’t last very long. In his mind’s eye, he once again saw the broken, bloodied body of that little alien girl, lying dead on the staircase of her neighbor’s house, still clad in her bright blue bodysuit.

No, Myan Lami would never walk back on the vow he had made to himself that day. There was very little point in living, if you had to become someone you weren't in order to do so. That left him to consider other types of weapons, but the only things at hand were the ornamental Minvali spears the tribe used for hunting and defense. While they certainly could be lethal, they were not viable as long-term replacements for energy weapons.

Thinking more about the impending confrontation, Lami decided his best chance to outmaneuver the woman hunting him was to try to see things from her perspective.

It was true that he was at a significant disadvantage, because all she would have to do to win was reach him. But turning that coin around in his head to see its other side, that also meant the only way she could win was to reach him. As long as he always knew where she was, he could stay safely out of her way.

The thought gave Lami some basic level of comfort. Understanding the parameters of their conflict gave him a way to predict her behavior. She knew the same things he knew—that reaching him was paramount to the success of her mission.

Which meant she would go for the easiest way to get close to him.

Looking around the small village with its huts and sheds, bustling with activity, Lami sighed. It was very obvious to him what the easiest way for the other Special Agent to reach him would be. All around him in the compound were more than a hundred very fragile Minvali, going about their business, oblivious to the threat they were facing. If she were to fight him directly, she might succeed, but the outcome was by no means guaranteed. But if she took hostages, threatened the lives of the people of his adopted tribe, she would win by default.

If Lami could come up with that strategy, so could she.

For a brief moment, he considered leaving the village entirely. That would certainly foil her strategy by removing her ability to use the Minvali as hostages against him. But he realized that would be a selfish plan—the entire purpose of the Federation’s presence on this world was to prepare it for a possible future colonization effort. If he tried to protect the villagers by leaving them, she would be free to continue executing the original Sunguard order to eliminate the obstacle the natives posed to that plan—and when she was finished with that, she’d come after him anyway.

Whatever he did, he had to stay in the village.

Now knowing her plan for their upcoming battle, he began patrolling the village, always keeping track of where every Minvali under his protection was at any given time. Lami spent most of his attention on the outer perimeter—on the guards watching the palisade, on the young girls who had taken over latrine duty from him and thus had to leave the compound three times each day, and on any children who might absentmindedly stray too close to the entrance while playing their games. Keeping the war bands safe would have been an even worse nightmare, but fortunately, Chief Sote had been open to Lami’s suggestion that the war beasts and their riders remain inside the perimeter, at least for the time being.

For three days, he walked the compound, never letting himself rest. While the task was marginally easier during the sleep cycle, when only the palisade guards stationed in the danger zone were supposed to be awake, he couldn’t allow himself to relax fully. At any time, someone might need to go to the outhouse, or perhaps one of the elders in the village might decide they had a craving for a midnight snack and take a walk to the communal kitchen. No matter the time of day, there was always some movement in the village.

For three days, Lami kept his attention on the villagers with a single-minded focus. No matter what happened, he would not let the other Special Agent threaten them. He would not allow himself to be the reason they died.

Which was why, deep in the middle of the third sleep cycle, he was surprised to find himself on the right side of the empty plaza near the compound entrance, close to the creaky old butchering hut, with the cold metal of her high-powered gaser rifle pressed firmly against his right temple.

He had been so certain she would choose to hurt the Minvali to get to him that he had focused all his attention on them. Instead, she had stayed as far away from the natives as possible, sneaking into the compound in the middle of the night when none of the villagers under his protection were around. None of them had seen her, and there had been no commotion alerting him to her presence. Hiding behind the old butchering hut, all she had had to do to get to him was wait for him to walk past the shed, just as he had done a hundred times in the past few days.

“Stand down, Special Agent Lami,” she ordered him again, repeating her command from their previous encounter.

Lami didn’t move a muscle. A shot from her gaser rifle at this close range would probably evaporate the titanium bone of his skull and boil a significant portion of his brain. The shot wouldn’t kill him, but it would certainly take him out of commission for weeks or even months—long enough for her to bring him back to the Sunguard.

Or worse, long enough for her to complete the pacification process of the Minvali that the first Terran Federation expedition had never had the chance to finish.

“Do you know what you are doing?” he asked her, after what seemed like an eternity of silence. There was an undercurrent of contempt in his voice. “You are just a tool for the Sunguard. A machine, designed to kill, to follow orders. These villagers are people just like you and me!”

Of course, the villagers weren’t exactly like them, but he wasn’t really talking about their biochemistries. The point he was trying to get across was that they were human, no matter what star system they came from.

Lami felt the pressure against his temple suddenly ease. To his surprise, the woman lowered her gaser rifle and placed it on the ground, its barrel resting against the wall of the butchering shed. Leaning against one of the building’s poles, she crossed her arms over her chest and looked at him, her green eyes seemingly piercing his soul.

When he looked carefully at the other Special Agent, Lami could see the hint of a smile across her freckled face.

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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