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The
Liberators Scott William Carter
I heard the report of a cannon a half second before the boulder on the ridge above us exploded. Pebbles pinged off my helmet. The ventilator fans whirred behind my ears, and a bead of sweat trickled down my cheek. The suits did a good job of filtering the air, but the inside of my helmet still smelled slightly metallic. It was the dead of night, but my Visosuit enhanced the image, giving the rocky gully an amber tint. The Dulnari had lousy night vision, so we always fought after sunset. I quickly counted ten black, sleek-domed helmets in the gully. Each helmet was marked with a different number, and Rina's number 22 was on the far end. We broke up two weeks earlier, but I still liked having her close during combat. "Major Steed," my brother's voice crackled over the all-suit frequency, "report." Damon sounded calm as a man could be. I watched Rina for a reaction, but she didn't move. I knew she had been spending her time lately with that egghead, Lieutenant Dyle, but I still wondered if she and Damon would hook up now that I was out of the picture. "Got a group of two hundred Dulnari pinned in a mountain bunker, Colonel," I said to him. "The rest of the target planet has been contained." I stopped thinking of the planets as having names long ago. After a while, they all blurred together . . .
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© Scott William Carter. Originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2004.
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