Barry Longyear - Enemy Papers

Yora Beneres, according to Reaper, is a hero waiting for a cause worthy of her ideals. After years of looking for some sort of meaning, she had given up her quest and was filling in the time left before death, until we came along seeking an end to war on Amadeen. She is a good pilot and an even better small arms expert. Reaper reports seeing her take out with three rapidly fired shots three guards who were surrounding her with weapons drawn. "Very frugal," Reaper added. "She hates to waste ammunition." Before joining the USEF to fight in the Buldahk Insurrection, she was a video actress with a fairly impressive list of credits. It was not enough.

When I study Kita Yamagata’s face, I am puzzled about her reasons for being on this ship. With the arrest of Estone Falna, her job with us is over. She has no stake, mental or otherwise, in what happens on Amadeen. Reaper says he and Kita have had long talks about police work, intelligence, and police procedures, and he is seriously impressed with her mind. Reaper is not certain why Kita is riding on this bullet to Amadeen, but the reason, he suspects, is in the next pod: Willis E. Davidge.

I look through the clear plastic canopy at his face, tiny crystals of ice on his eyebrows and upper lip. Kita Yamagata loves this man and I wonder if he even has a clue. I think I love him, as well, but as a strange sort of surrogate parent. Not a parent. An uncle, in fact.

His war was over three decades ago with the signing of the USE-Dracon Chamber Treaty. I know that he would not trade those thirty years on that hellishly cold planet for any other being’s time or place in the universe. He said once that my comrades and I had helped buy him that thirty years and it was time for him to put something down on account.

Remembering the old human joke, I said, "On account of what?"

Without acknowledging the joke, Davidge said cryptically, "I shave my face these days. That still requires a mirror."

Captain Moss is up in the cockpit, thrashing himself with his losses, Reaper is in his quarters reading, and it is time for me to begin my meditation. In my quarters, I take the kneeling position most Dracs take when meditating, but the unfamiliar position is too distracting. Before the Aeolus left Timan space, Kita had shown me a pose she uses called the lotus position, and I simply stared in horror at that tangle of legs, feet, and ankles.

After the manner of Mistaan on its ledge above the forest, I lie down on my bunk, my hands at my sides, close my eyes and breathe, opening myself to all of myself, the universe.

—Falna enters my awareness first, its sleek thighs, that miracle of a face, its gentle embrace, its passionate touch as it spread the lips of my womb and entered me.

A great well of loss.

Other lovers, other touches, other losses.

A lonely child, its dead parent’s hand cold and limp. When it was warm, that hand had little time to stroke the child. There were enemies to avoid, shelter to acquire, clothes to mend, food to steal, the endless demands of the Mavedah. The child still craves that touch, though, seeking always to fill the void that touch’s absence left.

—The Dakiz’s face, eyes white, purplish lips pulsing in and out. "Welcome to the Ri Mou Tavii, Yazi Ro. If you find here what you seek, that will be a treasure you will earn."

—The Amadeen Front prisoner held outside Fort Lewis, his hands upraised, "Love! We have to love one another!" Two guards were laughing at him. The third was listening. "There can he no peace until we kill hate. Let us be of one family."

All three guards died as the prisoner suddenly leaped at the one who was listening, wrested the energy knife from its hands, and killed them before another guard could bring the human down with a single pistol shot.

Love one another.

A few days later, guarding a new batch of Front prisoners, one of them rises to one knee and is hit at the same time by two guards with disrupters. I stand there watching as a female sitting on the ground next to the dead man cries and asks, "Why? My god, why?"

"Love one another," I tell her.

— two creatures, multi-legged, black, and scaled, their powerful pinching claws slowly opening and closing, corner a third creature, smooth, soft, small, and slow―

—Graduation day.

"The threat is an ongoing war in a closed system between two species neither of which has the ability to forget or forgive an injury. Each side’s goal is the elimination of the other side. The end of the threat requires peace."

―My very first graduation day.

My time at the Nokbuk Kovah is near its end. Soon I and my fellow fighters will join the ranks of the Mavedah. There is a test, though, its nature a closely guarded secret. One says it is a torture we must suffer without complaint. Another says it is a demonstration of arms. Another says it is a shameful hideous task we must perform to show how much we want to be Mavedah.

All of them are correct.

In my hand is a knife. When the door to the pit in front of me opens, I see a live human male tied with his arms behind him to a pole set into the hard-packed ground of the tiny combat arena. In the seats above the pit are Jetah Dekaban Lo and the Selector, Choi Leh.

There are no instructions. I am supposed to know what to do, and I am supposed to do it.

The human looks at me, its voice low and pleading. "No. Please. No. Please."

I raise my knife and walk toward the man, my mind racing. In our communications training we were shown a holographic receiver. Perhaps this is not a real human.

—In combat training we were shown some of the mechanical men some of whom were used by the USEF early in the war. They say there are still a few in the ranks of the Front. Perhaps this is not a real human.

—Its eyes are gray, the perspiration beaded on its forehead, its throat dry from fear. "Please, God, no. Please, God, no."

It is just a test. Lo and the Selector just want to see if I am hard enough to kill. No one would really use prisoners this way. I think I see a crack in the flesh of the man’s neck, just above the collar of his sweat-stained shirt. It is a mechanical and I have hesitated too long already. As I reach up with my blade and draw it across the throat of the man, I see that the crack is only a loose thread. Then I am sprayed with human blood as Dekiban Lo and Choi Leh grunt their approval.

As I walk toward the door, wiping the blood from my face, I hear them dragging another human into the pit. "No!" the human cries. "Please, no!"

I am led to a different place. I see my blood-spattered comrades sitting and standing by a tracked vehicle. They avoid looking into my eyes and I avoid looking into theirs. By late afternoon the last of us has graduated and is led to the tracked transport. We all climb in, the doors are closed behind us, and the transport’s motor whines as the walls and floor lurch on our way to the Okori Sikov in the Southern Shorda. "We are the twelve," says a bitter voice in the dark.

"The front twelve," we whisper in response. "Mavedah. "

"A truce, then," offers the Timan student. "Resolve what can be resolved, and have peace,"

"Every time there is a truce," I begin, "uncontrollable factions and individuals from each side attack and perform atrocities that ignite again the larger war. Truces that once lasted weeks and months are now reduced to hours or a day. Neither side can police its uncontrollable factions for neither political leadership can survive the prosecution of its own kind for the crime of killing those of the other side."

—Pria presents its problem to the nest.