The Old Ways

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Sendayu Hajime would have preferred the cold and silence of the void to the humidity and the roar of the rain all around him.

He wore a gray-green poncho that loosely blended in with the mottled forest. On his face was a clear plasticine breathing mask, providing a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen more amenable to his Martian lungs. His clothes were russet brown, and he wore a webbed belt that carried a sword hilt on a carabiner ring.

Sendayu vaguely recalled reading somewhere that this place had once been deep in the jungle, sometime before the Fall. Even though it was now just another part of a vast archipelago, scattered across the edge of the sea like broken eggshells in a sink, it was still pounded by the same monsoons which once fed the great forests of its past. That made it quite unwelcoming to a native Martian. But Sendayu had long ago resigned himself to a pragmatic attitude when it came to such things.

The streets were empty this time of night. The hot wind and hotter rain slashing the avenues of the ancient city made sure any stragglers had long since departed, and any CCTV cameras still in this district had long since worn out from neglect. That was to Sendayu’s benefit as he trudged along in the gloomy near-dark, hunched against the driving rain, bundled against the wind. He didn’t want to be seen in any case.

They say that you can do anything on this planet, go anywhere. The rules of the rest of the system didn’t apply. You just had to have the will to make things happen. Sendayu huddled against the miserable weather, feeling bitter. He had places to go, things to do, and little time to waste.

A voice in the back of his head was driving him even harder than the rain and wind drove against him, urging him on, beckoning him to ignore the travails of the storm hammering down around him. This part of him knew there was a much darker storm looming on the horizon, ready to swing down upon the heads of an unsuspecting solar system like the fabled sword of Damocles. There was no question of if, merely when.

He came at last to the inn at one end of the complex, tucked into a single low-slung, crumbling structure that had been abandoned for a millennium when the first rockets hit orbit. The courtyard of the citadel was under new management, put to use as a community market by its current inhabitants. Sendayu wondered what the holy men who once lived here would think of their sanctum sanctorum being used to hawk wares from the mercantile worlds. It was like the Vatican being turned into a furniture store.

He pushed through the outer doors into the cramped little vestibule that had been tacked onto the building. By now the little ramshackle entryway seemed every bit as old as the structure it had butted up against, the result of constant use and little interest in maintenance. “The entropy of not giving a shit”, as Sendayu’s old sensei had called it. Right now, he felt as if this assessment didn’t go far enough.

Past the inner door, a tableau scene played out. A player-piano with what looked like real wood paneling clacked away a folksy Old World saloon rag while a scattering of the local reprobates leaned heavily on their pint glasses. A flickering fire bubbled in the hearth scratched into one wall while the guttering embers of candles on each of the tables in the dining area cast a warm, dim, light over everything. Sendayu scanned his surroundings, and, finding no signs of trouble, crossed to that front desk.

A gnarled old man sat on a stool behind the desk, flipping through the pages of a reader tab that seemed to be the only bit of modern tech in the whole space. The man himself looked old enough to be one of the relics dug out of the catacombs under the temple. Sendayu suppressed a smile at the thought.

“What can I do for you?” the old man drawled as his newest guest approached. He did not look up as he spoke, but Sendayu could still see the yellow of his teeth past his bushy mustache.

Sendayu rummaged in the inner pockets of his poncho and placed the small metal disc he found there onto the counter with little fanfare. It bore a ten-pointed star atop a horizontal triband, all done in silver. The wizened innkeeper finally raised his eyes, just long enough to widen them at the sight of the token.

Then he looked back down at his reader and kept flipping through the pages of his e-Reader with now markedly purposeful disinterest. “That thing real?” he asked raspily. His voice betrayed no sign of the surprise his eyes had the instant he’d spied the ancient sliver of metal lying on the countertop. Sendayu knew better than to press the issue. He merely nodded.

The old man still did not look up or otherwise acknowledge the gesture. “Haven’t seen a real one in years,” he muttered.

“The old ways don’t have much pull down here these days,” admitted Sendayu.

The old man shrugged mildly. “Perhaps. They never did much good for us here on Gaia, anyhow.”

“That’s only because folks around here gave up on them when the going got rough. Not our fault that the people of Earth chose to throw industrial society in the garbage.”

“Perhaps.” That was all the old man allowed. “You looking for Weston?”

Sendayu nodded again. “I’d hoped you might be able to point me in the right direction.”

The sallow-faced geezer craned his head ever so slightly towards the rear of the room and gestured with one of his stubby, crooked fingers. “Back there,” he said, still flipping through his reader with the other hand. “And I wouldn’t poke around elsewhere. Folks around here are pretty sensitive to your type sticking their noses in local business, if you catch my meaning.”

Sendayu did. He deftly slipped the metal disc back into the recesses of his poncho as he silently turned away. He knew better than to flash it at anyone else, save for the person he had come to see.

The only reason the old man hadn’t lost his cool upon seeing the token was that he was old enough to have gained an understanding of both sides of the story. That, and the fact that men from Mars weren’t all tourists and swindlers bent on robbing Mother Earth of her remaining vitality. Some of them came with deadly intent in their minds. Those men, men like Sendayu, were not worth the effort of getting annoyed with.

He continued to scan the room as he headed for the rear door. No signs of trouble yet, but as that same old sensei had always liked to tell him, “You may not know when a situation is turning south, only when it has done so.” He swept aside a bead curtain and immediately stepped into further proof of this lesson.

The first hostile was waiting for him, having probably been set up just to watch the door for any suspicious entrants. He’d be the first to go. Even if the other two managed to get their suppressed machine pistols around in time–and they wouldn’t–it would all be for naught if that first guy got off a blast with the sawed-off he was currently hefting at the low-ready position.

One shout from that street-sweeper and everyone on the block would know something was amiss. So shotgun-man would indeed be the first to go. After that, Sendayu would have to play it by ear.

He had his blade out in just under a second. Sloppy, by his estimation. Apparently stepping through that bead curtain only to come face-to-face with a sawed-off shotgun had rattled him more than he thought.

No matter. He swept the blade up and to the right, neatly halving the street-sweeper like it had been a hot knife going through butter. It also took down the man wielding the scatter gun in one fell swoop.

Next came a tall, lanky fellow wearing a blue suit and muddy work boots. Sendayu couldn’t help but wrinkle his nose at the inconsistency as he deftly slashed the man asunder. Some people took no pride in their appearance. For whatever these poor sods would have been paid to try and do a job on a MARSCOM swordsman, they should have been able to afford better footwear. What a pity.

The second man fell into a heap as the third man turned tail to run. Sendayu wrinkled his nose again, though this time it was completely by choice. His distaste had nothing to do with some ancient code of honor, although he would be lying if his senseis had instilled a special consideration in him for such sentiments.

No, it had much more to do with the lack of challenge in killing an enemy who failed to stand and face his death. He’d never particularly enjoyed killing, but there was something to be said for doing his job on enemies who actually put up a fight instead of forcing him to resort to underhanded tactics. That was on his mind as he flicked his wrist to extend the sword length right through the other man’s heart.

The bag man twitched once, then went limp. Sendayu withdrew his sword from him, swept it clean on the hem of his old rain poncho, retracted the blade, and returned the hilt to its hook on his belt.

He stepped over his enemies and turned down the hall to the left. It wasn’t instinct that drew him that way, much as he’d like to claim the contrary. No, it was the fact that a fourth bag man had just appeared from an opened door down that branch, bearing another suppressed machine-pistol.

That their weapons were suppressed did not bode well. This was a professional job, or an attempt at one. That shotgun at the door had been just a warning to anyone else who was there for the same reason as Sendayu. That meant he was short of time, and that was somewhere no Martian swordsman wanted to be. He made a quick double-cut of the fourth man and hurried into the room he had just exited.

Inside he only found more questions. There were also two more bag men, neither of whom had done Sendayu the courtesy of arming themselves before he made his entrance.

How distasteful, he thought as he swept his sword out and silenced the nearest of the two. This man’s partner made a sound like some tiny, feral animal that had been backed into a corner. He then fumbled his backup pistol as he tried to defend himself against the sword-wielding intruder.

Sendayu sighed, in spite of himself. He lowered the sword and spoke in a cold, clear voice. “Leave,” he said, causing the man to stare up at him, dumbstruck. “Leave, I said. If I see your face again I will kill you.”

The man blanched like sun-dried coral. He then fled without making another sound.

Sendayu said a silent mantra to beg the fates to ensure that this small act of pity did not come back to haunt him in his travels. He then cleaned and sheathed his sword and turned to the bundle of packages that the two men in the room had been busily stuffing with something as yet unidentified when he’d entered.

He tore open the first sack and found the first of the answers he sought. Inside were the remains of a contemporary data cache, something which in its pristine state would have stored on the order of ten thousand terabytes of raw quantum information. That kind of storage was invaluable on Earth these days, which meant that its presence in the hands of Alliance-funded bag men was a good start in Sendayu’s hunt to determine why exactly he had been sent to Angkor in the middle of monsoon season.

A muffled voice shook him back to the present. His sword was out in a fraction of the time it took him before, up and ready before he’d turned around. That improvement was only a small comfort, though.

In the corner of the room was another man, bloodied and beaten, tied to one of the columns which supported the ancient stone roof. Sendayu recognized him, as well. He had seen his face a dozen times during the lead-up to this assignment. His name was Gregory Weston, codename “Constantine.”

Sendayu returned his sword to his belt almost as quickly as he’d brought it forth. He crossed the room in as few steps as his Martian gait would allow, knelt beside his wounded contact, and withdrew a small pocket knife to cut the man’s binds and the piece of rubberized tape which had been covering his mouth.

“Weston,” he said. It wasn’t quite a question. “Gregory Weston, correct?"

The man nodded, very weakly.

"I came to retrieve he data you've gathered. What happened here?”

Gregory Weston did not meet his eyes, though Sendayu could tell from a cursory scan of his charge that the other man still had sight. “Why,” he began softly. He fought raggedly for breath as he tried to speak. A bad sign, as Sendayu well knew. “Why did it take you so long to come for me?”

“I was told the chances you would be intercepted prior to my arrival were low,” Sendayu responded. “Clearly my handlers were in error when they came to that conclusion. Can you stand?”

Weston tried his legs and winced at the pain this brought him. “I cannot,” he said, grimacing.

“No matter. There are other ways of getting you out of this temple.” Sendayu carefully leaned Weston back against the column and looked around for a means of effecting such an extraction.” In the meantime, I must have the information you recovered, Mr. Weston. Regardless of what happens to you, I am sure you understand the importance of my returning that information to Mars with all due haste.”

Weston coughed softly, clearly straining to hold back his agony. “I have learned that the Alliance indeed plans to instigate violence here on the Mother Planet. Their goal is to engender a revolt against the stability provided by the Community of Gaia, such that the people of Earth may be turned against Mars and the rest of the Interplanetary Cooperative Administration. This plan is already in motion.”

Sendayu frowned against his own wishes. Such a revelation was not easy to stomach, even for someone with his repertoire. “Damned fools they are,” he muttered, more to himself than to Weston. “We’d better get you back to Aldrin City as quickly as possible. The Council will want to hear that firsthand.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t going to be possible.” The interruption of this new voice led Sendayu to abandon his search and withdraw his sword once more. When he rounded to face the intruders, he found that his situation was decidedly less than ideal. A tetrad of black-clad special operators faced him down, each of whom carried a sleek, modern beam rifle, standard issue to the Alliance Armada.

In their midst was a fifth man, wearing a similar charcoal gray uniform, minus the insectoid tactical helmet and with an added slate gray overcoat. He wore a Commissar’s emblem on his lapels, and a cold but easy smile that told Sendayu he was well aware of his group’s tactical superiority.

“You must be the Martians’ errand boy,” this fifth man said. “Tell me, how was the weather when you were last there? I’ve heard that the Capital is breathtaking this time of year.”

Sendayu lowered his sword, but did not retract the blade. He remained casual as he spoke. “Have you, now? Have you ever seen the autumn sunset reflected on the Marineris Sea? That truly is breathtaking.”

“I’ve never even set foot on the Red Planet, as a matter of fact. You’ll understand that our background precludes my friends and me from visiting.” The four operators flanking him kept their rifles zeroed firmly on Sendayu’s face and upper chest. He cursed inwardly. Every so often, the burden of being a sword-bearer in a time of omnipresent firearms was more than he could bear. This was one of those times.

“What do you want?” That was all he said by way of addressing the difficult situation.

The other man kept smiling. “That depends. What are you willing to part with? I’m feeling magnanimous today, I think I’ll see if I can throw you a bone.”

Sendayu leaned into this opportunity. “I’m leaving with Weston and the recording devices.”

The Alliance political officer shook his head. “You can leave with your life and you can stay here and die. I’ll leave the choice up to you, but I must stress that we’ll be taking those recording devices even if we have to pry them out of your cold, dead fingers. If you’ll pardon the cliché.”

Sendayu frowned deeper still at the man. “You’ll lose more than they’re worth in the attempt.”

“Oh?” the Commissar retorted. “I fail to see how you’d pose any threat, given that my associates could simply stand over here and lay into you with their rifles and that would be the end of it.”

Sendayu’s lip curled into a wry little smile. The other man raised an eyebrow at the sight of it. “Something you find funny about this whole exchange, my Martian friend?”

Sendayu’s grin expanded into a smile. He changed tact in a heartbeat. “Just that it’s so fitting, isn’t it? That after how far humanity has traveled, we find ourselves back on Earth? We fled so far from these shores in search of solutions to our problems, and yet the reckoning we find takes us back to our home shores after all.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s like poetry, in a way. A sort of solar anaphora, if you will.”

The Alliance man’s smile faded. A look of frigid distaste emerged to take its place. “I don’t have time to listen to your musings. I will reiterate: you can either walk out of here empty-handed, or you can die right now.” He raised his hand and prepared to give his men the signal to do just that.

Sendayu’s smile disappeared in turn. “Not going to happen.”

Before the situation could devolve utterly, Weston himself broke the tension. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but would it be too much to ask to have some medical attention here?” His voice was raspy and very weak.

The Alliance officer did not move, and as a result his men did not move, either. Sendayu spoke up next. “Do you think you could let me tend to him, before any of us try to kill each other over him?

A single nod from the Commissar was all Sendayu got in response. He slowly withdrew the blade on his sword and returned the hilt to his belt. He then turned, knelt beside Gregory Weston, and retrieved the small packet of medical supplies he kept in a different inner pocket of his poncho.

As soon as it was clear that Sendayu was no longer a threat, the Alliance operatives lowered their weapons. But even from halfway across the room Sendayu could still feel the tension crackling off of them. Good, he thought. The old ways still did have some pull among the outer worlds, after all. That might come in useful, sometime or other. It might come in useful very soon, too, if things kept developing along their current trajectory. Still, he made no overt sign of this observation. Best to play that card close to the chest.

The Commissar pointed to one of his men, then at Weston’s bundle along the opposite wall. "Vasculhe os pertences e recupera os aparelhos.” The operative in question slung his rifle and obliged.

Sendayu paid them no attention. Instead he busied himself with tending to the wounded man. As he quickly discovered, Weston’s wounds were far worse than they’d first appeared.

“This man is dying,” said Sendayu, trying to bite back reproach. Not only had Gregory Weston been severely beaten, but there was clear evidence of internal trauma from some form of torture device that Sendayu would have thought the Alliance had banned years ago.

“Well,” said the Commissar as his man continued to rummage through Weston’s belongings. “That’s the risk you run when you license out the ‘snatch’ part of your snatch-and-grab operation to local hoodlums. Apparently they took the interrogation part into their own hands, much to my chagrin. You understand of course that we desired to bring this man to Callisto in one piece.”

“Perhaps you should have done your own dirty work. He won’t make it off this planet if he doesn’t get immediate medical attention. He’d drown in his own blood just from a shuttle launch.”

The other man actually had the audacity to chuckle at that. “I think we can handle it.”

Sendayu’s nostrils flared. “Can you, now"; it was not a question.

The Alliance’s man ignored him. Instead he refocused his attention on the operative he’d detailed to search for the recording devices. “Bem, você já encontrou a maldita coisa?”

The operative pulled out a bundle of recording devices and held it up for his commanding officer to see. He spoke in a voice warped by the speakers in his helmet. “Senhor, há algo aqui. Continuar?”

Across the room from them, Weston leaned in close to Sendayu as he tried in vain to stem the internal bleeding, using tools not suited to the job to reach wounds they could not access. His voice was lower and raspier than ever. “I have an errand for you my friend, if you are able.”

“Of course,” said Sendayu, not meeting the stricken man’s eyes. “Any way I can help.”

Weston smiled weakly, clearly pained considerably by the effort of holding his composure. “There’s a little algae farm on the eastern shore of the Hellas Sea, about twelve kilometers south of Silver Palisade.”

“Yes. I’m familiar with the area. What about it?”

“There’s a family that lives there, by the name of Poledouris. They have a daughter, about your age, by the name of Danyelle. Fair-haired girl, bright blue eyes.” He paused, his eyes suddenly misty. “If you would be so good as to make the journey there, please tell her that Greg said he was sorry.”

Sendayu looked into the other man’s eyes. “I will do my utmost. You have my promise.”

Greg Weston smiled back at him, blood seeping into the spaces between his lower teeth. “Oh,” he said, lower and raspier still. “And one other thing, if you don’t mind.”

The swordsman resumed his work feverishly and yet in vain. “Name it.”

“When I am gone, retrieve the control pad from my right jacket pocket. Press the button.” He coughed, very weak now. His eyes were now having trouble retaining focus. “I’d suggest ducking when you do.”

Sendayu paused in his medical tribulations as the words sank in. He looked again at Weston, met his gaze and held it for a long moment. In the span of that moment, Weston’s eyes slowly glazed right over. The swordsman stared at him for a moment, then closed his own eyes solemnly.

He said a silent mantra to will the man’s soul to the next world, then reached inside Weston’s right jacket pocket. Sure enough, he found a handheld control pad, about the size of a pear halved. He withdrew it, inspected it, and, finding a single red switch, made to press it. He paused a second to ensure that the Alliance men hadn’t noticed anything amiss. Then pressed the button and tucked himself into a tight ball beside the column that Greg Weston had been tied to, and ultimately died next to.

Before the Alliance operatives even took heed of his sudden movement, the data devices stacked next to their lead man erupted. A ball of fire and shrapnel, blossoming outward into a bulb of death. The man detailed to search Weston’s belongings was engulfed by this blast. When it had passed, he did not get up. It would take a long while for the dust to settle, but Sendayu Hajime did not wait.

The first of the remaining Alliance men learned a lesson that Sendayu’s senseis had drilled into him long ago: that while men with guns usually overpower men with swords in a straight-up fight, all bets are off when the rules change. And the rules had certainly changed.

With so much dust in the air, the room was suddenly a mess of noise and muddled visibility. Sendayu mentally switched his iris lenses to infrared as he heard the enemy hostile operatives shouting in their warped helmet-speaker voices. He saw a third man raising his rifle to fire. This man hadn’t adjusted his aim fast enough, and paid for it with his life. He went down to a roar of gunfire as his trigger finger reflexively squeezed from the trauma.

The Commissar shouted orders as he fled the room. The last gunman standing panned his weapon back and forth, scanning for signs of the enemy but only seeing the blade as it jumped through the cloying dust to cut him down. Silenced by the flick of Sendayu's wrist.

Sendayu turned and scanned the room for anything he’d missed. Five dead men, blood, dust, and debris greeted his gaze. He lingered a moment on the body of Gregory Weston. The man was almost peaceful in death, save for the grime spattered across his face by the explosion of his booby-trapped recording tablets. Sendayu lingered only a moment, though. The mission brief was clear: any baggage was to be left behind.

He raced out of the room without another moment’s pause, and saw that the Commissar had run right into the arms of his extraction. All eight of them. The remainder of an Alliance hit squad.

He said a dozen curses in his mind, then turned down an adjacent hallway just as the doorway he’d been standing in was chipped away by hostile rifle fire. He ran, withdrawing his blade into the hilt as he dashed down a corridor, then rounded a corner into another.

He ran without looking back, hearing only the sounds of his own footfalls on the clammy stone floor, and the thunder of hostile boots clamoring after him. It was like the baying of hounds in his ears, driving him on. He ran until he came to an exterior door, half boarded up with old plywood. He did not hesitate. Extending his blade once more, he sliced the plywood into four nearly even pieces. Then, hearing the footfalls of his pursuers drawing closer still, he threw himself against the damaged barrier.

It gave way like an old tree, snapping under his weight. On the other side of the crude wall, he found a new problem: he was now falling through thin air, fifteen feet above the scraggly brush between the ancient temple and the once-proud forest which bordered its walls. He swore aloud this time, pulling the sword blade back into its hilt with a quick flick of his wrist. That was one way to go he did not find admissible.

He landed amid the bushes with a heavy thump, wincing as the branches stabbed at him. Without a second’s pause, he rolled into a ball and pulled himself under the largest nearby bush. Above him, he could hear the Alliance men shouting in their mix of languages.

Finally, above their rabble he heard a familiar voice. “Enough. He's not our problem anymore. If he shows his face again, he dies. In any case, he’ll have a hard time getting off the planet without this.” The sound of warped laughter drifted down to Sendayu’s hiding spot. When it ceased, he waited until the sound of boots on cobblestones faded away to nothing, then rolled over and got to his feet. He grimaced, feeling a twinge in his ribs that had not been there before. Better than death, he reasoned.

Then he reached into his jacket to withdraw his communication device. He went pale, his eyes widening. It wasn’t there. He pulled the pocket inside out to see if he was wrong, but he was greeted only with a sinking feeling. He swore under his breath in a way that would’ve made the clerics blush.

Somehow, in the melee, his comms pad had been dislodged. Maybe when he was slaughtering Alliance operatives, maybe before. And the damned Commissar had picked it up. Without it, he could not contact the ship waiting in orbit and signal for pickup.

Without it, he was stuck here, on the backwater cradle of humanity, with no way home. He sighed, stared up at the heavens, and wondered if he’d ever see Mars again. It was shaping up to be a very long day indeed.