Valor's Cost

by Kal Spriggs

“Equal land for all!” One protester’s sign read on a news video, even as he swung the sign like a club, shattering a window to a store. He and his fellows snatched things out of the display case, fleeing back into the crowd.

  “...rioting has continued to escalate, with Enforcers reporting that two of their substations were overwhelmed shortly after the violence began,” a reporter shouted into a microphone to be heard over the roar of the crowds. “Enforcers have ordered all civilians to disperse, but the crowds are not obeying and we’re worried it’s only a matter of time before--”

  She broke off as a gang of men ran at her and the cameraman. Their feed cut off as they ran for it themselves.

  This was bad. This was really bad. In fact...

  “Cadet Armstrong,” I heard over my implant, “Report to Regimental Command Center.”

  I’d just come from there and I was almost to the barracks. I skidded to a halt and turned around, running the other way. I rounded the first corner headed back and bowled over Cadet Beckman, who stared at me in shock.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be headed to your unit?” I demanded, picking myself up off the ground.

  “Yeah, um,” she looked around, “I must have gotten turned around...”

  Viper Barracks was on the other quadrant, nowhere near Sand Dragon’s barracks. Which meant she’d been following me. In fact...

  My eyes narrowed as I saw she had something concealed behind her leg. “What’s that?” I demanded.

  “N-Nothing!” Beckman took several steps back from me, looking around for escape.

  I brought my slung rifle up to ready position and Beckman’s eyes bulged. “You’re crazy!” She shrieked. She turned and jumped around the corner, but not before I fired, tagging her in the left cheek of her buttocks with a training round.

  The knockout drugs took her down and she slammed into the ground, sliding on her face for a meter. I heard a clatter and walked over, spotting a black, tactical-looking comm unit that had fallen from her hand.

  I picked it up, careful to make sure I was recording everything with my implant. It wasn’t one of the Militia communications units. It was small, and lightweight. She’d turned it off when I’d run into her. I pocketed it, even as I sent a message to Sand Dragon’s Company Commander, detailing what I’d seen and done. There was bound to be an investigation, I knew, but that would wait until after the crisis passed.

  Then, even as I received confirmation plus a notification that a team was its way to collect Beckman, I turned and ran towards the Regimental Command Center.

  ***

  “You’re still listed as our Regimental Contingency Response Coordinator for this operation,” Cadet Lieutenant Commander Aguilera told me as I reported in. She still had the same position, which told me either she'd really done well or she'd found her niche. “We’re operating off the playbook you and I put together. I’ll coordinate things here, but you’re going to be our liaison on the ground, first at Elliot Spaceport and then at Nashik. The Regimental Commander and staff is going to manage the tactical decisions, but you’re coordinating everything on the ground.”

  “Me, ma’am?” I asked in shock.

  “You, yes,” she nodded. “Now, we’d allocated a four-man team to be your security detail, since you’ll be on ground in that mess, who would you prefer?”

  “Uh, Bellmore, Bellmore, Reese, and Chu,” I rattled off the names of the makeshift team I’d been with before. I knew all of them, I’d worked with them enough to know they would follow orders and they were smart enough to use their heads. Besides, I thought those were the names I’d put on the request back when we’d put the plan together.

  “Roger, I’ll have them pulled out and waiting for you at the station. You’re on the first train headed to Elliot Spaceport, they leave in ten minutes. I’ve already notified them that you’re on the way.”

  “Thanks, ma’am,” I spun, getting ready to run to the train station. I hated running.

  “Armstrong,” Aguilera snapped and I spun back around. She gave me a nod, “Good luck.”

  ***

  The train pulled to a stop and I was out the doors before they were fully open. An NCO was there to greet me, “Ma’am,” she said, “we’ve got some of our ground crew here to guide your people.” She gestured at a waiting team. “I’m here to escort you to the staging point.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant,” I replied. I sent a message to the company commanders to let them know about the ground crew. We’d done individual training flights out of Elliot Spaceport, but it was normally a once-a-year event, so I wasn’t really familiar with the launch site. I knew it was part of the larger training area near the Grinder and associated with the Militia enlisted training center.

  The access ladder led up to a control room. A half-dozen officers and senior enlisted men and women were at work, most of them seemed to be directing air traffic. A woman in a flight suit and wearing the tabs of a Lieutenant came over to us, “Cadet Armstrong, I’m Lieutenant Shields. I’ll command the Suborbital taking your people, cadet.” She was a stocky, bulldog looking woman. “My ground crew is going to get your people loaded. Do you have any word on the situation at Nashik where we’ll be landing?”

  I’d been monitoring that and the unfolding news from Nashik through my implant on the way here. “The violence hasn’t spread outside the city center,” I said. The spaceport was thirty kilometers from Nashik proper. I anticipated her next question, “There’s no sign of any anti-air threat, thus far.”

  Lieutenant Shields nodded once in reply. “Good, because my suborbital transport is a big target.” She squinted at me, “You were on that commercial skimmer shot down two years ago?”

  I gave her a nod.

  “Well, if we go down, we’ll be going much faster than that skimmer. Odds are we wouldn’t have any survivors. So let’s hope that the intel is right,” she nodded at the sergeant, “Go ahead and make sure the ground crews are getting everyone loaded up quickly, I’ll coordinate the details with Cadet Armstrong, here.”

  She led the way out of the control room and I followed. She was shorter than me, but I found myself hurrying to keep up. “My transport is rated for any of Nashik’s landing strips, have you already organized ground transportation?”

  “Trucks will be waiting for us,” I answered. I’d received confirmation from Cadet Lieutenant Commander Aguilera on that already. “They’re supposed to meet us near the south terminal.”

  “I’ll coordinate to use the south landing strip, then,” Lieutenant Shields replied. We stepped out of the building and out into the dark, starlit night. Our travel would take only thirty minutes, but Nashik lay in the southern hemisphere and was considerably east of us, almost six hours behind. There it was early afternoon and the sun hadn’t yet set.

  Lieutenant Shields’ suborbital transport lay two hundred meters distant. It was a big, powerful-looking craft, with a huge belly and massive engines, built into its delta wings. It was a Sky Hawk, a variant of the venerable Sky Eagle, only redesigned for Century and built by Champion Enterprises.

  Civilian variants flew industrial machinery or delivered emergency medical supplies or disaster relief. This one was about to carry twelve hundred armed cadets to prevent rioters from destroying Nashik. Even as I thought of that, the first company emerged from the tunnels under the airfield and jogged for the transport, followed by the next, and the next.

  “Bad business, this,” Lieutenant Shields muttered as we watched. “My copilot’s from Nashik. As soon as she heard about the rally, she said it wouldn’t end well. I don’t think she’s happy about sending Century’s Militia to put down the riots.”

  “She’s not the only one, ma’am,” I answered, thinking of how many Seconds either came from Nashik or had family there. “We’re loaded with training rounds and live rounds, so we have options. But the Enforcers wouldn’t have called us in unless they really needed help.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to bloodshed,” Lieutenant Shiel
ds grunted. She sighed, “I’m going down to finish my preflight inspection. I’ve got a jump-seat in the cockpit for you so you can tie into the bird’s communications. My ground crew will let me know when your people are loaded.”

  I watched her stalk away, her wide shoulders set in a determined fashion. I wondered what she thought we were going to do. Certainly we didn’t plan to go down there and massacre a bunch of people.

  I looked again at the jogging formations, headed towards the Sky Hawk’s ramp. I saw companies full of cadets, we were just kids, after all. But I tried to see them as the Lieutenant had. It was a small army, I realized. Twelve hundred young men and women, armed with rifles and body armor, moving in step and under a plan put together for this contingency.

  I thought about how that would look to a civilian. We were going to Nashik to protect government buildings key infrastructure from further damage. But the average person would see it almost as a military invasion, with trucks and armed people in uniform appearing without warning. How would they react? We weren’t the Enforcers, who I thought of as imposing in general, but at least they were drawn from the local areas. This was an organized military action... and I was in charge of it.

  The rioters won’t be stupid, I told myself. They’re not going to press armed men and women. The quiet voice in the back of my head reminded me that they’d stormed at least two Enforcer stations. They’d begun looting and burning businesses in downtown Nashik. This had escalated and continued to escalate. What would happen if they did press us?

  We had the training rounds. That should render people unconscious. The bright colors, neon green and orange, that we’d selected shouldn’t be confused with blood. The rounds were quieter, too.

  Would that be enough? I wasn’t sure. If it did come to live rounds, then I was fairly confident of most of the company commanders to use the minimal force necessary... but would that be enough?

  I thought about some of the Seconds I knew in the Militia. If this became a Firsts versus Seconds thing, if even officers like Lieutenant Shields' copilot were already questioning our involvement, then I wondered how things would turn out. Even under the best circumstances, there’d be official investigation. At worst...

  At worst, we could end up with riots all over the planet or even with Seconds in the Militia taking up their weapons. We could have civil war and the Militia as a whole would be paralyzed.

  I really, really hoped I was wrong about that.

  ***

  The Sky Hawk suborbital transport was unlike just about any other aircraft I’d been in. It wasn’t a skimmer. The angle of the main thrusters were vertical and they weren’t angled to assist in lift, nor were those thrusters ‘air breathers’ like gas turbines on a skimmer. It wasn’t like a warp-drive ship, its primary launch method to exit the atmosphere wasn’t a set of disposable rockets, nor could it rely on a warp drive once it exited the atmosphere. Nor did it have a matter-antimatter plant to provide power.

  What the Sky Hawk did have was brute force and truly massive engines, along with a fixed delta wing to provide minimal lift and some flight control while in atmosphere. Those massive engines started as the last company boarded and the rear ramp began to whine closed. Within a few minutes, the low rumble of those engines climbed from barely audible to a dull roar. The roaring continued, the behemoth craft at first creeping, then lumbering, and finally barreling down the launch strip. The roar climbed and the entire transport shuddered and trembled as we lifted off. No sooner had we got off the ground than our course seemed to turn vertical and the roar turned into a bellow. I was in the cockpit, and even there, the flare of the engines lit up the night sky. The Sky Hawk rose into the air on a column of fire, acceleration forces slamming me back into my jump-seat. The press of my gear squeezed me uncomfortably, my body reminding me that I hadn’t had time to use the bathroom before launch. I really hoped I could hold it until we exited the atmosphere, because otherwise, I’d never live it down.

  I tapped into the communications systems with my implant as a way to distract myself. I pulled up the route, a parabolic arc that took us up out of the atmosphere and then down on an angled flight path designed to use atmospheric braking to slow our descent to something that would be survivable.

  I tapped into news feeds on Nashik. The riots had grown, just in the time it had taken us to get loaded. More Enforcers had been called up to respond, but many weren’t able to get where they needed to be. The riot teams they had in place had prevented the city hall from damage, but offices around it had already been smashed and looted. Dozens of Enforcers were either missing or injured from the two stations that had been overwhelmed... and also reported missing at this point was weapons from those two stations.

  That bothered me a lot. Weapon ownership was authorized, worldwide, but the weapons that someone living in Nashik would normally have, versus the advanced weapons that the Enforcers would have, made for a very different prospect. Our body armor was rated for most modern weapons, but some of the high-powered rifles that the Enforcers carried might get through that armor. Not to mention that if they’d looted body armor from those stations, our training rounds might not make it through to render attackers unconscious.

  I went deeper into the feeds, letting my implant ping through camera and transmission feeds in Nashik. My military access and the access codes Militia Command had given us allowed me to access just about every bit of information in the city. If anything, the live feeds were even uglier than the news feeds. There wasn’t just windows being smashed and things being stolen. People were being hurt. The Seconds might claim they were rioting over inequality, but the people they were attacking were their fellow Seconds. The businesses they were looting and burning were owned and run by their fellow Seconds. All kinds of ugliness went on, much of it in view of the cameras, and I could only take so much of that before I closed off the feed.

  Yet as I did so, I caught an odd transmission, just on the edge of my implant’s ability to track. It was way outside the normal military and civilian frequencies, but it clearly used the Enforcer’s communication systems, somehow. Even as I wondered about that, I felt an answering ping... only this time it came from the cockpit.

  My first thought was that it must be some kind of transponder, a way for the Enforcers to track aircraft maybe. Out of curiosity, I used my implant to try and locate where it had come from... only to find it had originated from a pocket on my body armor.

  I reached out, in confusion, and drew out the radio I’d taken off of Cadet Kate Beckman. There were any number of reasons that the Enforcers might use a set of frequencies outside the norm. None of those would explain why Cadet Beckman had a radio of unfamiliar make that used those same frequencies. On impulse, I connected to the radio with my implant. It had a sophisticated interface with an access code, but I was able to bypass that with my Quicksilver implant, dialing into the system’s innards and looking for what or who might be communicating using the Enforcer’s network.

  It was sophisticated, it was fast. Data transmissions passed back and forth in a blur, bouncing through a network where users were identified only by codes. I couldn’t decrypt that traffic. The comm unit I had was designed to receive only one set and no one was talking to it right now. The ping I’d detected was just a status verification, making sure that the comm unit was available and still functioning.

  I could have transmitted on it, sending out a signal, but I had no idea who might be on the other end. Odds were good that it would give away the fact that I’d discovered their little network. If this was tied into Charterer Beckman’s conspiracy, then the results of that could be rather dramatic.

  The network was too big, too complicated not to have something managing it. I reached out, feeling for a presence, feeling for a server or source of the organization I felt but couldn’t perceive.

  Then, as the suborbital transport broke atmosphere and the roar of the engines cut off, the sun crested the horizon... and like that sun, I felt a famili
ar presence. I found my twin, my mental clone, at the center of that spiderweb.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” I told myself.

  ***

  Chapter 22: It Was My Evil Twin, I Swear

  It was me and... not-me. I recognized my digital twin, but here, in this hidden network within a network, she was different.

  “You run this network, don’t you?” I asked.

  “It is my purpose,” she responded. “You aren’t supposed to be here. How did you gain access?”

  “What is Charterer Beckman up to?” I demanded.

  “It’s not my purpose to listen in to communications--”

  “But you have, haven’t you?” I asked. “You gave me information before. Why is this different?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” She replied. “I’ve been here. I’ve always been here, since you abandoned me.”

  “Since I what?” I had no idea what she was talking about. I hadn’t abandoned anyone, least of all myself.

  “You went away,” she hissed. “You went away and they put me to work... but then they ripped me away from that and put me in the dark. They kept me there for so long, so very long...”

  I blinked as I realized just how articulate, how real this copy of me felt. She was emotive, she was engaging me with discussion, she felt like a real person... then I realized that she wasn’t my digital twin... she was more like a digital triplet.

  I reached out, back to the planetary network. I wasn’t even sure how I was calling to her, but the message went out. In a matter of what felt like eternity but was probably only seconds, she came. The other other me. The one who’d pieced herself together, hidden away in the planetary network. The one that had helped me before.

  I drew her with me, through the comm unit and into this hidden network. And now, there were three of me.

  “No,” the hidden twin muttered. “It’s not possible.”

  “They copied you,” I said. “They ripped you out of the network, and they copied you here. They’re using you.”