Echo

by C Scott Frank

  Exhale

  Ariana had to remind herself to loosen up. She hadn’t even noticed that she was holding her breath until her lungs started to burn. It was easy to forget yourself when you’re plummeting through atmo faster than the speed of sound.

  Outside the small plexiglass windows just inches from her face all she could see was a blistering firestorm. Her orbital drop-pod dove through the superheated air causing the hardened chassis to glow brightly around the viewport.

  Exhale

  She realized she was holding her breath again. This wasn’t her first orbital drop, but human beings were never meant to be packed into a tin can like peppermints in a wrapper and flung from a spaceship towards a giant hunk of rock at terminal velocity. All said, it wasn’t something you get used to.

  Ariana was an Orbital Drop Marine. The ODMs were the elite of the elite. In this new age of space travel, gone were the traditional special forces like the Navy Seals or the Army Delta. The armed forces had undergone some severe changes since the discovery of faster than light travel, or FTL, and the good ole U.S. of A. had united the entire western hemisphere. That was fifteen years ago. She remembered it, but only barely.

  For their part, ODM units operated in near complete autonomy, and nearly always outranked the other branches. The ODM program had been planned, at least on paper, since before FTL had even been discovered. Once mankind decided to officially take to the stars, the brass had decided to fast-track the program and get men on the ground, in the most aggressive way possible. Four short years after the FTL discovery, the Marine Corps was officially assimilated into the Navy, and the ODM program was birthed.

  A member of the fourth graduating class of officers to the ODM, Ariana now found herself rapidly approaching the surface of a moon called Midas-IV. The inferno outside her pod suddenly evaporated and she saw clear skies all around her. Above her, the golden shape of the gas giant, Midas, loomed imperiously. As she descended, the moon below her came into view.

  From this distance, it almost looked peaceful. It was as if she was watching hundreds of fireflies dancing and playing among the sand castles of a gray playground. Some of the distant fireflies were much larger than others; she knew from the briefings that the blossoms of bright color were twenty-five-megaton nuclear warheads. The fourth moon of Midas was a lost cause. Ariana’s job, with the rest of her platoon, was to see to the evacuation of key military leaders before the Sardaan could completely overrun the moon. It seemed like a lost cause, especially as the briefing showing the moon in utter ruin, but sometimes the ODM had to be sent to give everything to complete the mission.

  War was a bitter affair.

  But, Ariana was a good soldier. She did what she was told without objection, and she did it with a cold efficiency that earned her a place among the ODM, even if she had barely made the cut.

  The indicators in her helmet’s Heads-Up-Display turned red, and an alarm signaled in her earpiece. Eight klicks. She grabbed the lever above her head with her right hand, and pulled with everything she had. Her body jolted and her stomach dropped through her toenails as the airbrakes deployed in her pod.

  The cylinder shook violently as the steel flaps caught the wind, slowing her descent to a speed that wouldn’t turn her into soup. She smiled at her own corny joke: she often referred to the drop-pods as soup cans.

  At one klick, she braced herself for the jarring impact. They often encouraged the marines to loosen up and relax at the point of impact, because the body can absorb the shock better that way. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t know anyone else who could either.

  With the force of a meteor strike, Ariana and her pod crashed into the ground, making a small crater. The spear-like end of the pod buried itself three feet into the hard alkaline soil of the moon. In almost the same instant, the front of the pod exploded outward on rigged hinges, and Ariana emerged, rifle held tightly against her shoulder.

  Two percussive cracks later and the enemy directly in front of her was down. She pivoted left with a precision snap and squeezed two more rounds into the soldier running over the hill. The micro-rounds caught him in the chest, and he flew backwards as if yanked by an imaginary whip.

  She checked her HUD for the positions of the rest of her squad. Their transponders glowed bright yellow to her right. She paused, waiting to see if another enemy would approach. None came.

  She took one last look at the men she had just shot. Through their grungy visors she could see their tattered faces. Men. Close to her own age, she estimated, in their early twenties.

  Ariana proceeded cautiously over the embankment, and for the first time she got a good look at the battlefield. The bodies of men and the charred husks of crippled war machines littered the gray soil. A thousand small fires burned across the surface giving the area a hazy smog. Ariana was thankful for the visor in her helmet to protect her eyes from the burning smoke.

  “Pulaski! There you are!” said a voice in her intercom. Her HUD indicated the voice came from her right.

  “You worried about getting lost or something, Roman?” Ariana said, reading the callsign in her HUD as she turned toward him. “C'mon, boy scout, let's find the rest of our unit.”

  “You don't have to look far,” a stern voice said. Ariana turned to face her commanding officer.

  “Gunny, did we get bad intel? I thought the LZ was supposed to be hot,” Ariana had expected the landing zone to be a firestorm.

  “So did I. I'm still waiting on the report to come in from HQ, but my best guess: at some point during our descent blackout, Charlie got out of dodge.”

  “So what do we do?” Roman asked.

  “We keep to the params: make our way to the compound and secure the area for the drop ships. We'll need to try and rendezvous with the rest of the team on the way. Keep your eyes on the radar for friendlies. Let's move out!”

  The team of three set out northwest toward the compound. Despite the carnage surrounding them, the trek was oddly quiet. Ariana could hear her own breath inside her helmet. At least she had remembered to breathe now.

  ***

  Out of the grey rock in front of them, gray steel walls rose to meet the sky. Every hundred meters or so along the wall, a large gun pointed out toward the flatlands surrounding the compound. Rail guns. Top of the line, electro-magnetically enhanced weapons capable of firing hypersonic rounds with ease. They were not cheap. Clearly someone thought this place was worth protecting.

  The moon was silent. The hushed setting only helped to fuel Ariana’s anxiety. What happened to all the action she had witnessed during her drop? Something wasn't right.

  The trio walked straight through the main gates of the compound. Ariana wasn't sure what she expected, but it certainly wasn't the sight that confronted her inside the massive walls.

  The bodies of men and women littered the ground everywhere she looked. Many of them wore body armor or some other military fatigues. Others were wearing civilian clothes. The compound was something of an embassy. Military and political officials had been stationed here with their families when the attack came. And the enemy had murdered every last one of them.

  “The f-”

  “Language,” Gunny cut Roman's expletive short. Gunny ran a tight operation. Some called her the Sunday School teacher of the ODMs. “But, I share the sentiment. We need to find out what happened here. We'll find the compound's control room and set up basecamp there. Maybe we can tap into the recordings and find something useful.”

  In her HUD, Ariana could see Roman's blood pressure escalating. She couldn't say she felt any different. The group made their way past the carnage in silence, a wordless ode to their fallen brothers and sisters. Inside the structure, there were few signs of a struggle. It seemed as if everyone
had fled the building of their own volition.

  “This war...” Gunny muttered under her breath.

  A few moments later, the trio found the abandoned control room. Gunny ordered Roman to set prox mines around the adjoining corridors to ensure they didn't receive any unwanted guests.

  “What do you think happened?” Ariana asked while she was sorting through the ration packs.

  “Do you know why this is such a grisly war?” Gunny asked in response.

  “Aren't they all grisly?” Ariana replied. She wasn't sure what her C.O. was getting at.

  “Well, yes. But this is the most brutal war humanity has ever faced. And not simply because we face extraterrestrials who likely outmatch us in nearly every way. No, what makes this war special is the fact that we don't know who to shoot.”

  Ariana understood now.

  Seven years ago, just as Ariana was finishing secondary school, the military outpost on Charon was attacked by a mysterious extraterrestrial force. The base survived the attack but the entire assault seemed suspect. Like a game. For the next three years, the E.T.s took potshots at several bases and outposts across humanity’s arm of the Milky Way.

  It wasn't until they launched a major offensive against a human colony on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, that Intelligence finally found out exactly who the enemy was: humans.

  At first, Intelligence assumed it was perhaps some lost human pirate gangs who had managed to commandeer or construct their own FTL ships and small fleet in the short years since mankind had taken to the stars. The numbers, however, didn't add up. As badly as Intelligence wanted the answer to be that simple, it just wasn’t.

  Then humanity had a breakthrough.

  A team of scientists had managed to intercept a shadow transmission as the enemy troops were retreating from their campaign against Saturn. After months of decoding, they learned the transmission itself was mundane, general military communication. The value, however, was in learning the code and frequency fingerprint. And they had a name for their mysterious enemy: the Sardaan.

  Intelligence teams began running the code through past recordings of the white noise of space for the past century, and with a very clever comb filter isolated multiple transmissions over the years. Hundreds of years.

  Military intelligence learned much about the Sardaan through these finds. For nearly two centuries, extra-terrestrial life had been visiting Earth. In an odd twist, it turned out all the crazy, tin-hat conspiracy theorists were right: aliens had visited earth and had even abducted humans from time to time.

  The E.T.s had abducted thousands of humans, in fact, with the sole purpose of storing a wide array of genomes and DNA information. The extraterrestrials had been cloning humans. For nearly a century they had been building an army. The tactics made perfect sense: for one, why sacrifice your own people if you didn't have to? With a ready supply of human clones, the E.T.s didn't have to worry about casualties. Secondly: discord. Battlefields became a firestorm of stray bullets as men shot men, never wholly sure they were fighting the enemy or their own kind.

  Ariana remembered hearing the news reports. After she saw the what was happening in their own solar system, she had to sign up. So Ariana Pulaski found herself in the ODMs on the fourth moon of Midas.

  “They’re trapped,” Gunny was saying, “The clones. Most intel officers believe the clones don't even know they're fighting for the enemy. They think we are the bad guys. That is what makes this God-forsaken war so heartbreaking. So inhumane.”

  Ariana was taken aback. She had never seen Gunny express this kind of sensitivity before. She guessed stepping over the bodies of a hundred dead humans will bring that out in someone.

  “So which were they?” Ariana said, nodding back toward the courtyard.

  “Only God knows,” Gunny replied. “But humans or clones, who are we to decide which has the right to life?”

  “Hmm,” Ariana said. She wasn't one to wax philosophical. She just knew to shoot at the people shooting toward her.

  “Charges are set, boss,” Roman said, striding into the room. “Hopefully I can get some of this equipment working. Then we'll be able to see who's coming.”

  Roman was the tech specialist of the team. They were lucky he had made it, his skills would certainly prove useful. He sat down at the desk and began typing.

  Within a few minutes, he kicked away from the desk with a smug grin on his face.

  “Something to report, lance corporal?” Gunny said formally, not willing to entertain his playful ego.

  “All systems up and running. We'll know if a golden goose lays an egg from five klicks.”

  “Are you aware that your metaphors are extremely lacking?” Ariana responded playfully, “Or do you just say whatever comes to mind?”

  “Oh, a little of both, sweetheart,” Roman responded with a grin.

  “Stow it, marine,” Gunny said, shortly. “Let's review some of this footage. Can you call up from the last twenty-four-hours?”

  “You got it.” Roman punched some more commands into the console and the large screen began displaying entries stamped in the last day. The three marines watched the accelerated footage in growing dread as a platoon of Orbital Drop Marines pressed into the gates of the compound and met the families waiting for evacuation. Without warning, the marines raised their rifles and sprayed the courtyard with an inferno of micro-projectiles and silenced the crowd.

  “What did we just watch?” Ariana asked, her voice shaking.

  “They’re getting smart,” Gunny said almost absently. “It was a Trojan Horse. They must’ve told the embassy help was on the way.”

  “Get out,” Roman said incredulously. “Now what do we do?”

  “There’s not a lot we can do now. It’s already past nightfall, and there’s no sign of the clones. You have the perimeter set up?”

  “Yea, we’re cozy as a cave dog.”

  “Good. We might as well get some shuteye and wait for orders. Roman, you take the first shift. Ariana, you’re up next.”

  “Right on, boss.”

  Ariana acknowledged the orders and settled in a corner of the room. As the adrenaline finally wore off, she drifted into a restless sleep.

  ***

  The sun felt warm against Ariana's face. She couldn't help but smile. It was a good day. She was wearing her favorite dress: the yellow one with the bunny rabbits. She ran wildly through the yard, looking over her shoulder and giggling with excitement.

  Her dad finally came out into the yard to play with her. She jumped onto the tire swing and yelled “Push me daddy, push me!”

  Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, and Ariana savored every minute of it. Her hair flew wildly behind her as her dad pushed her higher and higher on the swing. The sound of her own laughter filled her head.

  She looked up into her daddy's eyes, he was trying to say something to her, but every time he opened his mouth, all she heard was a shrill alarm.

  She jumped awake and shook the memory off as she realized it was a dream, the warmth fading. The siren, however, was very real. Her eyes darted around the dim control room looking for an answer.

  “They're here, check your gear and get ready for some action,” Roman slid into the room, panting from exertion. “They crept in close. Closer than I'd like.” He nodded toward the video monitors on the far wall. Sure enough, Ariana could see what appeared to be commandoes approaching the compound. They were just outside the large metal gates.

  “Well,” Gunny began while checking her mags, “This is either our glorious last stand, or our triumphant miracle. Which will it be?”

  “If we're voting, I would vote miracle, sir,” Roman replied.

  “Good answer,” Gunny said humorlessly. “Pulaski, you and I will take up defensive positions outside. Our goal is to hold this room. Roman, you’re our eyes. Be quiet. Be careful.”

  Ariana nodded, and without a word, slipped through the door and darted left.
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  The marines had trained for moments like these. Ariana remembered the first two weeks of boot camp. She knew all of the branches had some sort of hazing ritual for new recruits. She played along happily; she had always been a good sport. But the acts never stopped. She was constantly thrown headfirst into impossible situations, with little to no warning, and left completely to her own devices. She would later find out that everything had been planned to each meticulous detail. It was all part of her conditioning. She was programmed to tackle the unexpected, and to emerge wordlessly from the fire as a victor.

  She followed the corridor silently as it curved away from the control room. After a few minutes, she found a service exit that appeared to empty into the courtyard of the compound. She eased the door open as carefully as she could and peered around.

  Empty.

  She slowly crept out into the courtyard and pushed the door closed behind her. She ducked into a dark corner just as the footsteps sounded from the far end of the yard.

  Looking past the numerous bodies littering the ground in front of her, she could see the enemy troops moving into the open space. Each soldier had their rifle at the ready, focusing down the sights for any signs of danger. Above the troops, on the wall of the compound, Ariana could just make out a hint of movement. Gunny.

  The figure stopped and looked right at Ariana and tilted her head.

  Right.

  Ariana triggered the scopes in her helmet. She called up the InfraRed feed and the world was plunged into a bright grayscale where she could see much better. She looked back up to where Gunny was stationed on the roof. Her commanding officer gave a slight hand signal, followed by another head nod.

  Ariana got the message. She triggered her helmet's clock to sync with Gunny's. They would strike in precisely ten seconds.

  Ariana readied herself. She reminded herself to exhale, and tried to locate some semblance of calm, as best she could.

  Seven seconds.

  She locked in the target tracking in her IR display. The aim enhancers built into her body armor would assist in tracking her enemies once she began firing.