Frozen Fire

by C H Gideon

  Still, it seemed that Ms. Samuels’ efforts had been integral to saving Chief Lu’s life aboard the crippled Elvira. As a result, Jenkins grudgingly thought she deserved a little slack.

  But only a little.

  “Ms. Samuels…” He opened his eyes and stood from the table. “Most of your equipment was destroyed in the fight. Including a pair of cameras you had fixed to Elvira’s hull without requesting authorization to do so,” he added pointedly. “And I can tell you that most officers in my position would consider bringing formal charges against you for doing that. In combat, information security is critical. Your recording devices were not hardened against enemy takeover attempts, were they, Ms. Samuels?”

  Her jaw muscles bunched angrily. “The people have a right to—”

  “Again,” he interrupted, “I can assure you that most officers in my position would, at the very least, consider your deployment of those data-recording devices to be one of the worst breaches of trust imaginable. And at most,” he added casually, “they would recommend the charge of treason be brought against you for knowingly aiding the enemy.”

  Samuels reared back incredulously, wrong-footed by that last bit. “Are you suggesting I was in league with the Jemmin?” she demanded, quickly regaining her composure.

  “No, I’m not.” He shook his head firmly. “But there’s a saying about stones and glass houses that applies here, Ms. Samuels.” He relaxed, giving her a sympathetic look before tapping a series of commands into his link which would summon Styles. “Look, you’re here doing your job, and you’re doing it as aggressively as you can. I understand that,” he said seriously. “But you need to understand that as long as we’re on this rock, I also have to do my job, and right now my top priority is safeguarding this battalion while we prep for extraction to the Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Once we’re in orbit, I assure you that all of your materials will be returned to you along with a verifiable chain of custody which you will be free to formally review with my full cooperation. In the meantime,” he continued as Styles made his way through the soft-airlock of the mess hall, “I’ve had Mr. Styles prepare several items you might find of interest. Included among those items are high-fidelity images of Jemmin war vehicles taken during this engagement. I’m breaking several regs by offering these to you before they get declassified through proper channels, but in my opinion, you’ve earned them.”

  The truth was that General Akinouye had unofficially given Jenkins the go-ahead to give her the images since doing so might buy them enough time to get off Shiva’s Wrath and keep her from gathering more information on the Zeen.

  She was intrigued by the offer, but she was just as versed in the art of negotiation. “You can’t brush me off like this, Colonel,” Samuels promised.

  “I can assure you, Ms. Samuels, that this is no brush-off,” Jenkins said seriously, giving the ambitious reporter a knowing look as Styles came to his side and saluted.

  “You wanted to see me, Colonel?” the technician asked.

  “I believe Ms. Samuels was just expressing her interest in the presentation you prepared for her,” Jenkins said, turning back to the reporter with an expectant look. “Isn’t that right, Ms. Samuels?”

  Samuels shook her head in resignation. “Fine… I’ll look at these pictures of yours. But this isn’t over, Colonel,” she vowed before following Styles to the airlock.

  After they had left, Jenkins looked down at his platter and sighed. But just as he was about to pick up the half-empty tray, the mess hall’s lead cook emerged from behind the counter with a fresh platter balanced on one hand.

  “Mak,” Jenkins greeted with relief, “you’re a life-saver.”

  “Don’t mention it, Colonel,” the cook said, replacing the cold, half-eaten tray with a full, piping hot one.

  Jenkins sat down at the table, and after a few bites, he managed to forget Ms. Samuels and her recording drones.

  “Bahamut Zero is back aboard the Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Styles reported late the next day. With the worldlet of Shiva’s Wrath plunged completely into darkness, getting the behemoth off the surface had not been an easy task.

  “Good.” Jenkins nodded in relief after the first Armor Corps vehicle had been returned to the assault carrier. “We’ll complete our withdrawal in three days’ time. Have the DIE installations been properly secured?”

  “Yes, sir,” Styles acknowledged. “All removed or damaged equipment has been replaced, and all four facilities have resumed normal operations.”

  “Good.” Jenkins nodded before lowering his voice. “How about our reporter friend?”

  Styles flashed a mischievous grin. “All I know for sure is that she’s as kinky as I am.”

  Jenkins snorted. “Not the kind of intel I was looking for, Chief.”

  The technician chuckled. “Between our ‘calisthenics,’ I’m leaving her a trail of breadcrumbs and red herrings to run down while we’re still planet-side. She’s too smart to be fooled forever, but I doubt she’ll catch on until we’re out of here. Combined with those exclusive recordings, I think she’s leaving Shiva’s Wrath with a whole lot more than she expected she’d get. She’ll be satisfied,” he said confidently before adding on a more bitter note, “but her network’s editors are another story.”

  “We can’t control every variable.” Jenkins shook his head resolutely. “We were saddled with her before we even accepted this mission, and her presence was always meant to hamstring us. The best we could hope for is to mitigate the PR damage and try to do the Metal Legion proud in the process, and I think that we did that. Keep an eye on her and let me know if it looks like she gets ahead of you.”

  “Will do, sir.” Styles nodded.

  “Good work, Chief,” Jenkins said with feeling, turning toward Roy’s exit hatch. “I’m going to survey the camp.”

  Xi was tired, weak, and nauseated. But more than just being physically unwell, she was sick.

  The fight with the Zeen had apparently exposed her to a super-high dose of radiation, and Doc Fellows had kept her on strict bedrest while he pumped her full of drugs and cleansing agents to counteract the damned stuff.

  She had never really been sick before. Wounded, sure, but sick? As a nineteen-year-old woman, she was in the physical prime of her life. Even losing half of her liver during the transplant with Podsy had been relatively unremarkable. She wasn’t much for drinking anyway, so it wasn’t like she would miss out much on the diminished metabolic capacity.

  But sitting there, curled up on a cot beside one of Fellows’ fancy bio-beds, it was hard to focus on anything but the unrelenting waves of nausea that swept over her. Each felt somehow worse than the last, and it was nearly all she could do to keep from whimpering between the twice-hourly retching sessions she had grown accustomed to.

  “Jesus, Captain, you look like dogshit that’s marinated in donkey piss for a week,” she heard Dr. Fellows say. “You should have let me knock you out for a few days until the worst of this passed.”

  She smiled weakly. “If you think I’d actually ask you to slip me one of your date rape drugs, you’re even stupider than you’re perverted.”

  Fellows laughed, lowering himself to sit on the foot of her cot. “You’ll be all right,” he assured her with what sounded like genuine sympathy as he gently patted her ankle. “Give it a couple more days, and your stomach lining will be good as new. You’ll probably be back on solid foods by the end of the week.”

  Xi propped herself up, careful not to let the puke bucket stray too far from her lap as she made eye contact with the doctor. “Your wife…Dr. Turney,” she began, fighting down the urge to burp since doing so might initiate another full-on retch-fest. “How did you meet?”

  Fellows cocked an eyebrow in surprise, “My, my…a polite question about my past? Don’t try telling me there’s an actual person under that double-thick layer of dragon-skin you wear around twenty-four-seven.”

  “Don’t deflect, Doc,” she urged, remembering what Sergeant Major Trappe
r had said to her back on Durgan’s Folly about letting her guard down more often.

  Fellows sighed. “I was working at a frontier clinic in New Africa. Do you know about the Gandel Plague?”

  Xi shook her head, having never heard about it.

  “It was a mess,” he grunted. “Some fucking parasite got dug up on one of the system’s colonial moons, and nobody learned about it until two months had gone by and the damned things started showing up on blood slides. By the time the New Africans knew what it was, it had already vectored a dozen virulent strains of the worst shit you could imagine throughout the system. Hemorrhagic fevers, drug-resistant encephalopathics, immunodeficiency strains…you name it, and it was sweeping from one side of the system to the other. Turns out the damned parasite had been coopted by an ex-governor-turned-terrorist named Gandel, which he loaded with every pathogen he could get his hands on before sending them out into the colonies. Three million people died in under two weeks,” he said reverently while his gaze fell to the floor.

  “Why haven’t I heard about this?” Xi asked in alarm, causing Fellows to scoff.

  “I knew you were young, but I didn’t think you were naïve,” the doctor chided. “New Africa’s various governments suppressed media outlets from reporting on the calamity, and eventually everyone in power agreed it would be best not to let the truth get out lest inter-system commerce suffer. New Africa grows a lot of specialty foods and the like, but a bio-plague scare would have cut them off from the rest of the Republic due to fear of contamination. So traffic was re-routed to relatively safe ports while the truth was essentially buried. But the aftermath was horrific, with tens of millions suffering debilitating injuries even after surviving the various diseases.”

  “You went there as part of the relief effort,” she said knowingly.

  He nodded. “I was a dumb kid, fresh out of med school with the wild-eyed notion that I could make a difference. In the medical community, we knew something was going on in New Africa that was bad, but no one knew the details. I decided that was where I would go and make my mark. I had only been there for a few weeks when I met Mia, and she introduced me to Sarah, Melissa, and Anne.”

  “Wait…” Xi interrupted. “Mia Turney and your other wives knew each other?”

  Fellows laughed. “That’s the only real way polygamy can work, Captain.”

  Xi sank back against the cot. “I admit I did not see that coming.” She gingerly sat back up. “Polygamy is illegal in New America.”

  “It is,” he agreed, “but it’s normally more of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy given the aggressive incentives surrounding procreation. And for twenty-eight years, we lived together, raised eighteen children, and did the things that all married folks do.” His mood suddenly darkened. “But when I spoke up about some of the things I’d seen in New Africa nearly three decades earlier, the government decided to make an example out of me for fear that others would do likewise. I was sentenced to sixty-one years in prison, ostensibly just for loving who I love and for supporting them to the best of my ability.” He shook his head angrily. “No one should be thrown in jail because they loved too many people, Captain.”

  Xi was completely taken aback. Never in her wildest dreams had she expected Dr. “Strange Bed” Fellows’ prison sentence to be related to marriage laws. He was such a competent surgeon that she always assumed he had killed someone through negligence, or while intoxicated, or that he had actually murdered someone using his advanced knowledge of human physiology.

  “So…what you’re saying,” Xi ventured after a lengthy silence, “is that you would never be satisfied by ruining the life of just one woman, so you had to go and marry four of them?”

  Fellows chuckled before standing from her cot. “That’s the long and the short of it, kid.”

  “Thank you,” she said awkwardly, “for…sharing.” She felt well enough to sit fully upright, and did so to better see Chief Lu in the bio-bed beside her. “Is he going to recover?”

  Fellows nodded with conviction. “There was enough left of his arm that he’ll need just three months of rehab to get back to full strength, and by then, the burns will heal as good as Podsy’s.”

  “When will he regain consciousness?” she asked, looking up and down the blood-tinged, medicated bandages wrapped tightly around his upper torso and head.

  “I’m keeping him sedated until after he’s transferred up to the Bonhoeffer,” Fellows replied.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Xi said just as another wave of nausea slammed into her, forcing her to double over and retch into the bucket.

  “Try to keep it off the walls…” Fellows muttered as he moved to the far side of the mobile hospital.

  In spite of the dry heaves wracking her body, Xi somehow managed to laugh at the doctor’s unflappable persona.

  “Captain?” Colonel Jenkins greeted from the foot of Lu’s bed.

  Captain Xi looked up from a bucket clenched between her legs. Her eyes were sunken and bloodshot, but she was just as alert as ever as she made to stand. “Colonel—”

  “As you were,” he insisted, and somewhat uncharacteristically, she complied without argument. She must feel like hell, he thought as he inclined his chin toward the unconscious Lu. “Dr. Fellows says he’ll be ready to transfer Lu to the Bonhoeffer with the next can, and he’s ordering you to accompany him.”

  Xi made a distasteful expression. “I’d like to argue the case for keeping me here, but I think it’s obvious I won’t be any good to anyone for the next few days. I’m just disappointed I left my mech in such a mess,” she said with seemingly sincere frustration.

  “Elvira’s already prepped and ready for retrieval,” he assured her. “You’ve done your part, Captain. Take the downtime while you can get it, because if my read is right, we’re going to be under fire again sooner than we’d like.”

  She straightened in her cot. “Another deployment, sir?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” He shook his head, pulling a nearby chair over and setting it down beside her.

  Xi nodded in silent comprehension. “I’m ready, sir.”

  Jenkins lowered his voice. “The general’s going to give us as much cover as possible, but some of us are going to end up in front of review boards. I won’t ask you to compromise your ethics or personal integrity..."

  “I’m onboard, Colonel,” she interrupted with a measure of conviction that Lee Jenkins doubted he had ever projected, let alone felt. “We came here to do a job, and that job isn’t done until we’ve completed our extraction. I understand that going wheels-up off this rock isn’t the end of my deployment in relationship to this mission, sir. I’m not going to queer the deal by cracking under bright lights with the finish line in sight. And I fully understand that I might spend my next few birthdays in a cell if I don’t stay on my toes and play my cards right.”

  Jenkins was floored by this latest display of the young woman’s resolve and character. As he looked at her, disheveled and in pure agony from the effects of radiation poisoning, she displayed a measure of courage greater than anything he had ever seen in himself.

  He looked over at Chief Lu’s tightly-wrapped body, and it was that moment when he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that one day, perhaps very soon, she would assume command of the battalion. If anyone in the Terran Republic could lead the Metal Legion to the rosy future he had pitched to General Akinouye, it was the woman sitting in the cot beside her crippled crewmate.

  “This battalion is lucky to have you, Captain,” he said, meaning every word as he stood from the chair. He offered a salute, which she returned with a look of surprise before he said, “Now get some rest. That’s an order.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” she acknowledged as he turned to leave.

  He was now more determined than ever to keep her out of the pending debriefings and “informal inquiries.” Not because he doubted her ability to handle them, but because he couldn’t risk the Legion’s finest young officer getting caught in th
e political gears so early in her career.

  She was the future of the Armor Corps, and protecting that future was now an objective he needed to keep in mind at all times.

  “One more thing, Colonel,” Xi Bao said, grabbing Jenkins’ arm before he could go. “Did we win?”

  “We won because the Jemmin lost and the Vorr lost. We won because our champion rivaled their champion. We won because you convinced the Zeen that we are their equals. Symmetry, Captain.”

  “I understand, Colonel Li,” Jenkins said two days later after learning details regarding Chief Warrant Officer Podsednik’s actions during the last engagement with the Jemmin. “I’m not arguing your authority to lock him in the brig.”

  “The man violated my ship’s data core integrity in the middle of combat with an enemy known for committing virtual takeovers,” Li said with finality. “He’s lucky I didn’t space him on the spot, Lieutenant Colonel Jenkins.”

  Jenkins knew he needed to tread lightly here, and if letting the full-bird colonel rub his nose in their rank differences avoided unnecessary conflict, then that’s precisely what he would do. “The logs clearly show, Colonel Li,” Jenkins continued evenly, “that the Jemmin were only revealed after Chief Podsednik introduced the antivirus to the Bonhoeffer’s computer core.”

  “Antivirus?” Li scoffed. “You call it whatever flowery word you like, but the book calls it an unauthorized attack on the integrity of my ship’s information-processing system.”

  “Unauthorized? Yes, absolutely,” Jenkins agreed. “But it’s not a ‘flowery’ word, Colonel Li. It’s an accurate descriptor, and we both know it.”

  “I don’t like your tone, Lieutenant Colonel Jenkins,” Li said with thin-lipped disdain.