by Rick Partlow
It wouldn’t come and I was forced to keep swimming, keep fighting. Lights flashed in my vision, not beacons guiding me to safety but a flash of warning that my air was gone and I was about to lose consciousness and still I kept swimming.
Air, suddenly, without warning, somehow so much colder than the frigid water, so cold it made my lungs hurt when I sucked it down. Water went down my windpipe with the air and a violent cough racked my chest. Desperate, I threw myself onto my back and let myself float. The night was clear and Brigantia’s solitary moon was out; enough illumination for me to see just how far away the lake shore was.
And more…I could see the fiery deaths of dropships lighting up the sky, one after another, a platoon of Marines and four flight crew per bird. Missiles streaked out from the escort fighters, beams scored the atmosphere as orbital ships offered fire support, but they were answered with the eye-searing blast of a fusion-fed laser slicing the black apart. Assault shuttles disappeared in clouds of superheated gas thousands of meters above me, the stars of their passing reflected in the flat, mirrored surface of the water, and the lasers continued up through the atmosphere to target the ships in orbit.
It’s gone to shit. It was a revelation, slapping me in the face with a wash colder than the lake water. They’re going to have to pull back.
It felt like a lump inside my gut. Everyone could be dead. I’d only seen two suits pop free of the drop-ship. Was it Scotty Hayes? Rodriguez? Sandoval? Was Lt. Ackley dead? Gunny Guerrero? Was I the only one?
But beyond that, down at the base of my deepest thoughts was one thing, one concern. There wouldn’t be any Search and Rescue lander coming for me. I was alone. I cursed softly, turned over and started swimming.
“Wake up,” Poppa urged, shaking at my shoulder. “You have to wake up.”
No, that was wrong. Not Poppa…I’d never see my father again. I opened my eyes and found myself shivering fitfully and staring up into the yawning muzzle of a rifle.
“Shit!” I scrambled backwards against the rough bark of the century-old oak, seeded by the original colonists along with various other genetically altered Earth life.
The cold of the incipient dawn was forgotten in a rush of adrenalin and it took another second before I could look past the gun and see the old man holding it. Well, even out here in the Periphery, no one actually got old, but a life spent outdoors in the sun and weather had cracked and lined the lean, sharp-edged face, darkening it into the color of the desert rock outside Trans-Angeles.
“Take it easy, boy,” the old man drawled, swinging the barrel of the gun upward and raising a calming hand. “If I saw you burn in here last night, the Tahni surely did.”
He waved the hand in a “follow-me” motion and headed off into the woods, not turning back to see if I would follow. I considered it for a long moment, trying to shake off the disorientation. I didn’t remember falling asleep last night, but I’d obviously passed out immediately after crawling up on the shore. The skinsuit was insulated, which was probably the only reason I hadn’t died of hypothermia on a night where the temperatures had dipped down close to freezing and even with it, the morning chill permeated through my core. The cold made my decision for me; I needed to move.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked the old man, struggling to keep up in soft boots not meant for outdoor use.
The local seemed to know the surest way through the trees and I did my best to follow in his steps without turning an ankle.
“Dak Shepherd.”
I waited for elaboration, but none seemed to be forthcoming and we were almost through the trees. I stepped out into the open, grassy plains and froze, as if all the fear I’d anticipated last night had been stored up and unleashed on me at once.
Seven Years Old:
I didn’t want to come out from beneath the blanket, didn’t want to leave the vehicle, but it was too hot to stay inside; I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. The sun was naked and harsh, the sky yellow with dust and sand, and all around me was nothing, emptiness. The old road stretched out from one horizon to the next, cracked and broken by time, buried under sand in places but stubbornly persisting for the long decades since it had fallen out of use. Buttes jutted red and lonely in the distance, but nothing else interrupted the desolation.
I cried out for my Poppa, for Anton, but no one answered. I was alone.
“Are you comin’, boy? Or would you rather wait for the Tahni to come haul you off to an internment camp?”
I blinked and the haze of years past cohered into the lined mask of Dak Shepherd’s face again. He was frowning and the expression seemed redundant. Beyond him, the open grasslands carpeted the river valley, spread out under an endless, bleak sky and my gut twisted in unreasoning panic.
“Agoraphobic?” The word wasn’t spoken with the scorn I expected. I nodded, trying to force my eyes to focus on Shepherd’s face.
“Slightly,” I gasped the word out. I closed my eyes and tried to slow down my breathing. “Usually not this bad.”
“See that a lot from Earthers. Keep your eyes on me, don’t look around, but move fast.”
That helped. I studied every detail of the man, trying to focus on the rough, hand-made work clothes the old man was wearing, patched and stitched in a dozen places, trying to identify the odd lines of the rifle he carried. It wasn’t a military issue weapon; it looked as old as he was and had probably been custom made on a fabricator from a black-market pattern. All I knew was that the hole at the end of the barrel was big.
I kept my eyes down, watching the damp grass, imported and gone wild, slapping insistently at my thighs. Mosquitos swarmed in our wake, diving with singular purpose at my shaven head, mocking the futility of my flailing hands.
“Why the hell did they bring mosquitos here?” I wondered, not expecting an answer.
“Same reason they brought cockroaches and rats,” Shepherd responded with an amused snort. “By accident. Watch your step, we need to start running.”
“Why?” It came out more plaintively than I’d intended.
“Listen.” He nodded off to their right, back toward the lake.
I started to turn, then reconsidered and closed my eyes first. I heard it then, the distant rumbling…not thunder, there wasn’t enough cloud cover for that. It was a turbofan engine, not close yet, but coming our way.
“Maybe it’s Fleet Search and Rescue.” I tried to sound more hopeful than I was.
The only reply was a humorless snort. Shepherd broke into a long, loping run and I sprinted to keep up with his lanky, long-legged stride. I wanted to look up, wanted to see where we were running, but something deep in my chest clenched icy fingers at the idea and I kept my head down and my legs churning.
I wasn’t out of shape; they didn’t let Marines get out of shape, whether we operated a battlesuit or a desk. But I was huffing and puffing trying to match Shepherd’s pace and I wasn’t even weighed down by a rifle. The old man was like a length of coiled spring, thin and wiry and mechanically efficient. I was just beginning to wonder if I’d have to suffer the humiliation of asking Shepherd to slow down when the older man abruptly dropped out of sight. My arms pinwheeled and my heels dug into the ground at the sudden realization that I was about to fall into a creek bed, then the soft ground at its banks crumbled and I was sliding down on my back, trying not to yell out.
My butt slammed into the flat side of a rock worn smooth by water, arresting the slide after only two meters and sending me sprawling head-first into the fast-running water. The creek was only chest-deep but the current was strong, I was off-balance and the water was shockingly cold, even through the skinsuit. I tumbled, desperately trying to stand but unable to get my feet beneath me; the current began to carry me away…
I could feel Anton’s arms through the blanket, could feel my brother lifting me into the car, even though I couldn’t see it. I knew the car; I’d watched it pulling up outside. It looked impossibly old and battered and I wondered if it was an original gas-bur
ner someone had squirreled away in a garage out in the boonies or if it had been fabricated off an old pattern by someone too poor to spring for a newer model.
“Be quiet, Cam,” Anton whispered to him as he laid me down on the floor in the back seat. “Be quiet and stay here and everything will be okay.”
Liar.
A hand wrapped around my right forearm with the grip of a power loader and yanked me upright, then pulled me to the shore just a few meters away.
I nodded thanks to Shepherd and expected the local to make some scathing remark about my clumsiness, but the man put a finger to his lips in warning, dark eyes traveling upward. The scream of the jets was close now, over the lake, and from the change in the pitch, I was fairly sure the aircraft was hovering. Shepherd waved for me to follow and headed upstream, away from the lake, splashing through the shallows.
“How long do we have to stay down here?” I asked, after the third time I’d nearly slipped on the unstable, rounded rocks of the creek bed.
“Until they go away.” Shepherd indicated who “they” were with a jerk of his thumb back toward the lake. “Or we’re over the horizon. Or they find us and kill us.”
He fixed me with a glare.
“Shut up and move.”
20
I stumbled blindly in the deep shadows of the canyon, too exhausted to pick up my feet and too stubborn to ask Shepherd for another break. The system’s primary was close to setting somewhere behind those red canyon walls, and we’d been walking or running since dawn with only a handful of five or ten-minute breaks, carefully-rationed water and very little food. And I’d spent most of the trip with my eyes glued to Shepherd’s back, not daring to look up for fear of another panic attack.
“Heads up,” Shepherd said, his voice as even and free of strain as if he’d just taken a stroll in the park. “This is it.”
I forced my eyes upward, expecting another break and hopeful that the walls of the narrow canyon would keep me from freezing up. It was so dark I almost missed the trailer, and that was probably the idea. It was backed into a crevice where the side of the sandstone canyon had collapsed, shielded from overhead view by camouflage netting, with dirt piled over its sides to break up its outline. I jumped back when the door in the exposed side of the mobile work shed squeaked open and a woman stepped out.
She was a younger, smoother version of Shepherd and from the resemblance, I guessed she was the man’s daughter. The work clothes were similar, though she’d opted for a pistol holstered at her waist instead of the massive rifle he carried, and skin and hair were half a shade lighter.
“So, this is our guest?” Her voice was a strong contralto, her eyebrow arched in skeptical assessment.
“I’m Corporal Alvarez, 187th Marine Expeditionary Force,” I blurted, barely stopping myself from following up with my ID number.
“Cam,” I amended, trying to salvage my composure.
“Maria,” she offered, and I had the sense that she was about as chatty as her father.
“He’s what’s left,” Shepherd declared sourly. “Let’s get inside before their drones make a pass through here.”
It felt incalculably comforting to be inside the shadowed confines of the trailer, despite the accumulated sand on the floor, the dingy, peeling paint on the walls and the battered and ripped upholstery on furniture that could have come from the pre-spaceflight era. I was so relieved to be indoors again that it took me a second to realize there were other people in the trailer, two of them sprawled out over a sofa that might once have been some shade of green and a third huddled over a folding table, leaning against it despite its questionable stability.
They were all dressed in similar fashion to Shepherd and Maria, all with the weathered look of locals, and all armed, both with obvious weapons and skeptical expressions. I was staring at them uncertainly when the door slammed shut behind me and Shepherd’s hand on my shoulder guided me toward a chair.
“Hope they didn’t track you,” one of the two men lounging on the sofa rumbled, picking at his teeth with a sliver of wood as he regarded me from beneath shaggy, sand-colored brows.
“We have bigger problems,” Maria assured him. She looked around at the others, her face going grim. “Fleet Intelligence just sent a coded message…”
“You’re in the Resistance?” I asked her, eyes going wide. I knew the cells existed on all enemy-occupied worlds, organized by the spooks to get intelligence on the Tahni and sometimes sabotage their on-planet facilities, but to meet one…
Maria didn’t answer, but her baleful glare told me what she thought of the question.
“They’re not going to try another conventional attack,” she went on, instead.
“They’re abandoning Brigantia?” the woman seated at the table asked, her eyebrows going up in surprise. She looked older than Maria, more stolid and stable, though not the desiccated fossil that Dak Shepherd was.
I shook my head, knowing the answer before Maria gave it, and liking it about as much as she seemed to.
“They’re gonna’ nuke the Tahni base,” I said. Maria glanced at me, looking surprised at the insight. I shrugged. “We got our asses kicked and we don’t have enough troops for a repeat, not without getting beat up just as bad.”
“But a strike that close to Gennich…” One of the men on the couch pushed himself to his feet, stepping closer to me as if I were the one launching the missiles. “It’ll take out the whole city!”
“They’ve given us sixty hours to evacuate as many people as we can,” Maria said. “They said they’re going to try to keep the Tahni pinned down with orbital bombardment while we do it.”
There were spluttered protests and hands slapping furniture in frustration, but I ignored them, my thoughts churning, my mind kicking back into gear now that it no longer had to fight back the panic constantly.
“The shields will be at maximum output,” I mused, and didn’t think anyone had heard until the others fell silent, staring at me as if I’d grown a second head.
I shrank a bit under the scrutiny.
“During the bombardment, I mean,” I explained, trying to remember the important parts of the briefing past the Skipper’s morale boosting. “It’s got a fusion reactor powering it, but it’s still going to be close to the edge deflecting all that shit. It would only take a nudge in the right place to blow it out.”
“Yeah?” Shepherd was at my right shoulder, so close I could feel the man’s breath. “What’s this right place?”
“You guys must have taken some photos of the base, right?” I spread my hands hopefully.
Maria pulled a datalink off her belt and set it down on the table, touching a control on the side. The hologram the device projected wasn’t just a photo or a video, it was a detailed schematic not too dissimilar to the one they’d showed my platoon during the target brief, and I didn’t bother to ask how she’d got it.
“Here,” I said, pointing at a section of the squared-off, blocky construction of the base. The transmitter was a universal dish shape, its form a slave to its function. “That was our target…shit, was it just yesterday?” I shook myself, trying to get my head working right.
Maria shoved a canteen into my hand and I swallowed half of it down before handing it back, nodding gratitude.
“The antenna is the only external structure connected to the power supply,” I went on. “It’s got overhead cover by the shield, but the ground approach is open.”
“What good is blowing up an antenna gonna’ do?” Toothpick Man demanded, gesturing with the wood sliver. “I don’t give a damn if the Tahni can call their mommas back home.”
“Jesus, Charlie.” Maria rolled her eyes. “It’s connected to the power system. If we blow it up while they’re drawing maximum from the reactor…”
“They told us the power surge would overload their systems,” I agreed. “It’ll shut down their shielding, at least until they can reset.”
“The Fleet will be bombarding the shield,” She
pherd mused quietly.
“Do you have any explosives?” I asked. It wasn’t my specialty, but every Marine got classes on handling explosives in Basic and I was sure I could remember enough to work with it.
“We have something better than that.” It was the man sitting beside Charlie. He was short and skinny and unimposing and he hadn’t said two words until now.
“You got it?” Shepherd seemed surprised, and the expression didn’t fit on his hard-edged face.
“Out in the truck. Drove it in last night.”
“Damn.”
There was a reflexive relief in my exclamation, and on its heels a tide of guilt.
“It was the only one that survived the crash,” the little man was saying, leaning into the powered lift bed of the all-terrain cargo truck, shaded and shielded by the camouflage netting pulled over the truck like a carport. I winced when the man slapped a hand appreciatively against the leg of the prone battlesuit. “Took me all night to dig it out of the wreckage and get it on the truck.”
The suit was battered and scorched, and I could already see that the jumpjets were so much scrap metal, but the joints didn’t seem damaged and the weapons were intact. I hesitated, his hand near the latch to release the chest plastron.
“Is there still…?” I trailed off. The whole thing seemed disrespectful.
Maria put a hand on my shoulder, obvious sympathy in her eyes.
“Oh,” the little man realized what I was asking. “No. The lock that attaches the helmet to the chest came loose in the dropship crash. I left the body there…didn’t have time to bury him.”
I pulled myself up into the bed of the truck and examined the armor with a critical eye. There was blood inside the helmet, nearly dried now. I swallowed hard and grabbed the leads of the interface cables, plugging each into the jacks implanted at my temples. There was a silence inside my head, a complete darkness that meant lack of input and I began to despair…until a blinking yellow indicator let me know the suit’s system was rebooting.
