Burning Eagle

by Navin Weeraratne

  “I read your after-action report this morning. How is the surviving member of your team?”

  She paused.

  “Al-Masri will be fine. Him and the others just need some time to reflect.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t know the degree of support the Invaders had from the locals. It was your team and others who found out for us. You however did manage to complete your mission despite heavy losses. I think that’s commendable.”

  “It drew a blank. Sarasvati’s campus was nothing more than a husk. There wasn’t even any old data that could be retrieved.”

  “But you confirmed that. We needed to know. Also, I’m more interested in your conduct than I am in the mission.”

  “Sir.”

  “After Major Jahandar was killed, you instructed the nano-fog to attack anything not transmitting on your team’s frequencies.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I’m not attacking the decisions you made under fire, I’ve been there. But I’d like to know why you made your choices.”

  “I had to protect my team and protect the mission. As soon we were ambushed I knew things were going to be hard, but there was no reason to think that civilians would be a threat. Major Jahandar – Jahandar broke stealth to try and help a child. He paid for it, the child was probably detonated from a distance. At that point I saw that there was no telling hostiles from civilians. We didn’t have time for obstacles, and I had to protect what was left of my team and safeguard the mission.”

  “That was a tough call. Most people wouldn’t have made it, or decided to so quickly. Most of the teams that went out yesterday were faced with the same choice, and they chose differently. This hampered them badly.” He poured a second glass of whiskey.

  “I – I don’t understand.”

  “What exactly?” he handed her the glass.

  “Am I being disciplined?”

  “No. No one trained you to shoot the people we came here to save. But that’s what we have to deal with now, and we need soldiers who can understand that. You did exactly the right thing.”

  “Thank you Sir.”

  “It must have been very hard, shooting people. You should talk about it. Don’t keep that bottled in. I want you to go to see counseling, and that’s an order.”

  She shrugged. “It was easy.”

  “Easy? How?”

  “They aren’t people anymore. They’re Calamari.”

  Havelock I

  Deep Space, two light years from Paradiso

  The Endurance internment ship. Probably the biggest human terrorist camp in the history of our bastard species. We were here to abduct a suspect and we had no warrant, no jurisdiction, and no more coffee.

  “You ass,” Yuri tapped his empty cup over into thin air.

  “I thought you’d be more offended if I left you the remains.”

  “I wouldn’t have.”

  “Yes you would have. Everything offends you.”

  “This bloody ship offends me. Why are they allowed to get away with this kind of shit?” he pointed out the car window at the graffiti-sprayed street sign. 4th Street had been rededicated Some Fight On.

  I shrugged.

  “Their Old One has a plan. Whatever it’s doing, it’s done it before.”

  “I would argue that it’s doing nothing. Human Affairs has probably had to clean up its messes in the past. And I bet it knows that.”

  “Shush.”

  “Why? It can’t hear me. And if it could hear me, then it could hear what the Scum say too, and then it should be telling us where they are so we can go after them, right? Right? You hear me Old One?”

  His only answer was the street light flickering over the empty alley, reflected in the rain water pools on the asphalt and cracked pavement. The buildings here were closely spaced: Endurance had always been a high capacity facility even before the Alliance turned it into an internment ship. It had been named St Clare’s before the Liberation, home to ten million people. Now it housed about twice that number – it was hard to do a census since resistance was so strong here.

  A small door opened up into the street, warm yellow flooded out in beams. The silhouette of a tall, bald man stepped out in a long trench coat, his breath steaming up the cold.

  “There’s our man.”

  Yuri pulled out his gun, it hissed as it recognized his prints and activated.

  The trenchcoat started to walk down the street away from us.

  “Start the car.”

  The door opened again and a woman stepped out next, short, small made, bundled inside a lined jacket too big for her. She started walking down towards us.

  “Rex, start the car.”

  “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Who? Start the bloody car already, he’s getting away!”

  “Angelica Harris.”

  A blank look. He never read anything he didn’t need to.

  “The Storyteller.”

  Realization.

  “Shit! That’s her?”

  “Forget the target, we’re taking her instead.”

  We waited till she got about six meters from us – then she stopped, eyeing us back and forth. We had no good reason to be out there at that time – but neither did she.

  I stepped out of the car.

  “Ma’am, are you Angelica Harris?”

  “N – no. I’m sorry I have to go,” she turned.

  “You need to come with us Ma’am.”

  She froze and watched Yuri as he quickly moved up and stepped in behind her, blocking the street. The other man who had left earlier had also stopped, silhouetted under the flickering street lamp. He froze for a few moments - then turned and ran.

  “Is that how some fight on?” Yuri shook his head. “My ass fights on. Now get in the car,” he drew his gun.

  I walked over to her and gently pushed her forward. She was a thin, pale, brunette, her blue eyes hardened suddenly.

  “Now don’t try to be a hero,” I put my hand on her shoulder and moved her forward and she reached up and snapped my thumb.

  “Dammit!”

  Lights starting turning on. The door to the building opened again and three men rushed out carrying simple, kinetic pistols. They started firing.

  Yuri fired a bolt into one who was smacked back, smoke pouring from his forehead, and the other two scrambled for cover behind parked cars. I hit the woman in the face with the flat of my other hand, hard. She gasped, blood dripped from her broken nose. I put my arm around her and shoved her into the car, and then drew my gun. One of the gunmen was aiming at me, I lanced him through the throat.

  “What part of don’t try to be a hero, did you not understand?”

  She cowered in the backseat, sobbing. At least she wasn’t in the crossfire anymore.

  “Yuri, move!”

  I thumbed my pistol to rapid fire and emptied the power cell in a spray of red bolts at the last shooter. He stayed down, and Yuri sprinted back to the car and jumped in.

  “Other seat!”

  “What?” he looked back and fired another shot.

  “I can’t drive, she broke my thumb!”

  “You idiot.”

  The car sprang into life and we tore down the street. We heard security alarms and Sirens in the distance but we drove on for three more streets. We were ahead, but only barely ahead, of real trouble.

  We pulled over and switched to a different car – Yuri held up his Human Affairs badge to the door and it slid open with a hum. It would create a trace of course but we didn’t care – our job was to do the grab and get out, everyone else could worry about the details.

  I looked in the back. The suspect was curled up, her eyes closed, cupping her face with her hands, red seeped and dripped through her fingers. I felt terrible.

  “Did you have to hit her in the face?”

  “Actually yes, I had to shoot someone.”

  “Look, just do something about it. I feel like we’re a pair of rapists or something.”


  I pulled out some gauze I had and handed it to her. She took it and held it up to her face, red expanded into it.

  We reached one of the cargo ports, a pilot was waiting there for us with an Alliance high security pass, an open ramp, and absolutely no questions. We drove right up to the ship, a fifty meter rocket tug, and jumped out of the car leaving its doors open. The engine slam-started even as the ramp was retracting, we clutched at railings as we took off.

  I hurried down to the sickbay with the suspect and got her treatment.

  “Are you Angelica Harris?”

  “Yes.”

  The holding room was bare, quiet, well lit, clean. I sat at a small table, the suspect opposite me. We had checked her for weapons and she was clean, she had a nano plastic bandage on her nose, it would heal in a few hours. Steam rose up from her coffee. It was a shame she wouldn’t touch it, it was good stuff.

  “Are you the one they call the Storyteller?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “Because you bastards kidnapped me?”

  “You are under arrest for being a terror suspect. Agent Gennady and I are with Human Affairs, and we’re taking you in for questioning.”

  She said nothing.

  “What are these things you were carrying with you?” I pointed to them on the table. They were rectangular bindings filled with white, printed, sheets.

  “Those are books.”

  I stared at her blankly.

  “What?”

  “Books. You know what a book is?”

  “I did just ask you what these were,” I held one up and opened it, “is this – this some sort of insurgent code?”

  “They’re antiques, they’re from Earth. That’s where you ultimately come from, it’s our home. The code you’re looking at, those are letters, old letters. This one is in a language called Arabic, it’s a holy book, its called the Koran. This one is in Japanese, it’s the history of the Tokugawa Shogunate, an empire from our past, from you past. This one is in Sanskrit, it’s called the Ramayana. It’s Indian. You look Indian, are you Indian?”

  I scowled. “No.”

  “Well, do you even know what that means?”

  “Well, I know it doesn’t matter.”

  “Why? Because they told you it doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter who you are and where you came from? The great works our people have made, our art, our history, our place in the universe? These things don’t matter to you?”

  “No. No they don’t. They are irrelevant, they’re old, tarnished triumphs that have no meaning whatsoever in the space we live in today.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I’m telling you that.”

  “Well you’re wrong. The Alliance stole us from Paradiso and they took everything from us! Our homes, our children, our dreams.”

  “Liberation was a long time ago. Get over it.”

  “Liberation!” her veins popped. “It was enslavement! We are a captive people, and you Human Affairs goons are their pets!”

  “I’m not saying that a lot of people didn’t die back then. I’m not saying their deaths didn’t matter. But I am saying there’s no point in blaming people around today for what happened then, you can’t hold them accountable for what other people did – or for the fact that perhaps they could have managed it differently. You talk about history? History is done. The Liberation happened. Now get over it.”

  Her eyes slitted.

  “Get over it? Get over what, that the Alliance doesn’t understand that we’re not done fighting yet? You may not care who you are or where you come from, but I care. A lot of people here care. And a lot more people out in space care, and they’re coming. And they’re coming to get you.”

  She drank her coffee. It was cold.

  Diamond III

  Six Months Later

  “Excuse me Sir. Did you get a chance to review the latest report?”

  I ignored her and kept looking out the window at the city. Our maps showed Villablanca as a sunny farming region before the Invaders came. The manors were all gone now, along with their vineyards, wine cellars, orchards, and cider presses.

  Now it was a horizon-to-horizon slum.

  Awkward adobe huts leaned against each other for strength. Skinny children shouted and splashed through brown puddles in dirty alleys. Sweat-chested vendors pushed rickety hand carts, selling dried algae stacks, chickens, and puppies to hungry mothers with hungrier families. Loincloth-wearing devotees with metal hooks in their backs, pulled wagons topped with garish-painted Gods.

  When we got here, everyone complained about the smell. A city of a million with bad sanitation is always going to smell like shit. One gets used to any smell, but it was fashionable in the Green Zone to complain about such things. Bloody UEFers were always complaining. They complained about the natives, about how they were always sullen, lazy, or trying to kill them. They bitched about the food –they’d try a sweet a housekeeper would make for them, and then declare a whole cuisine ‘shit.’ They’d do it in groups, while sitting in their mess hall eating 3d-printed steaks.

  Complaining about the smell was my peeve. How can you always complain about something you’re completely used to?

  Six months in, and the Union Expeditionary Force was now just a typical group of grumpy expats. Unprepared to live away from home; they surrounded themselves with equally uncomfortable transplants. They defended themselves from all the peering, different, people around them with sneers, contempt, and superiority complexes.

  I hated them more than the natives did.

  “Sir?”

  We had started out looking for Category Ones: Transcendents as we knew them. They had captured technology on Paradiso that would have put them ahead of their ill-fated cousins at Tennyson. Technology they would have adapted – which we could easily identify. Underground servers; sat-link cores; quantum entanglers.

  “Excuse me, Sir?”

  We found fuck all evidence of Category Ones. There had been some excitement over an old military tunnel system, but the aliens had only being using it to store nuclear waste.

  Category Two were Transcendents as we could deduce them. While not the same as ours, they would still face the same design challenges. Miniaturization. Data storage. Energy supply. It made sense to expect similar solutions to similar problems. Dolphins and sharks were good terrestrial examples – different creatures with similar designs. Evolution never ignores the obvious.

  So we looked for the signs. Pockets of tropical forests amidst polar ice – growing around subterranean heat vents. Academies training the finest minds to become glorified tech support. Evacuated towns that drew more energy, empty.

  I’m just checking in to see if you’ve had a chance to sign off on the report Sir.”

  Nothing.

  Category Three were Transcendents as we did not know them. Your guess was as good as mine.

  “Sir, I really need you to – “

  I turned round, at last. The spic and span uniform was an instant too late hiding her disapproval. It was the air-conditioning rule. Anyone who worked in the dust, dirt, and sun I had no problems with. If they worked in air-conditioning though, I probably made them uncomfortable.

  “I have not, Private Holman. So tell me what’s in them so I don’t have to.”

  “Um. Yes Sir.”

  Without a protest or eye contact, she called up the files in virtual space over my desk. They were laid out in a row, each glowed as she tapped them in sequence.

  “We interviewed another twenty people this week, but the expert system drew no leads. Statistics estimates our pool is just too small, and that if we can bring another five hundred to a thousand interviews, new, actionable patterns will emerge.”

  “They said that five hundred interviews ago.”

  Holman nodded, and tapped the next file. “Gene Mapping has collected another six hundred blood samples. They won’t have the full results till Monday, but initial
counts show nothing abnormal or signs of reengineering.”

  “Why do they even bother? What about the listening posts?”

  “Nothing. Insurgent burst transmissions and pirate radio broadcasts, but nothing over a hundred kilobytes a second. No machines have been talking to each other except for our own.”

  “Did they follow up on my suggestion that they could be using our own networks to move data around?”

  “There’s nothing in the report, I’ll have to check.”

  “Fuck it. Don’t bother.”

  “Sir?”

  “They haven’t done it. They know they won’t find anything, so they didn’t bother. I know they won’t find anything, so I don’t care.”

  “Yes Sir,” the disapproval creeping in.

  “Take the rest of the day off, Holman. Everyone, hey everyone!” I shouted to the hall. “Take the rest of the day off! You can come back to another six months of bitching and getting nowhere, tomorrow.”

  “Sir, if you could just sign off on these before – “

  “You sign.”

  “It needs to be yours Sir – “

  “Then make it convincing. Who cares? It doesn’t matter Private, ‘cause no one cares. It’s just another batch of reports that show we worked really hard, and have still found nothing. So who cares? I certainly don’t care. I should hope you don’t care. I’m off for the day. If anyone wants me, tell them to go have sex with themselves.”

  I walked out of the room, the building, and then the Green Zone.

  The Green Zone was a cantonment in the best tradition of polite fortress embassies. This was where the government buildings that ran Villablanca were. The UEF had no interest in displacing the authorities, just in telling them what to do. As such, moving in amongst them seemed a good idea at the time. The Green Zone was also where the Calamari had put up a Space Elevator. It had been spared because it was in the middle of a human city. The Calamari had used it to siphon raw materials and slaves up to their orbitals. Now it brought down street lights, school chairs, and water treatment trucks.

  Cantonments are all about keeping out the natives, and that means a wall. This one was six meters of diamond and smartcrete: it could take a gigawatt x-ray blast and keep on self-repairing. Automated guard towers loomed over it, their weaponry retracted politely into pods. They could stun charging mobs; sniff out drums of homemade explosives; and shoot down long-range bombers.