The Oppressed

by Matt Thomas

  “Sure!” Julian said.

  Ava gestured for him to remain quiet. “Our actual survival depends on our ability to do our job. I know you’re not from here so you don’t get it. But if the wrong person sees us with you, the best case scenario is that they pull our travel privileges, in which case we don’t survive the next Inventory. If we stand with both you all and MacIntyre, we’re as good as dead.”

  “Okay. I get that.”

  She looked again at the Hetarek bodies, and thought about how many more there could be. “But what I can do is tell MacIntyre you’re coming and where to meet you.”

  “That would be a huge help. Thank you.”

  “That’s it, though.” Ava said firmly. “After that we’re done.”

  “I can respect that. Just that introduction would be enough.”

  Julian stepped forward. “Do we have to be done? We go all over, and we know a lot of people. We can give them some names and tell them when to meet.”

  The risk was too much. Ava had to balance the effectiveness of helping yet another doomed uprising with the direct threat. The more they helped, the more likely it was they would die in the process. But the prospect of more dead Hetarek kept tugging at her. “We’ll see how this one goes. But it’s just a name, time, and location. That’s it.”

  “We can make that work.”

  The woman stepped forward, extending a small device in her hand. “Here, take this. It’s a short range encrypted transmitter. You can use that to give us the details after you spoke with MacIntyre.

  Ava tried to wave it off, but Julian grabbed it from the woman’s hand. “Absolutely.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the newcomers loading equipment, and a body, into the back of the Komodo.

  “Give us an hour head start.” Ava found herself saying. “So they don’t link us together.”

  “Thanks again, Ava and Julian. I hope to see you again.” The leader said.

  “Christ, I hope not.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Colonel Tamaka had made two things clear when they had first moved the task force to the restricted wing of Columbia: Admiral Sykora had access to the secured facility that occupied nearly a quarter of his flagship. Xander had personally given the admiral a read-on for all of the extremely sensitive task force operations so that nothing happening in his ship would be out of his reach. It was largely lip-service, a way to make their host feel better, but it had worked. So far.

  The second directive proved more challenging. Admiral Sykora could not control the Joint Special Task Force. They were to coordinate operations with him of course, and provide mutual support, but the JSTF reported to a separate chain of command leading directly to the Council of Free Humans.

  The balancing act led to a certain etiquette. Since the Sergeant Major had not ended the morning's brief with an admonition that everyone had better be in uniform and behave for the admiral, Xander deduced that the admiral had broken that etiquette when he appeared unannounced in the operations center. Xander was about to call the room to attention as required by conventional military courtesy, but stopped himself. He wasn't sure the resulting confused and annoyed looks would have been better than outright ignoring that piece of military custom.

  "Lieutenant Colonel Berne and Major Gretter,” Admiral Sykora boomed. “Could you please explain to me this report I had regarding your contact, Objective Helen?"

  Berne stood, still in a tee shirt and shorts from his afternoon workout. "Yes, sir. She's KIA."

  The admiral stared at the officer, clearly trying to decide if he was being sufficiently insubordinate to warrant a response.

  "How?" He asked after either swallowing pride or deciding not to berate this officer in front of Berne’s subordinates.

  "Sir, she was with ODA Eighty-Two Twenty-Two taking them to meet a contact and they got stopped at a check point. It got pretty hairy pretty fast and she was shot in the face." Berne recited without emotion.

  Xander had spent the bulk of the previous two years learning as much as he could about the woman they had known as Objective Helen, but a file somewhere identified as former Captain Anastasia Genovese. An ODA team leader who had been captured during the evacuation of Earth because, according to reports, she either willingly gave up her seat on a Quinalt so that it could take more refugees or was knocked off the shuttle in the ensuing firefight. They eventually released her, and she began recording hundreds of hours of reports over the subsequent decades. The reports detailed her time as a prisoner of the Hetarek, her observations and intelligence on the occupied planet, and eventually turning into a bit of a diary. They had never talked directly, always transmitting at the snail’s pace of the speed of light. The Free Humans received the transmissions years after she sent them. Xander had recorded the response message transmitted on their first reconnaissance satellite sent back to Earth.

  Strangely, he felt her loss. After all she had been through, to be killed so quickly on the operation she had helped create just seemed wrong.

  Sykora crossed his arms and stared at Berne. "Why aren't you panicking?

  CHOPS shrugged. "What good will that do, sir? The team's there now." Berne was right, of course. There was little that could be done other than mourn her loss and move on to the next battle.

  "Convince me this isn't catastrophic. Convince me I shouldn't shut this whole thing down."

  "First, sir, like I said. Our team is on the ground. They're there whether she’s dead or alive. We can't pull them out, so there's nowhere to go but foreword." Berne’s nonchalance about the situation clearly disturbed the admiral. The senior officer saw multiple possibilities, one of which was failure. True to the color of his beret no doubt shoved in a locker somewhere, it was like that option had been permanently removed from his psyche. Not in the cliche that failure carried such severe consequences that it it was unthinkable. He he just couldn't comprehend non-success, non-perseverance. His brain threw an error message at the thought.

  Seeing the two men clearly speaking alien languages to each other, Xander stepped in.

  "Admiral, she provided us with the name of a contact who can do the heavy lifting. Two locals also came to the team's aid and said they could arrange a meeting with that contact. We have a route to follow that will get us to the same end point. We'll follow our contingency plans and adapt."

  The admiral examined the two men. "I understand it was a significant firefight. In their first engagement, no less. You're not worried they tipped their hand too soon?"

  Berne shook his head. "No, sir. Better they tipped their hand and stayed alive."

  The admiral continued to glare. "You still think we can do this?"

  "Yep." Berne answered without a thought.

  The radio crackled "Serpent Eight-Two, Serpent Eight-Two, Serpent Eight-Two, Beast One-Five. We're troops in contact at this time. Standby for report. Thank you. Out."

  Berne turned abruptly away from the admiral, staring at the images coming through of Castor. Pockets of Hetarek still hid amongst the rocks, stranded far from the Gemini wreckage and the now-liberated Hetarek encampment.

  "I'll leave you to it." The admiral said, dismissing himself and turning to exit the operations center.

  "Thank you, sir." Berne said over his shoulder. He stabbed a finger at the map of the mostly secured planet. "What the fuck is that asshole doing on that side of the planet."

  "The CONOP says recon." Someone answered.

  "Bullshit. Get that dumbfuck some CAS."

  Xander stepped over to his terminal to read intelligence reports, trying hard not to wonder if Sykora had been right.

  *****

  There was something hopeful about the crumbling building tucked in a gully far away from fields, roads, or habitation compounds. After their new contacts, the angry young woman and her brother, said goodbye, it took another three hours for the team to make their way amongst the scrub bushes towards the rendezvous.

&nbs
p; The building had been a barn at one point, with farm equipment rusting into the ground. The yellow glow of an ancient kerosene lantern escaped through cracks and boards. But, somehow, the near pitch black of night concealed rather than highlighted the illumination.

  Bryan led this now three person team inside. A cluster of five men and women waited, each holding a firearm, but loosely, not really ready for battle. It wasn’t clear that any of them knew how to use it.

  "Hey, I'm Bryan." He extended a hand, and finally one of his hosts ventured forward to shake it. He introduced the rest of the team, but the other would-be partisans just stared. They stared at the team's lack of malnutrition. They stared at their new weapons. They stared at their confidence.

  "It's really true, isn't it." The first one said, the one Bryan assumed to be the leader. "I didn't believe it when Ava got word to me. It's just been so long. I'm Lucas. Lucas MacIntyre. We'd nearly given up hope."

  Lucas was not a young man, neither were the three other men and one woman on either side of him. From their wrinkles and weariness, Bryan deduced that they must have been old enough to have been part of the founding group of resistance fighters a generation before. A tattered American flag hung on the wall, along with various patriotic artifacts. The layers of dirt and faded colors showed more resilience than despair.

  "Can I offer you a drink or something?" Lucas asked.

  Bryan accepted water, declining an offer of moonshine. Lucas unfolded squeaky, rusted folding chairs and four of them sat down. O stepped outside to maintain a watch.

  "When are they coming? The rest of you?" Lucas asked eagerly.

  "Soon." Bryan replied.

  "How soon?" The woman standing behind Lucas asked.

  "Soon enough that my team is here and we're not leaving."

  "Is this it?" Lucas asked. “Is it just you guys?”

  Bryan shook his head. "Were just the icebreaker committee."

  "How many do you have?"

  The team leader shrugged. "Enough to start making a difference. Enough to start training anyone willing to fight so we can lay a foundation for liberation." He pointed to the rifles and shotguns around the room. "How many of those do you have?"

  MacIntyre shook his head. "It's not the guns the are the problem. We've got some cached all over the place. A bunch scavenged right after the invasion. A bunch survivalists had stashed around. The problem is ammo. We burned through a lot the first few years. Then they let us hunt so some goes to that. A lot just went bad after so long."

  "They let you hunt?"

  He nodded. "They think eating meat is barbaric. They cut us in half as an incentive to work harder, but they think eating meat is barbaric. You know what they do to their dead? They turn them into goo that gets fed to their queen and babies down at the hatchery. But eating a steak is barbaric." Lucas snorted contemptuously.

  "I haven't had a steak in twenty three years." Bryan said. "Not a real one anyway. Somehow we left the cows behind."

  "For you, I bet we can fix that. Anyway, sorry to rant. They know we don't get enough protein with the shit they let us grow, so they just don't bother us while we're hunting. They keep track on guns out in the open, and it's mostly shotguns. Some places have gotten pretty good with bows and arrows too. But, well, we're hurting."

  "We can get you some ammo, and maybe a few weapons. It's pretty limited, but it depends on how many people you think you can put together."

  Lucas unclasped his hands. "It depends. There are some here or there that are like us. They'll fight any time, any place. I can think of maybe a couple dozen in the region like that. There's a lot more who can be persuaded under the right circumstances."

  "What circumstances are those?"

  MacIntyre sighed. "You have to understand what it was like right afterwords, during the Culling. There was a ton of resistance. There were some military units left behind, and especially around here there were lots of guns and tons of ammo. But it didn't matter. We'd kill some of them and they'd kill way more of us. They'd launch these air raids that'd wipe out whole towns. I was seventeen, and I remember being out on the Hetarek hunting parties, and we'd get a few of them, so they would launch a raid before we got home. I'd try to make it through the mountains and see fighters streaking down. They were starting to just wipe us all out until the realized they could replace grapes with schleckt. Then they needed us for labor. They just beat us down until people finally gave up hope. There might be an uprising here or there that got people exited at first, and then they'd cut everyone in half and display the pieces. I think people need to think that whatever you're doing isn't just another flare up. That would help a lot, in my humble opinion."

  Bryan considered this for a moment. "You hear anything from any other regions?"

  Lucas shook his head. "We hear that if you can’t grow schleckt or have mines, or directly help the people growing schleckt or mining, they jut sterilized you. They cut off all travel. They patrol the borders between the regions pretty well. We're all very isolated. There are clusters around, people too remote and insignificant for the Hetarek to go pull them out. They're pretty insular, though. They're afraid of attracting too much attention."

  "Had there been any attempt at continuity of government?"

  At this, Lucas laughed. "You know what they did first? They paraded that guy around, the freighter pilot who found the Ahai, umm... Lucius D’Affri was his name, right? They said they'd use him as an ambassador since he'd worked with the Ahai for so long. They got everyone to see him as a leader of whatever was left. Then they cut him in half. After that, any government official left went into hiding. After about, oh, two years or so, a bunch of folks came out of some bunkers on the east coast. Said they represented the United States." He stared sadly at the flag. "We had no idea what that was anymore. They got cut in half too. Broadcasted across the planet. Every once in a while we hear about someone trying to make something work or continue the old ways, but it never amounts to anything.

  "What about organized resistance still out there?"

  "There have been a couple of attempts. Some military units left behind fought pretty hard before they got wiped out, but I haven’t heard anything about that in years. There's the occasional riot or something but we only hear about that when the Hetarek want us to know how they slaughtered everybody."

  Bryan shifted in his chair, leaning forward."We're going to do everything we can to keep that from happening. But before we start anything, we need to find people we can trust and get them trained. We're not creating havoc without a plan."

  "What is the plan?"

  "I'm not going to give you details. But, in a nutshell, once we get some people trained, we'll be doing disruption operations here, east of the mountains, and preparation for a return west of the mountains."

  Lucas scoffed. "West of the mountains. You mean Seattle. They're going to liberate Seattle instead of this side where all the work is done."

  Bryan laughed. "Look man, I'm from Tacoma. You're not going to get any Seattle elitism out of me. We're going to liberate everywhere. The whole planet. You're within a hundred miles of the beachhead. But before we get there, we need to start building. Can you help us with that? Can you find us some people and some guns?"

  MacIntyre nodded enthusiastically. “You bet. Give me a way to communicate with you and a couple of days. We can get some people together. What else can we do to help in the meantime?”

  The team leader looked down at his tablet and pulled up a series of bad photographs and incomplete bits of data. “We’re trying to get an idea of who are the major players on the other side. See if we can get to any of them.”

  “You mean kill them?” Lucas responded with a huge smile.

  Bryan only shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe we find some other way to use them. But I need some honest feedback. Anastasia Genovese gave me a good start...”

  “Julian told me about her, that’s terrible. She was a patriot.”

&n
bsp; “Yes she was.” Bryan agreed. “And she gave me some information but maybe you can go through these and help us out. It’s not sexy but we need it.”

  Lucas nodded soberly. "I can do that for you. But you owe me some dead Hetarek."

  "That's why we're here."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  From such a distance, the sun barely stood out, just large enough to separate itself from the surrounding stars. They floated in near perfect dark, only the soft red glow of the instrument panels and the dim back-light from the book he held in his hand yet barely read. Off to the right a mere fifty meters, the second Petrel hung motionless, the gray hull barely visible even at so close a distance. He could make out the silhouettes of Dauod and Quinn against their own ambient light. The total absence of engine noise or radio chatter amplified the blood pulsing through his ears and each breath. He was completely devoid of sensation.

  Sasha slept in the adjacent compartment, fortunately with his microphone turned off. They had drifted in the termination shock zone for more than six hours. Quinn had finally stopped talking an hour ago, doubtless as he fell asleep and let Dauod monitor the sensors. Jean was happy to let his own pilot sleep. Sasha was too young to fully appreciate what they had done.

  He needed the computer’s help, but he found it. A bright green box flashed up on the canopy highlight what at first glance appeared to be empty space. But when he stared at the space long enough, he could see it. Whether he actually saw it or whether his mind conjured the image, he couldn’t be sure. But Jean Costeaux saw Earth. The small, faint dot barely registered, but he saw a place Free Humans had not seen in decades. To many in the fleet, Earth held the significance of an objective, no more. Few young enough to fight remembered the planet. Many of those who did had died along the way, trying to return. It was hard to imagine being close enough to the planet to see it, but yet it was still far enough away its light took ten hours to reach his eyes.