by Rick Partlow
Once the Intell officer saw all of us were inside, he waved at us to follow him and we filed through and crammed into a small conference room that was barely able to hold all of us around the table in the middle that we all knew was for officers. I fought back claustrophobia as I got shoved farther and farther into the corner by Johnny’s shoulder as he got shoved by Abdi who got shoved by the rest of the squad and the rest of the platoon.
I was so busy trying not to get crushed that I almost didn’t notice when the other guys came into the room. There were six of them, four men and two women, and they all looked way too young for the ranks on the sleeves of their black Intelligence utilities. The biggest one, towering over the others by a head, had skin the color of antique mahogany and a serious, thoughtful demeanor that suited his rank of Major and reminded me of some of the Corporate Council executives and Commonwealth politicians that Mom used to have over for meetings and coffee. The others were only remarkable for their youth and their Captain’s ranks---Captain like a Marine Captain, not a Fleet Captain; Intelligence had the same rank structure we did, not like the Fleet’s for some reason I’d never bothered to look up.
Well, that and all of them seemed a bit…outsized, maybe was the word. Muscular beyond what our guys were, and we were infamous for spending our off time lifting weights. These fuckers were jacked, like professional athletes with cloned muscle implants.
“What the hell are these guys?” Johnny muttered, eyeing them suspiciously.
“At ease!” Anderson barked and the murmuring and chatter ceased abruptly.
All the officers took a seat except the Major, who regarded us coolly, hands clasped behind his back.
“We’re with a special field unit from Fleet Intelligence,” he said, his voice deep and sonorous, again reminding me of a politician. I noted he didn’t volunteer his name. “Your platoon will be split up by squads and ride with us in our ships, which are specially designed to avoid sensor detection.”
A squad of us crammed into one of those ships? Shit, that was going to be tight. I hoped it wasn’t too long a trip.
“Our target,” he went on, his face carefully neutral the way Mom’s was when she was about to deliver bad news, “is Demeter.”
“Holy fuck,” Johnny blurted, much louder than I’m sure he intended, but he wasn’t the only one to curse in disbelief.
“Stow the chatter, damn it!” Anderson told us, and now I thought I knew why he was short-tempered.
“There are already DSI agents in place near Amity,” the big guy told us. “They’re going to organize an assault by the civilian resistance on the Tahni garrison there as a distraction, while all of us here launch an attack on the fusion reactor complex outside the city. Once we have the reactor, we can cut power to the defense lasers and allow Attack Command missile cutters to take out their pickets and open the way for conventional Fleet Marines to land and break the occupation.”
“No air support?” Sgt. Gomez asked, ignoring a dirty look from Gunny Anderson. But he was giving voice to the doubts I was feeling. “No heavy weapons?”
“Other members of our team will be disabling the security systems.” The Major was trying to sound confident and optimistic, but not quite pulling it off. I had a sense that he didn’t like this plan any more than we did. “That should give us the element of surprise and allow us to gain entrance to the fusion reactor complex before the Tahni garrison can call their troops back from the garrison attack to reinforce it.”
“Enough questions,” Captain Kapoor declared, setting his helmet down on the table with a solid thump that silenced the muttering. His face was grim, but businesslike. “The plan is what it is, and it’s not going to change because you don’t like it. The operations order and mission brief are being sent to your ‘links, and you can rehearse in ViR en route . Grab your gear and get it loaded on the ships.”
I felt a fluttering in my guts as I followed the mass of people out of the room. We were going to Demeter, trying to re-take a world the Tahni had held onto for over a year.
“You know this is what happens when you get good at doing the hard shit,” Johnny commented to me, his tone almost cheerful, like this was just the sort of thing he’d joined the Corps to do. “They give you harder shit to do.”
I looked back at him and laughed, I couldn’t help it.
“What are they gonna’ have for us if we pull this off?” I wondered, trying to imitate his light-hearted attitude, even if I didn’t share it. “Maybe they’ll drop us on Tahn-Skyyiah and have us go kill the Emperor.”
Chapter Seven
When I opened my eyes again, there was light---dim light, like it was switched on in another room, but still light. I was inside somewhere, warm and dry, staring up at a bland, white ceiling arched upwards into a dome like a prefab building poured from buildfoam as quickly as possible. I was out of my armor, I realized after a moment, and lying on a cot, covered by a thin blanket.
And I didn’t hurt. I should have been hurting. Without the helmet to medicate me, my head should have been splitting and my broken ribs should have been slicing into my chest like daggers…
I sat up abruptly, tossing the blanket aside. I wasn’t wearing my skinsuit, the tight, flexible undergarment Recon Marines wore under our armor for the possibility of vacuum operations. Someone had taken it off me and I was dressed in generic workman’s clothing: a grey, long-sleeved shirt of some sturdy material and blue denim pants. I looked around the room and saw my armor and skinsuit sprawled over a reclining chair stuck in a corner between two sets of shelves. My helmet and rifle were on the floor next to it.
I swung my feet around and stood, slowly and carefully, keeping one hand over the bed in case dizziness or nausea hit without warning. But there was nothing. I shook my head, stepping over to the chair and retrieving the Gauss rifle from the floor beside it. It was still loaded, and I slung it over my shoulder, not because I thought I would need it but more because I wasn’t comfortable leaving it behind when I didn’t know where I was or who else was here.
The door to the room with the cot was ajar, and swung open to my touch with a faint squeak of old hinges. On the other side was what looked like some kind of storeroom, packed from floor to ceiling with plastic crates, some of them stacked empty to the side. Chemical ghostlights glowed sullenly along the wall, always on for however many decades they’d been built to last. Through the open door to the storeroom was a narrow hallway, and there was a bright light at the end of it.
I walked through it, pushing down a feeling of trepidation I knew was silly. Whoever had brought me here was a friend, or at least an ally. At the end of the hallway was some sort of control room, and an old one at that: fixed flat screens lined the walls, each with a view of a different part of the forest, while the central one showed an array of slowly moving red icons on a field of green.
“I was wondering when you’d wake up.” She didn’t get up from the swiveling chair pulled up to the center control console, just turned it to face me.
She was young. It was hard to tell sometimes, with the medical treatments available to the people with the money to pay for them, but I’d hung around those people on a daily basis for most of my life. She was in her early twenties, I judged. Her dark hair was cut short and there was a subtle weathering at the corners of her eyes and mouth that spoke of a lot of time spent outdoors, which matched her utilitarian clothing and the relaxed strength I could see in her shoulders.
“Did you bring me here?” I asked her.
“Lucky for you I had a survival blanket in my backpack,” she said, the corner of her mouth turning up slightly, “or I’d have never been able to drag your heavy ass through the woods.”
“Thank you,” I said, and extended a hand. “I’m Randall Munroe.”
“Sophia Rocca,” she replied, standing and taking my hand. Her grip was strong, the grip of someone who worked with their hands a lot. “I assume you’re part of whatever happened in Amity a few days ago.”
“Days ago?” I repeated, letting her hand slip out of mine as I felt a chill going down my back. “How long was I out?”
“Oh right, sorry,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder in a strange, comforting gesture. “You…” She winced. “You were in pretty bad shape when I found you. Besides some broken ribs and a punctured lung, you had a cerebral hemorrhage that was about a couple hours from being fatal.”
“What?” I blurted, realizing abruptly that I had shouted the word. “How do you know? Are you a doctor?”
She chuckled at that, shaking her head. “I’m a student volunteer for the Commonwealth Ecological Survey,” she told me. “But lucky for you, this research station is remote enough that they sprang for an auto-doc.”
She waved for me to follow her and I did, heading into a side door off the control room. Through it was a small, cluttered clinic, most of the little chamber taken up by the cylindrical tank of an auto-doc. It was open and empty, but I’d seen them in use before; I shuddered as I imagined what I’d looked like floating in biotic fluid, nanites rebuilding me from the inside out. The things were really damned expensive, something I hadn’t appreciated until after I left the strata of society where every apartment block had one.
“Damn,” I muttered, staggering a step as I realized just how close I’d come to dying. I looked back to…what was her name? Sophia? I looked back to Sophia in new appreciation. “Thanks a lot,” I said, a bit more heartfelt than before. “You saved my life.”
She seemed to blush a little at that, though it was hard to tell given the dark tan shade of her skin. Then it seemed as if she remembered something and a frown passed over her face.
“Well, at least I managed to save somebody,” she said, brushing past me as if she didn’t want anyone to see her expression.
“What do you mean?” I asked, following her back to the control room. She was facing the wall, hands shoved into the pockets of her work pants. “Look,” I tried another tack, “I’m a Recon Marine---we’re like scouts. We were here with some Fleet Intelligence spooks trying to take out the defense lasers to pave the way for the regular Marines to land and take this place back from the Tahni.” I shook my head, still unable to remember exactly what had happened, only recalling flashes and explosions and pain. “We ran into some sort of ambush and I don’t know anything else after that. Do you know what happened?”
“I was out at one of the little observation posts the survey has all around the forest,” she told me, still facing away. “I’ve been popping from one to another ever since the Tahni came. Then one day, there were a couple strangers here, at the central research station.” She turned back towards me, and her eyes were slightly red. “There shouldn’t have been anyone else out here. The research team was in Amity when the Tahni landed…we all were.” She paused, swallowed a lump in her throat before she went on. “It was my birthday. We were celebrating, a break from the routine. They all died, and I got away.”
She shook off the memory and went on. “Anyway, the strangers were DSI. They’d been dropped here to organize a resistance.”
I nodded. That fit with our pre-mission briefing. The Department of Security and Intelligence had tried to get infiltrators onto every Tahni occupied colony to gum up the works for them.
“They had me run some errands for them, contact some people,” she said. “They didn’t really tell me much, except that there was something that was going to happen in town and I should stay out here.” She laughed humorlessly. “Of course, I didn’t do that. I snuck as close to Amity as I could without getting spotted. I couldn’t see much, just a bunch of smoke and light, but I heard explosions.” She let out a breath. “Whatever was supposed to happen didn’t. The DSI agents never came back. There weren’t any landers, there weren’t any Marines.”
I felt myself sag, letting go of what I’d known was a forlorn hope. The operation had failed. I was alone.
***
The scratch of the tires on the rough pavement and the hum of the cart’s electric motor were all the sounds I could hear in the recesses of the narrow, dark tunnel, and they weren’t enough to fill it. It seemed too empty, too absent and yet still too small and confining and I didn’t like it. I stared at the cone of light from the cart’s headlamps that was all I could see.
“How long have these been down here?” I asked Sophia, taking the chance of distracting her from driving to distract myself from nascent claustrophobia.
“Since the beginning,” she told me, seemingly unaffected by the conversation or the close confines. “The researchers had the tunnels dug so they could check on the re-introduced fauna without disturbing them. They lead to a bunch of smaller outposts that pop up in different sections of the forest.”
“It must have been cool, working with animals that used to be extinct,” I said.
“The megatherium is my favorite,” she said, and I saw a slight, sad smile pass across her face. “Such a big, slow clown, fearless because nothing else can touch them. Dr. Chandra loved them.”
“Dr. Chandra?”
“Lead researcher.” The smile disappeared. “She was a good friend.”
I nodded, not wanting to take her down that road any farther. She had other ideas.
“The Marines who died,” she said, glancing over at me. “Were any of them your friends?”
“They all were,” I answered honestly, and I felt a tightness in my chest that I hadn’t let myself experience before as I thought about Johnny. “They were my only friends, I guess.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt Sophia’s hand on my arm, firm and comforting. “You don’t have any friends back home?”
“Most Marines,” I replied, repeating something Johnny had said to me when we first met, “if they had a home worth going back to, wouldn’t be Marines.”
“Where’s the home that’s not worth you going back to?” The question wasn’t flippant, like I half expected it to be from the wording. I looked at her for a moment, searching her intentions, before I answered.
“Earth. Trans-Angeles.”
“Wow.” She whistled softly. “That’s the big town, isn’t it? I read there are more people in that city than on all the colonies combined.” Not quite, but I didn’t bother to correct her.
“You’ve never been there, then?” I presumed.
She laughed. “No, I’ve never been to Earth at all. I’ve been taking virtual courses towards my Biological Engineering degree through Berlin University, but I was born on Hermes. I came here because of the unique opportunity for studying the re-introduced species.”
“That must have been expensive,” I said. “Does your family have the money to send you off-planet for graduate study?”
“No,” she snorted at the thought. “I’m on scholarship. My parents are xenobiologists studying the evolution of life on the habitable extra-solar worlds.”
“So, what do they think, did the Predecessors do it?” I was joking; it was a standard trope in movies and ViR-dramas, not to mention conspiracy theorists and Predecessor Cultists.
“Probably,” she answered, shrugging. I blinked at her, wondering if she was joking as well. “There’s no proof, but Mom and Dad don’t believe life on all the colonies could be so similar genetically unless it was introduced from the same source.”
“Wow,” I muttered, sitting back in the cart’s seat and propping a foot on the edge of the open side. “That’ll teach me to make fun of conspiracy theorists.”
“Whatever else the Predecessors might have done,” Sophia said, sniffing, “I hope they didn’t have anything to do with the evolution of the Tahni, ‘cause I’d be awfully pissed at them.”
I grunted, fell silent for a moment.
“How do you know this guy will be there?” I asked her after another minute of driving through the Stygian sameness of the tunnel.
“There are fiber optic connections between the outposts,” she told me, “to link together the sensor monitoring equipment. He sent a signal using the console at the
next outpost down the line, trying to get ahold of the DSI agents.”
“And he’s in charge of the militia?”
“He wasn’t before,” she said with a hiss of breath, “but I guess he’s what’s left.”
There was nothing to say to that. It was only a couple minutes longer before we came around a curve in the tunnel and saw a green light flashing ahead, near the ceiling. Sophia let off the accelerator and the cart slowed down, coming to a stop next to a ladder set in the wall, leading up to a small hatch. I clambered out of the cart and pulled my rifle out of the back, slinging it over my shoulder. I had my handgun stuck into my belt, and it felt extremely odd to be carrying them both around in civilian clothes.
“Let me go first,” she said, holding up a hand as I started to move to the ladder. “They’re going to be nervous.”
“Yeah, I guess they might, at that,” I allowed, giving her some space.
The whole business was decidedly low-tech: she climbed up and rapped on the metal hatch with her knuckles. A few seconds later, it opened, flooding the tunnel with harsh, white light and sending insects and at least one rat scurrying away back into the darkness beyond.
Why’d they bring rats here? I wondered idly as I watched her disappear through the opening.
There was muffled conversation somewhere above me, a couple of sharp words in tones filled with stress, then uncomfortable silence. Sophia’s head and right shoulder stuck back through into the tunnel and she waved me up, the deep frown on her face a relic of whatever had been said.
I followed her up and emerged into a room of bare, grey concrete, covered by obsolete but sturdy-looking 2-D monitor screens and a single control console, all of them currently dark and deactivated. There were three worn and ratty-looking office chairs around the large console and a flimsy folding cot in a corner. The only doors other than the hatch were the thick, battered metal portal to the outside and a light, plastic folding partition to what I guessed was a bathroom.
