by Rick Partlow
Besides Sophia, there were three other people in the blockhouse and none of them looked particularly happy to be there. One was younger than me, still a teenager, and might not make it to my age by the look of the bloody bandages wrapped around his chest. He was lying on the cot, moaning softly, a makeshift IV drip hanging off a hook set in the wall feeding him something, maybe painkillers. He was pale-skinned at the best of times, I could tell, but looked like a ghost right now from the blood loss.
Kneeling over him, adjusting the IV drip, was a woman who looked similar enough to be his mother or older sister. The weathering on her face and the pinched agony around her eyes told me she was probably his mother. Blood stained her hands and arms and her long-sleeved blue shirt and I was sure it was the boy’s. She’d carried him here.
The other guy, I knew immediately, was the one I was here to see. He had the harassed, overwhelmed look of someone thrust into a leadership position for which they weren’t even remotely prepared. It had turned what looked like a face that normally was cheerful and rounded into a drawn and haggard oval, the flesh dragged downward by the grimace he’d worn for a while now. His hair was shaggy and brown and not recently tended, and his clothes were the typical rough, outdoorsy stuff you found on colonies like this. He had a pistol holstered at his hip and a Tahni laser carbine slung across his back and I wondered if they were badges of his rank or if he knew how to use them.
“This is Carl Braun,” Sophia told me, gesturing at the man, mouth still tugged down into a frown. “He’s…he was lead technician for the fusion plant, before.”
“I’m Lance Corporal Randall Munroe.” I stuck out a hand and he shook it with a little reluctance, his grip wet with sweat but strong. “First Force Recon Marines.”
“You’re all that’s left of all those fucking DSI and Intelligence and military types who were all over the place just a few days ago?” His question was somewhere between a rant, a demand and a lamentation. I didn’t know if he wanted an answer, but I gave one anyway.
“As far as I know,” I said, feeling that clenching in my stomach again at the thought. “My platoon was ambushed by Tahni High Guard battlesuits en route to our objective. I don’t know what happened to the Intelligence operatives who were leading us, but if they’re alive, they bugged out.”
“You motherfuckers got us all killed,” he snapped, fury and despair and desperation twisting his face into something grotesque as he took a half-step towards me. “All my friends, Janie…”
“Carl!” Sophia said, stepping half in front of me as if she’d have to defend me from him.
“Shut up, Carl,” the woman tending to the boy said firmly, looking over at us with irritation in her eyes. “You know it’s not this young man’s fault. He’s a Corporal, for Christ’s sake.”
That seemed to deflate the man, and he stepped back, nearly stumbling with exhaustion.
“Yeah, I know,” he admitted, slumping into one of the worn office chairs. He looked up at me, pain in his expression. “The Tahni, they’ve started arresting everyone they think might have cooperated with the attack. All the family and friends of anyone they know or even suspect was in the militia or working with the DSI. They’re keeping them in an office building in downtown Amity that they’ve turned into a prison, under guard. I think they’re going to interrogate them all, try to smoke us all out, but I guess they have to wait for reinforcements first.”
“Why?” I asked, confused. “Why do they need reinforcements?”
“Because we kicked the shit out of them,” the woman put in, pride in her tone despite everything. “Between us and those Intelligence commandos that went in ahead of us, we killed at least a hundred of them. It wasn’t until those damned High Guard battlesuits attacked us that we had to withdraw…”
She fell silent, wiping sweat from the forehead of her semi-conscious son. Sophia put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing softly.
“Wait a minute,” I said, stepping forward, closer to her. “If they’re thin on the ground right now, this might be the perfect time to bust those people out. If we can get to them before they bring in reinforcements…”
“Are you fucking nuts?” Braun demanded, eyes going wide. “We just lost about half our people; do you think the rest are going to want to try another attack?”
Sophia was staring at me like I’d gone crazy, but she didn’t say anything.
“We wouldn’t need many,” I insisted, my mind working furiously. I didn’t know why this was so important to me, but I just had a sudden urgent need to be doing something, and this was something I knew had to be done. “But listen, Mr. Braun, this is time-sensitive. We can break them out now, if we hurry. If we wait and lick our wounds…” I shrugged. “They’re probably dead.”
“Jesus,” Braun muttered, eyes glazing over as he thought about it. “I don’t know…I don’t know if I can get them to do this.”
“Carl.” The woman’s voice was sharp and he looked up at her automatically, like she was his mother. “Justin is there, in that prison. And besides being my husband, he knows about these tunnels, about the other hideouts. If we have a chance to get him out, I’ll go with just me and this boy if I have to.”
Braun shook his head hopelessly, then looked me in the eye.
“What do you want us to do?” He asked me.
“First,” I said, “we need to get that kid on the cart and back to the auto-doc at the research center. Then…” I shrugged, looking between Braun and Sophia. “I’m going to need someone to show me this prison. I have to go into Amity.”
Chapter Eight
Mom had visited Demeter once with Dad, before I was born, back when they were together. She’d shown me the videos of their safari through the section of the Megafauna Reclamation Project that was open to public tours, and she’d also shown me stills and videos she and Dad had taken in Amity. It had been a quaint, cozy place that called to mind pictures I’d seen of two or three hundred years ago, with small, individual buildings made from local material connected only by surface streets. People still used manually driven cars or four-wheel motorbikes to get around, or just walked in the streets. Wild animals could be seen in the fields just outside the town, kept out of its borders only by sonic barriers. The people looked happy.
Pushing the plastic food cart through those streets now, I couldn’t even recognize it as the same place from those pictures. The primary star was behind a sheath of grey clouds, but the grim pallor that covered the little colony city had nothing to do with the weather. There were security cameras at every corner, and surveillance drones hovering overhead with a constant, irritating background buzz like a swarm of mosquitos. Tahni patrols scuffed by in their Shock-Troop exoskeletons, kicking up dirt and dust with each clomping step, faceless behind darkened visors. Every once in a while, we’d see a Tahni officer pass by with their long, loping stride, their sheltered eyes dark with suspicion of every human they encountered.
There weren’t many people out, and those that were moved hurriedly from one assigned task to another, ferrying food, spare parts and supplies from place to place as they were ordered by the Tahni. Most of the civilian population was confined to the row housing and hotels on the edge of town, forbidden from leaving without a ration voucher or a work pass. I wondered why they bothered to keep the human colonists around at all; it would have been easier for them to just execute them all and not worry about possible saboteurs or rebels.
Then I kicked myself mentally. It was obvious why they kept them around: they were shields. With the colonists still there and still living in the midst of them, the Commonwealth Space Fleet couldn’t just sit back and fire kinetic energy weapons at the planet willy-nilly until the Tahni abandoned it. It was the same reason they didn’t just stick everyone in a prison camp: if the humans and Tahni were mixed together, you couldn’t launch surgical strikes to take out just the enemy and leave the human prisoners unharmed.
Which gave us a plausible reason to be pushing a wheeled cart down
Connaver Street just before dusk, toward the Commonwealth Government Office Building. Beside me, Sophia glanced around furtively, fear still evident in her face despite her best efforts to hide it. The last time she’d been in Amity, she’d seen all her friends die in front of her and she’d nearly been killed herself. She’d insisted on being part of this mission, though, which I respected. I decided it would be safest to pair her with me, where I could keep an eye on her.
Sure, she didn’t have any combat experience, but neither did any of the rest of them. We’d just have to count on the fact that the Tahni would still be reeling from the attack and missing the soldiers they’d lost. That’s how it had looked to me when Carl Braun had snuck me in a couple days before; and I was a storied combat vet with all of one mission, so obviously, I knew what I was talking about.
I would like to have pulled the operation off sooner, but it had taken Braun a couple days to contact the militia members who’d been hiding out in the forest; and even then, he’d only been able to bring in about thirty. Most of them would be part of the diversionary attack, which left me ten people to pull this shit off, including myself, and I’d known most of them for under 24 hours.
I tugged nervously at the loose, hooded tunic I’d borrowed, trying to make sure my armor and tactical vest didn’t show through it. It was humid as hell that evening, felt like a summer thunderstorm coming on, and I was sweating my ass off. That also could have been because I was scared out of my mind. I’d never led anything bigger than a squad even in ViR training, and only written an operations order in class. Once.
What the hell was I doing? I was going to get these people killed!
Then we reached the service entrance around the side of the Government Office Building and I had to stop thinking and just do the job.
The building was only four stories tall, but that made it big by local standards. It was built from red brick, fired from real clay out of the hills to the north, and had apparently been something of a tourist attraction in and of itself before the war. Now it attracted humans because a Tahni Shock-Trooper forced them inside at gunpoint. The Tahni guards on the main walk had waved us to the side of the building where an aluminum overhang shielded the service entrance and loading dock; three more pushcarts were already lined up there, along with the gaggle of people who'd brought them.
The people looked rough, their clothes ragged and hand-patched, their faces either gone blank from months of numb shock or hardened to a bitter, jaded cynicism. Young and old, male and female, they all shared a look of fear and privation that I had never seen before outside history class and never thought I would. They reminded me of refugees from old 2-D footage of the 20th and 21st Centuries, lined up at camps trying to find food, and for just a moment I nearly forgot why I was there.
Then the loud argument between the unarmored Tahni stationed at the entrance and the human trying to get the first food cart inside cut through the haze of unreality and brought me back to the present.
"I was ordered to bring this here!" The woman was practically wailing, tears beginning to streak the dirt on her face. "I swear, sir, they told me I had to get this food here on time or I wouldn't get my daily rations!"
I had no clue how to read Tahni facial expressions, so I couldn't have told you if this particular soldier was pissed, bored, annoyed or happy, but I did know he didn't speak much English, because he kept repeating the same sentence in an absurd accent that butchered almost every word.
"Three carts today, no four."
He made a hand motion at all of us and repeated it again. "Three carts today, no four."
He had what passed for a handgun among the Tahni, something weird looking with a magazine behind the grip, holstered across his chest, but he hadn't made any move for it. I guess he wasn't pissed or annoyed enough, yet.
I checked the time on my 'link, then nudged Sophia. She looked at me with eyes too wide and I nodded, holding up one finger. One minute.
"Do you have anyone who speaks our language?" The woman implored.
"Come on, lady," the older man with the cart behind her grumbled. "Just give it up and let the rest of us get on with it."
"I can't lose my rations!" The woman shrieked at him, hands raised in frustration. "I have children!"
"So do I!" The man shot back, running a hand through his long and unruly black hair. "And I'd like to get done with this and get back to them!"
The explosion happened almost mid-sentence and the look on the man's face showed me he wasn't as good an actor as I'd thought. Luckily, the Tahni were no better at reading our expressions than we were at reading theirs, and the guard was so spooked by the sound that he didn't pay any attention anyway. It was a distant blast, a low-pitched "crump" that rolled across the plains out to the west about two kilometers away, where the Tahni had appropriated the Amity spaceport.
There were murmurings and shouts and running footsteps in its echo, but the guard at the service door seemed torn, pawing at the communications link on his shoulder and yelling something into it. Then there was another blast, and a third only seconds later and the guard yelled something else and took off into the street, towards the spaceport, leaving the door shut and locked behind him.
We waited until he'd disappeared around the corner, then tipped our carts over on their sides, dumping out the mostly-empty canisters that covered their actual cargo of Gauss rifles and spare magazines. I grabbed mine, easily distinguishable by the grenade launcher affixed to it, and snagged my helmet as well, securing it to my neck yoke then ripping off the civilian clothes that covered my armor while the others slung spare rifles over their backs to arms the freed prisoners.
"Get back," I told them over the helmet's external speakers, aiming the grenade launcher at the door's latch. I'd preloaded it with the only door-buster round I'd had in my vest and I hoped this was a good use for it.
Once everyone was behind me, I touched the trigger and the gun bucked against my hip as the round kicked out and slammed into the latching mechanism with a flare of plasma. The lock blasted apart and the door started to swing open from the kinetic energy of the round, but I was already slamming my shoulder into it and charging into the loading dock.
It was fairly small, meant to accommodate office equipment deliveries, and the smoke from the door-buster filled it with a white haze, but with my helmet's optics I could see a Tahni soldier running down the hall, drawn by the noise. The 10mm tungsten slug went right where the aiming reticle in my HUD said it was going to, dead center between his brow ridges. His head disappeared in a mist of red that painted the walls around him, and his body tumbled forward, landing in a heap only a meter from me. I tried not to look at it, tried to forget that he'd even been there, stepping over it and heading down the hallway to the broad, wooden staircase.
The one I'd killed had been sitting at a desk by the stairs, watching the front entrance, but he'd been alone and thermal readings showed the lobby as clear. My boots made a hollow clomp as I took the stairs two at a time, hoping the others were following but not waiting to find out; speed was the key and I could do this part alone if I was fast enough. The intell Braun had gotten for me said the prisoners were being held on the top floor, with a command center on the second and most of the guards stationed on the third and fourth. I had to get to the third floor and eliminate those guards before they realized what was going on.
I hit the second-floor landing, barely glancing off into the entrance hall to the command offices, and kept going, not caring if I was seen; if anyone came out of there, I'd have to leave them to the others and hope that at least one or two would be competent enough to deal with it. No one had shot me in the back, anyway...yet.
I was going fast, maybe as fast as I’d ever run in full armor, but that last flight felt like it took hours to climb. I felt like I was on the stair-mill in the base gym, climbing a never-ending staircase to a top I’d never reach. But then the last step came so abruptly I nearly stumbled, catching myself with a teeth-jarri
ng stomp on the marble floor. The landing opened up on my left into what Sophia had told me used to be a small history exhibit of the colony, but had been turned into a makeshift armory and a break area where the guards rested between shifts in the detention area.
Luckily for me, the twisting maze of the walking history exhibit blocked the view of the guards in the back near the armory from what was happening up front, where the front desks had been. There were tables there now, set up in some odd formation to accommodate a peculiar Tahni game involving little black and silver shells and a miniature catapult. No one was playing it now, but the remains of the game were scattered across the table and the floor, one of the chairs overturned in haste.
We knew they hadn’t gone downstairs to help at the spaceport, so that meant they’d either gone deeper into the armory to retrieve armor and weapons, or they were up in the detention center waiting for us. If I went into the armory to try to take out the guards first, and I’d guessed wrong, they could be up with the prisoners now, getting ready to use them as shields or simply killing them outright to keep them out of our hands. But if I bypassed the armory and just barreled upstairs and the off-shift guards weren't there, we’d wind up with a substantial armed force below us, blocking our withdrawal.
It was a decision I had to make in a fraction of a second, and I charged into the armory with the vague notion that if they actually had gone upstairs already, we'd be too late to keep them from getting to the prisoners, so delaying for a few seconds on the third floor wouldn't hurt much. The way the human brain works, though, I wasn't sure if I thought that before making my decision or just followed blind instinct and then rationalized it.
The history exhibit had featured holographic videos running on a loop at intervals along the curving, maze-like hallways, but the Tahni had turned them off, one or two through the expedient method of shooting what looked like a laser pulse right through the wall. I was glad they were gone; it would have been distracting as hell walking through there with a bunch of computer-generated generic scientist types lecturing me on genetic engineering and filling ecological niches.
