by Rick Partlow
I kept my eyes on the horizon, deathly afraid that I’d see an assault shuttle coming from the port, heading for us. One hypersonic missile would kill us before we knew we were dead. But there was nothing.
“They’re doing the best they can,” she said, looking around, trying not to let any of the others hear her. “They’re still shaken from what happened last week.”
They’re not the only ones, I thought. I tried to push out of my memory the image of Johnny’s dead eyes staring up at me.
I noticed that the road had gotten rougher as it traversed up out of the valley and into the edges of the forest. The shadows of the trees overhead wreathed us in darkness and I knew the driver had to be wearing night vision, since he didn’t slow down and didn’t turn on the headlights.
“Hey!” Grey yelled over his shoulder at us from the open back window of the truck’s cab. “There’s a vehicle up ahead!”
I got to my feet slowly and painfully, feeling my hip stiffening up, and limped up to the front, squeezing past the freed prisoners. I leaned over the top of the cab and spotted it immediately; it was another cargo truck much like the one we were in, but with a dump bed, and it had been shot up pretty bad. The passenger’s side of the dump box had dozens of ragged penetrations from what looked like KE gun rounds, and there were charred and blackened spots on the side of the cab from nearby explosions. The truck shuddered and skidded to a halt in a spray of gravel, and the driver’s side door fell open, spilling out Carl Braun.
“Stop here!” I yelled through the cab window, pounding on the roof.
Our truck braked abruptly and I grunted as I was thrown forward against the back of the cab. I hit the quick-release for one of the side panels and dropped to the ground, ignoring the stabbing pain in my hip. I saw Braun staggering over to the passenger’s side and helping another man down with the aid of the third person in the cab, a husky-looking woman.
Others were climbing out of the dump bucket, but only three or four; and I had a sudden leaden feeling inside my gut that the others were all dead, and that it was my plan that had gotten them killed. I jogged as best I could towards Braun and the others with him, vaguely aware that Sophia was following close behind me.
"Where are the others?" I asked him. He looked at me strangely and I realized my voice must sound odd coming through the helmet speakers; he hadn't heard me talk through them before. "Is this everyone who made it?"
"No, we got everyone out," Braun told me and my chest unclenched with a hiss of air. The former technician looked exhausted, his face pale and covered in sweat, and he still looked better than the man he was supporting. The middle aged, dumpy-looking little man had taken a tantalum needle from a KE gun through the calf. I knew it had to have gone through the truck body first or else most of his lower leg would be gone; instead, his leg was soaked with blood from a wound the width of my pinky finger.
"We took the truck out as a distraction," Braun went on. His voice went hoarse and he cleared his throat and spat to the side. "The others got away on foot, they'll meet us in the tunnels." He jerked his head toward our vehicle. "We need to walk from here, so we don't lead the Tahni to the entrance. My guys'll rig the trucks to blow."
"Sophia," I turned to her. She was there at my shoulder, which felt right for some reason. "Get everyone off the truck. Make sure they don't leave anything behind, especially weapons." She nodded and jogged back to the loading gate.
"You lose anyone?" Braun asked me as she left.
I almost nodded, but remembered I had my helmet on. "One woman," I told him. "Sophia said her name was Claire."
Braun winced at that. "Jesus. David's going to be devastated. Those two were inseparable."
David was the older man, her husband. "He is," I agreed. "But he did his job."
The others were clustering around the two of us, hope and concern on their faces. One of the men was helping David to carry Claire's body, and others were supporting the ones who had trouble walking.
"We have to go the rest of the way on foot," I said, turning up the volume of my speakers. "I know some of you are hurt, and I know you're probably hungry and exhausted, but if you can keep it together for just a bit more, we'll get you to safety."
"Son?" I turned in surprise at the voice coming from so close to my shoulder.
It was one of the people we'd freed from the detention center, an older gentleman who looked even older than he was after the occupation and privation and confinement. Grey streaked his bushy, brown beard and he had the face of someone who made his living outdoors.
"Yes, sir?" I responded, wondering if there was a problem with someone who couldn't walk. I'd try to help, but I didn't know if I could carry anyone too far with the damn hole in my side.
"Are you a Marine?" He asked me, something like wonder in his eyes, maybe that they were finally seeing someone from the outside.
"Yes, sir," I answered, feeling a bit of a surge of pride that I don't think I'd felt before, ever since I'd been forced by circumstances into enlisting. "I'm Marine Force Recon."
"Thank God you're here," he said, patting me on the arm before he passed by, following Sophia and the others into the woods.
I think he believed that me being here meant their problems were over. I didn't bother to correct him. I figured he'd find out soon enough.
***
I sat under a tree with my rifle across my lap and watched the river flow by, crashing with a wild spray against the small hydroelectric generator just beneath its surface. From here, you couldn’t even see the research facility: it was dug into the side of the hill a hundred meters away, only the door on the opposite side above ground. Across the river and through the trees out a half a kilometer across an open plain, I saw a small herd of mastodon shuffling along from one stand of trees to another, surreal visions of past millennia pacing along on tree-trunk legs, covered in ginger fur. They didn’t concern me; the sonic fences kept them on their side of the river, according to Sophia.
It felt good to be out of my armor, and even better to be clean, even if I’d had to steal some soap and take a shower in the damn river in the outflow from the generator. By the time we’d traversed the tunnels and got people settled into the different outposts and then returned to the main research base and got my wound treated, it had been well past midnight, and all of us had collapsed exhausted into any available corner to get some sleep. I’d woken up before dawn and found everyone else still asleep, so I’d decided to take the opportunity to clean up; now I was sitting in the golden light of the rising sun, wearing the workman’s clothes Sophia had loaned me and trying to think.
Or maybe I was trying not to think. Too much thinking was starting to make me panic.
“I thought I’d find you out here.” It was Braun. His face was bruised and his left arm was bandaged, but he looked a lot more alert and alive than he had yesterday. In fact, he seemed a bit hyper, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he walked up the bank towards me and crouched down. “How’s your hip?”
“Fine,” I told him. “Sprayed some skin-seal on it and it’s just a bit tight now. How are you doing?”
“I got a bit banged up when a missile hit next to us,” he said, shrugging. “It’s not a big deal.”
I tried not to snort. He was trying too hard to sound casual about it, like he was an old veteran now. Still…
“You and your people did a good job yesterday,” I told him honestly. “We couldn’t have pulled it off without you.”
“Thanks, but you did the heavy lifting,” he admitted. “None of us could have got in and out of that building that quick, with so few casualties.” I didn’t respond because it was true, and there was nothing to say that wouldn’t make me sound like a douchebag.
Braun eased into a seated position next to me on the bank, looking out at the mastodons in the distance. He didn’t say anything for a minute, and I thought maybe he’d just come out to say thank you.
“I want you to take over,” he said and I turned
, blinking at him for a second, uncomprehending.
“Take over what?” I blurted.
“This whole thing,” he clarified. “The militia…” He frowned. “Actually now, I guess it’s a resistance. But they need someone who knows what they’re doing. With Georgia---she was the planetary Constable---gone in the attack on the Tahni base a week ago, along with her deputies, we don’t have anyone who even held a gun before the occupation.”
“Mr. Braun,” I said, chuckling as I stared back at him in disbelief, “I’m a fucking Lance Corporal. I was in combat one time before yesterday, and I’ve never led shit except in training.”
“You led us all yesterday,” Braun objected. “And it worked.”
“We got lucky!” I said a little too loudly. “We caught them licking their wounds from the attack last week, low on manpower and resources and maybe with a few of their higher-ranking officers dead. That’s why we had to hit when we did.”
“And you knew that,” Braun argued reasonably. “None of us would have thought of it. We all just wanted to sit on our asses and hide.” He shook his head. “I been thinking these last couple days, Munroe. Thinking about what’s going to happen next, and it’s not going to be easy. Tell me something, how long do you think it’s going to be before the military tries again to take this place back?”
I hissed out a breath. This was exactly what I’d been trying not to think about.
“It’s going to be months,” I put the gut-wrenching thoughts into words, spitting them out like bad food. “It might even be a year or more. What they did here last week, that was a shoe-string operation, something some fuckwit Admiral in operations thought up and kicked upstairs until it bounced off someone who’d seen too many war movies. All it took was one part to go wrong, and it all went to shit. I’m just a Lance, but even the most elementary operations classes told us you have to be ready for shit going sideways.”
I used my rifle to push myself to my feet, feeling the hip wound tugging at me with a twinge of discomfort. I paced down the bank a few steps, then motioned upwards, past the shelter of the overhanging limbs and into the lightening sky. “Back on Inferno, the Fleet operations gasbags will be blamestorming this shit for months. When they decide to move again, it’s probably going to be with a slow, plodding operation and overwhelming force because it’s the opposite of what they did this time so it must be right.”
I paused, realizing that I sounded exactly like Gramps did when he was talking about the First War. A grin tugged at my mouth, but I hid it from Braun. Gramps would have this shit organized and these people squared away in a week.
“So, we’re going to be on our own for a long time,” Braun said. I looked back at him and saw him nodding, as if that was what he’d been thinking, too. “You’re just a Lance Corporal in the Marines, Munroe, but I’m not even that. I can take apart and put together a plasma injector with my eyes closed, but I am not qualified to train these people or lead them into battle.” He paused and wiped at something in his eye. “I joined up with Georgia and her people because of Janie. She and I…we were going to get married. We wanted a family.” He swallowed hard. “She was a fighter, but I’m not. If you won’t do it, I’m going to tell them to go hide somewhere and try not to get killed until the Commonwealth military decides to come bail us out.”
“Shit,” I muttered, closing my eyes for a second. Okay, so maybe I was the only one here who had any military experience to speak of. But… “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Braun, I will agree to train your people as best I can, and to plan and lead any military style missions they carry out. But I will not be in charge of your ‘resistance,’ if that’s what you want to call it. They need someone they know making the big decisions, someone they can trust, and that’s not me.”
I extended a hand, having to force myself to do it past a ton of trepidation. “You run the show, I’ll do my best to help.”
He hesitated for a second, wheels turning behind his eyes, but finally he took my hand, grasping it firmly and shaking it.
“All right,” he said. “I got to admit, Munroe, I was really hoping to let someone else be in charge of this bullshit.” He laughed humorlessly. “Or, you know, just doing the whole running and hiding thing.”
“Yeah, well, I was hoping to be back on leave on Eden by now,” I retorted, “getting reacquainted with this very nice blond girl I met there last time. But I don’t think any of us are getting what we hoped for very soon.”
“Speaking of very nice girls,” Braun said, his grin a bit too snarky for my tastes, “Sophia told me if I found you, to ask you to come to her and get your wound checked out.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, shouldering my Gauss rifle and heading back inside.
“Don’t you go anywhere without that thing?” Braun called to me as I walked.
I paused and turned back to him. “No. And you shouldn’t either.” I hoped my tone was as serious as the way it felt in my gut. “This place is relatively safe and well hidden, but it could all go to hell any time. No one should be outside unarmed.”
He nodded, sobering. “Right. I guess that’s why we need you.”
I turned away and rounding the grassy mound of the camouflaged building, admitted to myself that the main reason I’d taken my rifle along was because in Boot and Recon training, they dropped you for a hundred pushups if you were farther away than arm’s length from your weapon.
Doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea anyway.
The main control room had been empty when I’d gone outside for my bath, but now there were a half dozen people inside, a couple monitoring the sensors, watching for the enemy I guessed, and the rest trying to hook up Gauss rifle magazines to wall chargers to top off the batteries. My eyes flicked around, making sure no one was finger-fucking a loaded rifle in here, but the guns stacked in a corner all had their magazines removed.
I found Sophia in a storage room, rummaging through tubs full of raw food-stuffs---soy patties, algae powder and other stuff that could be stored long-term and fed into a processor for preparation. She straightened as I stepped through the open door, fists going to her hips, a look of critical evaluation on her face.
“Where’ve you been all morning?” She asked me. “I wanted to check your wound.”
“I took a bath in the river,” I told her. “It stinks inside that armor, you know?” I looked her up and down, noticing her fresh clothes and scrubbed face. “You look like you got cleaned up too. Is there a shower in here that I missed?”
She smiled, shaking her head and relaxing a little. It was a nice smile. “No, I took a sponge bath with a water jug. Isn’t that river a little cold?”
“It felt good,” I said with a shrug, leaning up against an empty shelf. Honestly, it wasn’t the first time I’d taken a bath in a river, but that wouldn’t fit into my cover story.
“You probably needed it,” she admitted. “All right, let’s have a look.” She gestured at my hip.
“In here?” I looked around at the closet. “What about the clinic?”
“We have one of the wounded spending a few hours in the auto-doc,” she told me, “and her husband is camped out on the table next to her. More privacy in here. Just shut the door.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her doubtfully, but slid the storage room door shut and twisted the lock. She motioned again, with a look of impatience and I unfastened my borrowed pants and dropped them and my underwear low enough for her to see the burn in my hip. It looked a lot better now than it had yesterday; the skin-seal spray had closed the wound and was encouraging healing beneath its flesh-colored surface. I’d have been better off using the auto-doc, but that was a limited resource---the nanite-filled biotic fluid had a shelf life once you exposed it to air, and there was only so much of it in the storage tanks. You didn’t want to waste that on minor wounds.
She grabbed the beltline of my pants and pulled them down a little more, and I felt an absurd compulsion to try to pull them back up. She glared at me and I let go. Sh
e ran a finger over the surface of the skin-seal and “tsk”ed quietly.
“Looks okay,” she assessed clinically.
I was feeling the warmth of her fingers on my skin and I looked over her head and tried desperately to think about baseball.
I had, I realized quite abruptly in a flash of self-awareness, very little experience with women. Anna had been my first serious girlfriend and we’d stayed together two years. The girl on Eden had been looking for fun and had been quite aggressive about it, and I’d been too drunk to be shy. This…this was hard. No! Difficult! This was difficult. Don’t even think the word hard.
This was complicated. I didn’t know Sophia that well, and I had no reason to think she was interested in me in any way other than a fellow human fighting against the Tahni. If I made the wrong assumptions, it would be pretty damned embarrassing, not to mention making everything awkward with someone I’d be living in close proximity to for at least a few months.
I noticed her fingers hadn’t moved and I moved my eyes down to hers, clenching my teeth. She had a curious look on her face.
“Do you prefer to go by Randall or Randy?” She asked.
“Everyone just calls me Munroe.” My voice, for some reason, came out in a hoarse rasp. I cleared my throat.
She snorted at that, but smiled again. “How old are you, Munroe?”
“Twenty-one,” I told her honestly. “You?”
“Twenty-three. That’s not too big of a difference, is it?”
She took a step closer, till our faces were only a few centimeters apart, and I could smell a faint scent of whatever kind of shampoo she’d used on her hair. She was tall; I was a meter-eight and she was almost as tall as me. Her hand was still on my left hip and now her other hand went to the right one, her fingers sliding across the edge of my shorts. My breath caught slightly and I looked into her dark eyes, thinking that no, I couldn’t be making the wrong assumptions at this point.
“No,” I said in a low mutter, putting my arms around her and pulling her into me. “Not too big of a difference at all.”
