by Rick Partlow
“All those people,” one of the women muttered. I think I remembered her name was Kate, but I wasn’t sure enough to call her that. She was fairly young for a mother, maybe ten years older than me at most, dressed in borrowed work clothes. Her face was coated with soot and dust from the missile strike and her brown hair was long and tangled. “They killed all those people…”
“The aliens are going to kill us all,” one of the younger teenagers, a girl with black hair cut short and startlingly grey eyes, declared to me. There was no fear in her voice, just a dull acceptance.
“No, they won’t,” I told her bluntly, not talking down to her. “You know why?”
She shook her head, a little skeptical curiosity in the set of her square jaw.
“Because if they kill us all,” I informed her, “then Earth has no reason not to start launching nukes at this place till nothing can live on it at all. They need us around. But we don’t need them, so we have an advantage.”
“Why don’t the aliens just launch nukes then, if we take it back?” Her brother, slightly older but with features nearly identical to his sister, asked reasonably.
“Because the Tahni think it belongs to them,” I said. “And you don’t break your own stuff.”
“How the hell,” Sophia asked in a voice full of pain and bitterness, as if she hadn’t been paying attention to the rest of the conversation, “did they find the settlement? There’s no way they could have stumbled onto it, not as remote as it was.”
I looked at her and saw the broken look on her face, and I recognized it because I felt it, too. We’d put a lot of work and sweat and hope into the settlements, into getting people out from under the thumb of the occupation. And we’d just watched dozens of them die in front of our eyes, while we were helpless to stop it. Maybe I was becoming jaded. A few weeks ago, it would have stabbed me in the gut with despair. Now, it just felt like another lead weight added to the ton on my shoulders, like those weights the drill sergeants in Recon selection would slip into your pack during a ruck march to make it harder, to make you drop out.
“They had to have tracked one of our movements from the tunnel to the settlement,” I guessed. I shook my head. “Damned if I know how. They can’t know where the tunnels are, or they’d have hit them already. Maybe someone showed up on a patrol drone’s surveillance footage?”
“Maybe,” she said, grudgingly, still staring into the dirt. Then she looked up at me, her dark eyes narrowing. “If they did, why didn’t they just hit them immediately? It’s an awful coincidence they did it just as we got there.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, so I didn’t try. Instead, I retrieved my helmet from where I’d laid it down beside her, shook it out to make sure no insects had tried to take up residence inside, and got the yoke ready to put it back on.
“We should get going,” I said.
Then I set the helmet in place and fastened the yoke. It booted up quickly as it reconnected to the internal sensors in my armor and, as always, ran a complete scan of everything around it for threats, including environmental threats like poisonous gasses, toxic chemicals and the like. I never really paid much attention to those scans, since I usually already knew if I was on a planet with an unbreathable atmosphere.
This time, though, I noticed a small notice blinking yellow in the corner of my HUD readout. Yellow didn’t mean immediate danger, just a potential threat I should be cautious about. In this case, it was notifying me of a fairly low but nevertheless distinctive radiation source within a two-meter radius. I looked around, confused. There were no rock outcroppings nearby and the ground was soft and loamy. Where the fuck would radiation be coming from?
I touched the control pad on the forearm of my armored sleeve and told the helmet computers to localize the radiation source. My HUD instructed me to walk twenty meters out, then twenty meters back to triangulate and I did, ignoring Sophia’s curious glance. The yellow circle in the terrain mapping function narrowed, shrinking down to a point. That point settled on a spot a couple meters ahead of me and to my right. My blood froze in my veins as a suspicion took hold.
I moved closer to the spot and the glow got brighter, projecting itself over my field of view in the helmet. The glowing yellow star was right in the middle of the chest of the woman I thought was named Kate. She stared back at me, a look of intense and unsurprised guilt on her face. Tears ran down and her shoulder shook.
“I didn’t want to,” she sobbed, burying her face in her hands. “They said they’d kill my children…”
“Oh, fuck,” Sophia said, her voice weak as she slumped back to the ground.
“They let you go,” I surmised, a harsh, cold tone to my voice that I didn’t intend. “They let you go to lead them here.”
She nodded into her hands and I saw the look of horror on her husband’s face as he understood what we were saying.
“I’m not the only one,” she told us, looking between Sophia and me, trying not to look at her husband or children. The nine-year-old was confused, while the toddler was playing in her father’s arms, blissfully ignorant. “They told me I wasn’t the only one.”
The other settlements. My head swam as I realized what she was saying. I felt my hand shaking as I fought not pull my pistol and put a round through her head, not for what they’d done to her but for her keeping it secret. Her children were right here, I reminded myself. Think about them.
“We can’t take you back,” I said after a moment. “They wouldn’t be able to track the isotope underground, but we can’t lead them to the tunnels.” If they didn’t already know about them, I amended to myself silently.
“I understand,” she said quietly, eyes on the ground.
“Do you?” I asked sharply. Her face snapped up, and from the look on it, I knew she did.
“James,” she said in a calm, even voice, “you need to take care of the children.”
“Katherine?” James was shaking his head, clasping his toddler girl to his chest like a life preserver. “We can’t leave you here…”
“James, you have to take care of the children.” Katherine put a hand against his chest. “This was my fault, not theirs. I won’t let them or you pay for it.”
I turned away, walking back to the other two families, who were staring at us uncomprehending, not having heard most of the conversation. They looked at me as I walked past them, and I was grateful for my helmet and the anonymity it gave me. It kept me from having to talk to them. I leaned against a tree at the edge of the path, feeling another weight slip into the pack. How much more could I carry before I dropped out of this march?
I heard Sophia telling everyone to get to their feet and I looked back and saw that Katherine had said her goodbyes. The nine-year-old boy was sobbing, not understanding why mommy wasn’t coming with them, straining against Sophia’s hands as she pulled him away. James was crying as well, but he was walking away from her, shielding the two-year-old. Katherine waited until the others had passed her by, till everyone had moved down the trail and around the next curve out of sight, and I waited beside her.
She watched the way they’d gone for another minute, still waiting for them all to be well out of earshot. Then she turned to me with a look of devastated acceptance.
I hated her, not for what she’d done but for what she was forcing me to do. We couldn’t take her back to the tunnels with that isotope tracer inside her, and we couldn’t take her anywhere safe to remove it because they’d come get her before we could get it out. And we couldn’t let the Tahni have her, or they’d force the location of the tunnels out of her.
I pulled my pistol from its chest holster, reversed it and offered the grip to her, but she shook her head, wiping at her tears with the back of her hand. It streaked her face with moist dust and dirt.
“I can’t do it,” she said, her voice a whisper, barely audible as she turned away from me, facing the trees. “I can’t do it myself.”
I looked at the gun in my hand, hefted it. So
light, just a piece of hardened polymer and ceramic, but it weighed more than the world.
All I heard was the hissing of my own breath deafening in my ears, drowning out her quiet sobs. I raised the pistol to the back of her head, the pressure of my palm activating its link to the reticle in my HUD. She was a target now. I thumbed the selector to deactivate the minimum arming distance for the warhead, then before I could think about it, I touched the trigger.
What was left of Katherine pitched forward to the ground, everything that had been her, everything that had made her an office functionary and a mother and a person scattered over a dirt game trail in the ass end of nowhere.
I waited for the nausea, waited for the wracking guilt, but there was nothing. I felt nothing. That was so much worse, somehow.
I shoved the gun back into its holster, un-slung my Gauss rifle and marched away after the others.
Chapter Twelve
Braun wasn't at the base when we arrived. No one was, and I should have been worried about that, but I didn't give a shit. We'd given him the word from the outpost where we'd entered the tunnels, and what he did with it was his business. I let Sophia deal with settling the families in; they wouldn't have wanted to talk to me anyway. I paced through the deserted facility into our room, tossed my helmet on the floor, leaned my rifle in a corner then began stripping off my armor. I paused as I pulled off my chest holster, struggling with an urge to throw it against the wall. Instead, I set it down carefully and finished undressing, peeling off my skinsuit and dropping it over my armor plating.
There was a water jug in the corner by the door; a towel was draped over it and a rag we were using for a wash-cloth was bundled around a bar of soap on the floor next to it. I sponged off slowly and methodically, scrubbing at stains that wouldn’t come out, ever. I was pulling on civilian clothes when Sophia stepped into the room and approached me slowly and carefully, like I was a primed explosive charge.
“Carl’s back,” she said quietly, laying a cautious hand on my arm. I stared at it; it felt alien to me, somehow, different than it had before. Maybe it was just me that was different. “He wants to talk to you.” She looked down, let her hand fall away. “It’s bad, Munroe.”
“I figured.”
I reached over to grab my rifle before I left the room but then closed the hand into a fist and walked out without it.
Braun was outside the main hatch watching the sunset. I’d figured he’d be raging and screaming, but maybe he’d already got that out of his system because he was dead silent, his face neutral, his eyes cold. He didn’t look at me when I walked up beside him, just kept staring at the setting primary.
“They got three of the settlements,” he said, finally, in a tone like he was speaking of the weather. “Over a hundred dead. We found two more refugees with isotope tracers implanted. They’re dead, too.”
I wondered if he’d killed them himself. Braun had changed a lot since I’d first met him; he looked less harried and overwhelmed and more confident, and his face seemed sharper somehow, less shapeless. The weapons he carried habitually looked less like ornaments of rank and more like tools.
“Munroe, I want Tahni prisoners.”
I shrugged. “I can get you live Tahni,” I told him, “but our briefings say that most have implanted transponders for tracking down missing soldiers. They’d find them in a couple hours, tops.”
“Do you know where in them they have the transponders implanted?”
“Sure,” I answered readily. “It’s in their back, between their shoulders. But it’s surrounded by blood vessels and nerve clusters and pretty close to their spine. You can’t take it out without permanent damage, maybe fatal damage, unless you have a fully equipped medical clinic.”
“Is that file in your helmet computer?”
“Yeah.” Somewhere. I knew I could hunt it down.
“Load it on a tablet and give it to me.” He finally turned and looked at me with the same casual, careless regard he’d had for the horizon. “Once you finish the operations plan for getting me prisoners, I’ll give you an interim location to bring them and we’ll cut the transponders out there before we take them underground.”
“Even if you cauterize the wound,” I warned him, shaking my head, “they won’t survive long.”
He smiled. I wasn’t a man who scared easy, not anymore, but that smile scared me.
“They won’t need to.”
***
The Tahni soldier blinked and groaned through the gag in his mouth when I pulled the sack off his head and shoved him into the muted light of the tent, quickly closing the door behind us and shutting out the rest of my squad. They were all younger than me and full of anger. A couple had been the lone survivors of the settlement attacks and they were eager for revenge. I didn’t like to look at their faces and I was glad to be away from them for a minute.
This was the third Tahni prisoner I’d snatched tonight and the workers were getting better at setting up the mobile surgery tent. It had been thrown up quickly, a roll of plastic tarp propped up on jerry-rigged poles in a stand of trees just outside the north end of Amity. A folding table was set up in its center, smeared with fresh blood.
Matching stains were on the shirt of the surgeon, who’d run the city clinic in Amity before the invasion. He was a burly, muscular type with skin the color of a walnut and hair that had once been neatly curled into dreadlocks before the last year had turned them wild and frizzy. He’d lost his boyfriend to the Tahni and he had, as Gramps liked to say, run out of fucks to give. He smiled grimly as he watched his attendants force the struggling Tahni down onto the table, restraining him with tie-down straps from a truck.
It took three of them to do it; the Tahni was a big male, if a bit on the old side. His age was probably why he wasn’t a Shock-Trooper, why he’d been stuck in a menial job overseeing cargo deliveries. The Tahni didn’t do anti-agathic treatments for some obscure religious reason, so they cycled soldiers through their elite units a lot quicker than we did. The older ones were put in ceremonial positions if their superiors liked them, or rear-echelon shit-kicker details if they didn’t. This guy just didn’t have any luck at all.
“Too bad we don’t have any anesthetics calibrated for Tahni physiology,” Dr. Mangrum said, half to himself, as he pulled a laser scalpel from a pocket of his red-stained overcoat and one of the orderlies cut through the Tahni’s uniform jacket with a pair of scissors. “Or maybe not too bad…”
I didn’t bother telling him he’d made the same remark with the last prisoner. I was fairly sure he was halfway ‘round the bend and I hoped to God I didn’t need him to treat me for anything.
It didn’t take as long this time, perhaps because he’d had practice now. The Tahni’s muffled screams didn’t make it out of the tent, and the straps restricted his thrashing to a pitiful shudder as the laser sliced neatly through the flesh and muscle of his upper back, laying it bare to the stark whiteness of the spine. The extraction of the tracer was a messier affair, with mechanical forceps and a great deal of blood, adding to the collection on Mangrum’s clothes. But in less than two minutes, he had the small, metallic nodule clutched in his gloved fingers.
He examined it with a critical eye for just a moment, then handed it off to a stone-faced young woman who might have once been called pretty before the things she’d seen and done had hardened her.
“Take it as far to the east as you feel comfortable, Esther,” Mangrum told her. “Drop it in a hole, or in water and get out before they find you with it.”
She nodded and dropped the bloody device into a pouch on her gunbelt, then ducked out of the tent and took off running. Dr. Mangrum turned back to his “patient” and began packing the still-bleeding wound with gauze, then covered it with a bandage. Not a smart bandage; we saved the few of those we had left for our own wounded. This was just sterilized cloth, like we were on a battlefield a couple hundred years in the past. The Tahni had gone limp, possibly unconscious, and was shuddering wi
th each breath.
“Very well, Corporal Munroe,” the surgeon said, finally, securing the dressing in place. “You may have your people deliver this thing to Carl.”
“I’ll take him myself,” I corrected him. This was my last run for the night. By the time we got this one back, it would be nearly daylight. “Get your tent broken down and get back to base as quick as you can.”
“Quickly,” Mangrum corrected my grammar absent-mindedly, motioning to his orderlies to start the wrap-up. “As quickly as you can.”
I stuck my head out the entrance and waved at a couple of the bigger guys in my squad to come in. Their names were Kurt and Victor, and I only remembered that because I needed to be able to direct them in combat. They were both blond, with long hair and bushy, unkempt beards and might have been brothers for all I knew.
They grabbed the Tahni by the arms and hauled him out of the tent, then dumped him face-first into a powered wheelbarrow we’d stolen from the resort construction site weeks before. The sky was clear that night and Demeter’s rocky, irregular moon was up; I felt uncomfortably exposed in its merciless glare.
“Let’s go,” I urged the others, waving at the lean, whipcord girl on point to move out.
Illyana was her name and she was carrying a Tahni laser carbine; the Gauss rifles were getting low on ammo, but we could always steal Tahni ammo off their dead soldiers. Of course, the Tahni hadn’t gotten a new shipment since the reinforcements had arrived, and I wondered if it was because they weren’t able to get any more ships safely through. I hoped it was.
I snorted without humor in the privacy of my helmet. If this thing kept going on too long, maybe both sides would run out of ammo and we’d be down to knives.
The path through the woods was narrow and overgrown and the wheelbarrow wasn’t designed for that kind of terrain. I had to have the Viking twins carry the Tahni for stretches of a hundred meters or more while three or four of the others dragged the cart, and if we hadn’t had a use for it back at the base I would have left it behind.
