by Rick Partlow
We weren’t very stealthy, but in this situation, I didn’t care. The forest was full of animals making noise and drones looking for thermal signatures would be overwhelmed by elk, deer, bison, aurochs, mastodon, dire wolves and God knows what else. My main worry was running into a predator, and making noise made that less likely. When Gramps and I had backpacked in the Rockies, we’d always talked to each other or said “hey bear” every few seconds, and I remembered the lesson. I’d been on the damn planet for months and still hadn’t seen a saber-tooth or a short-faced bear and I was very happy to keep that status quo.
By the time we reached the tunnel entrance, I could sense rather than see a hint of dawn above the trees and I knew we had cut it fairly close. There were two families crammed into the little two-room outpost buried at this entrance and they stared at the Tahni captive with mixed hatred and fear, the parents shoving their children back away from him as we carried him through to the tunnel. I tried not to stare at the kid’s faces. They always had this look, all the refugee kids, like they’d never get over this no matter what happened, that things would never be good again.
I felt weariness dragging at me by the time we reached the cart they’d left for us, and I fell into the seat and closed my eyes, letting Illyana drive. I dozed off at one point, but woke with a jolt when we came to a stop at the base. There were permanent guards posted out at the tunnel entrance now, with night vision and lasers looted from the Tahni and they nodded to me and the others as we passed by. They looked hard and lean and angry. Everyone who’d survived looked that way now.
The Tahni prisoner had passed out a couple times on the trip back, and I wondered if he was going to survive long enough for Braun to interrogate him. I assumed that was what he wanted the prisoners for. I’d uploaded Tahni language translation programs to the base’s core systems and everyone had them on their ‘links and tablets. We should be able to understand them, and to get them to understand us. The question was whether this schlub actually knew anything worth telling.
More familiar faces stared at me as we filed into the base, some with awe, some with caution, others with downright hostility. James Sanderson still blamed me for his wife’s death; honestly, I did, too. There was only one face I wanted to see, and as I pulled off my helmet and entered the main control room, I spotted Sophia seated at the monitors, watching something intently; she was the only one in there, which was strange. I was about to walk over to her when Braun stepped out of the clinic, looking like something from a nightmare.
His hands and arms were covered with blood to the elbows, and more of it had splattered on his shirt. There were even flecks of it in his beard, and the image matched the cold intensity of his eyes.
“Bring him in here,” he told the maybe-brothers who were carrying the Tahni between them, his hands secured, the hood still pulled over his head.
“What the fuck?” I muttered. “Carl?”
He ignored me, preceding the prisoner into the room, then shutting the door behind them. I tried to open it but found it locked.
What the fuck?
What was he doing in there? I expected him to be using physical duress to get whatever answers he wanted out of the Tahni, and while that was against the Commonwealth UCMJ and the law, hey, it wasn’t me doing it and I didn’t have to watch. But it looked like he was up to his armpits in a butchered mastodon.
I turned to the rest of the squad. “Go get some food and sleep,” I told them. “Clean your weapons and your gear after you eat.”
They nodded and headed back for the tunnels; we were storing a lot of the food in there now, stacked in the little service alcoves where technicians had used to access the fiber optic cables for repairs and maintenance. There just wasn’t enough room in the base or the outposts for all the supplies we’d gathered. We’d intended to ship a bunch of it out to the settlements, but…
“What’s going on?” I leaned against the console next to Sophia, dropping my helmet in a chair. “Where are the other two prisoners we sent you?”
“Here,” she said quietly, a numb quality to her voice that I didn’t remember hearing ever before, nodding at the screen. “You can see them.”
I looked at the screen, confused. I knew every view from every one of the forest’s hidden game cameras by heart, after months staring at them, looking for sign of Tahni incursion. This one was different; someone had hooked up a new camera, and from the open terrain and the gravel road running through it, I could tell this was coming from somewhere closer to Amity.
“It’s a disposable drone,” she said, answering my unasked question. “They won’t be able to trace it back to us because it’s a wide-band broadcast; anyone with a receiver anywhere within a twenty-kilometer radius should be able to pick it up.”
The drone must have been small; it was wavering with the wind, the dawn light glinting in its lens, and it took me a couple seconds before I saw the bodies. They were both tied to metal braces, their bases buried in the dirt by the roadside like crosses. You couldn’t tell if they were Tahni or human at first; they were just glistening, wet masses of bloody tissue. It took another, closer look before I realized that they’d been skinned like animals. Then one of them moved…
A cold, creeping tendril of unreality was worming its way into my brain, trying to convince me that this was nothing but a fever dream, that it couldn’t be actually happening. I let it settle over me like a comforting blanket, ready to believe anything to keep from accepting what I was looking at.
A warbling, inhuman scream broke me out of that fugue, penetrating the door into the clinic and echoing through the control room. I came off the console and stalked over to the door.
“Munroe…” Sophia was calling my name, but I ignored her.
The door was cheap plastic with a cheap lock. I smashed the sole of my boot into it and it buckled and slammed inward with a dull thump. Inside, the Tahni prisoner was strapped down to the table, naked, his clothes cut away and discarded, with the Viking brothers holding his head and arms to keep him still as he tried to thrash against the restraints. Carl Braun was working at the skin inside his thigh with a small, curved knife; from the blood on the plastic tarps stretched across the floor, this was where he’d done the same to the other two prisoners.
He’d looked up, eyes wide at the door bursting open and I punched him square in the chin, popping his head back and sending him crashing into the side of the auto-doc and tumbling to the floor. I didn’t even feel the impact through my armored gloves. The Viking brothers let go of the screaming Tahni and took a step towards me, but I swept my handgun out of its holster and pointed it between them, stopping them both in their tracks.
For the first time since I’d met them, they looked afraid. They had a right to be.
“Munroe!” Sophia was in the doorway, an imploring look on her face as she saw how close I was to killing everyone in the room.
I glanced at her quickly, not wanting to take my eyes off the brothers for long; they were young and stupid enough to try something. The Tahni had stopped screaming; now he was panting raggedly, sagging against his restraints, eyes squeezed shut.
“You knew he was doing this,” I said. I’d meant it as an accusation, but it came out of my mouth as a plea, a wish that I was wrong.
“They slaughtered children,” she said, eyes gone so cold I didn’t think they’d ever be warm again. “They treat us like animals. Why should we treat them any different?”
“You wouldn’t do this,” I gestured at the Tahni with the barrel of my gun, “to an animal. You don’t do this to anything.”
I hit the thumb selector, then aimed the pistol at the forehead of the Tahni prisoner and fired a single shot. Sophia and the two brothers jerked in surprise. The blood and brain matter was nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the stains on the table and the tarp.
On the floor, Braun was beginning to stir, moaning softly as he felt at his face with his hands. I thought I might have broken his jaw. I hoped I h
ad.
“I’m leaving here,” I told Sophia. “I won’t be part of this.” I jerked my head towards the dead prisoner. “Come with me, Sophie. Before you’re like him.” She knew who I meant, and her eyes went to where Braun lolled on the floor.
“I can’t,” she said. “This is my home.”
I nodded curtly, having accepted what she’d say before I heard it. I moved past her and grabbed my helmet off the chair in the control room, settling it on and then heading for the hatch. I thought about grabbing some food, but decided I had enough rations in my backpack to get me where I was going.
It was risky heading out in the daylight; it would be easier for the drones to spot me. I found I didn’t care. I shut the hatch behind me and headed into the forest, away from the base, away from Sophia. She hadn’t, I realized with a dull ache in my gut, asked me not to go.
Sophia hadn’t asked me not to go.
Chapter Thirteen
It was the 23rd Century. Humans had been travelling from one star system to another for 150 years, in space for twice that long. We could step outside our universe, we could replace organs and limbs with cloned flesh on a biomechanical framework, and we could implant interface jacks in our heads and hook our brains up to computers. We could grow meat in a vat and turn algae scum and soy paste into something at least passable to eat with the help of an automated kitchen.
Yet here I was, squatting in the dirt, bare-chested and eating the meat from an elk calf I’d hunted and killed and cooked over an open fire on a wooden spit. What a kick in the head.
Yeah, okay, I’d killed it with a rocket-propelled homing projectile aimed with a holographic reticle in a computerized helmet, and I’d cut the wood with a utility knife honed to a sharpness of a few molecules across and started the fire with a miniature blowtorch, and I was under the unfinished buildfoam dome of a half-built vacation resort on a planet stocked with genetically engineered wildlife, but still…
The elk calf was delicious. It was my second kill in my two weeks out here at the resort construction site. I wasn’t sure if the Tahni were bothering to monitor the place, but I knew the resistance had looted everything worth taking from it, so they wouldn’t be back. That took care of one of the two groups I was hoping to avoid.
I couldn’t stay here indefinitely though, I knew that. I’d eventually run out of ammo to hunt, or run out of vitamin supplements, and I’d have to get supplies by stealing from the Tahni. By myself, that would be dangerous, but I didn’t see what else I could do, besides crawling back to Braun. That wasn’t going to happen. I wished I’d thought to bring some civvie clothes with me from the Resistance base, though; when I was inside and relaxing, the best I could do was to strip my skinsuit down to the waist and try to cool off. And despite the fact that the material of the suit never absorbed my odor, if I spent too long in it, I stank like hell.
Plus, it was lonely out here, especially at night. I was getting paranoid and starting to jump at shadows with no one to watch my back. At least I hadn’t started talking to myself yet.
Ah well, maybe the damn Tahni will stumble across me and put me out of my misery.
That thought hadn’t had time to travel from one side of my brain to the other before I heard the footsteps outside. My body reacted before my mind had the chance to dither about it, and I grabbed my rifle and scrambled into a dark corner, as far from the fire as I could get. There wasn’t time to get my helmet on, so I’d just have to hope the fire screwed up their night vision imaging.
“I thought I told you not to kill the calves.”
I slowly stood and let the rifle drop to my side, holding it by the carry handle. I recognized the voice immediately, and I knew it was Sophia before she stepped through the gap in the unfinished wall and into the firelight. She was dressed in a Ghillie suit I’d made for her by hand out of strips of material salvaged from torn blankets, and carrying one of the older Gauss rifles the DSI had smuggled in before the failed operation to retake the colony. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail and her face was smudged black with soot for camouflage. She looked beautiful and deadly.
“Are you alone?” I asked her, deciding to forego small-talk.
“Well, if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t tell you, would I?” She pointed out puckishly, squatting down by the fire, just outside the ring of rocks that bounded it. She plucked a bit of rib meat off the spitted calf, chewing and swallowing it eagerly.
I moved back to the fire and sat down beside her, facing towards the opening, because she was right about the possibility of her not telling me if she wasn’t alone.
“Did you change your mind about leaving?” I wondered. This close, I could smell her and I felt an aching in my chest. She put a hand against my shoulder and locked eyes with me, and I thought for just a moment she had come to stay.
“You have to come back, Munroe,” she said instead. I looked away from her, the breath I’d been holding for just a beat going out of me.
“There’s not a chance in hell I’m going to go commit fucking war crimes for Carl Braun,” I spat, letting loose a deep wellspring of bitterness that I hadn’t been able to share with anyone else these last two weeks. “If I see that crazy fuck again, I’ll likely as not shoot him in the face.”
“Carl’s been in a bad place since the Tahni destroyed the settlements,” she admitted. “But we all were. They killed children, Munroe. Babies.”
“It’s not about what they did,” I told her. “It’s about what we are. About what I am. I’ll do a lot of shit, Sophie---I’ve done a lot of shit these last few months, and I’m not proud of all of it. But I’m not going to skin some poor rear-echelon motherfucker alive to prove a point.”
“Things have changed,” she said, finally dropping the other shoe. “Carl isn’t in charge anymore.”
“What?” I blurted, taken aback. I couldn’t think who might have taken over from him. “Who is, then?”
She tightened her grip on my shoulder and jerked her head towards the door. “That’s why you have to come back. They want to talk to you.”
“They?” I repeated. “They who?”
***
“Sergeant Munroe,” the little man said with an insincere smile, raising his hands in greeting rather than offering to shake mine. “It’s so nice to find you alive!”
He was round-faced and jovial and soft, with an unruly mop of black hair, and he looked like nothing else as much as he did a school teacher, even with the dark grey utility fatigues and soft body armor he wore, and the pistol at his hip.
“It’s Lance Corporal,” I corrected him. “And who might you be?”
“I’m Robert Chang,” he introduced himself with the flourish of a stage actor, “and this is my colleague, Amanda Kibaki.”
The woman was much less talkative and much less pleasant than Chang. She had brown hair cut to a centimeter or two from the skin, and a harsh, hard-edged face with eyes the shade of well-aged wood. She hadn’t said a word since Sophia and I had walked into the Revenant Research Base, just eyed me doubtfully, hand never straying too far from her holstered handgun.
Of course, no one else had been that damned talkative either. The ones who didn’t seem outright hostile acted embarrassed, like they couldn’t meet me eyes. They were the ones who knew Braun had gone too far. Sharon and Justin had hugged me, but no one else had said more than two words. Of Braun, himself, I’d seen no sign, and I wondered if that was deliberate.
“We’re with the Department of Security and Intelligence,” Chang went on, “as I’m sure the delightful Ms. Rocca,” he nodded towards Sophia, “has informed you already. And you have indeed been promoted to Staff Sergeant, albeit,” he laughed softly, “posthumously. That will have to be adjusted, of course, but the back pay should be very lucrative.”
“How the hell did you two get here?” I wondered, shaking my head at the little man’s nonstop banter.
“Oh, it was touchy, believe you me,” he laughed quietly, moving over to a table set up in the main c
ontrol room and waving for us to join him. “It involved a Transition directly in line with the system’s primary, then days and days in a Hohmann Transfer Orbit in a disposable hibernation pod covered with sensor dampening material, then a rather hair-raising ejection in a drop pod and a damn long walk.” He looked around at everyone gathered in the room. “Did you know there are saber-tooth tigers here? Freaking saber-tooth tigers, I shit you not.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. This was the best the fucking DSI could do?
“I meant,” I clarified, “why did they drop you here? Is Fleet planning an operation? Are they going to try again to take back Demeter?”
“No,” he said, his tone still cheery. “Not for the time being. Demeter was a fiasco and people lost their jobs because of it; the political fallout is still floating down to Earth and President Jameson isn’t ready to risk another attack yet. But we’ve been monitoring things via spy drones and the powers-that-be have decided that things couldn’t get much worse here, so they sent us in to test that hypothesis.”
Agent Kibaki finally spoke up, her voice deeper and much more authoritative than Chang’s. “We’re in charge of planning from now on,” she said with a finality that would brook no argument.
“Yes,” Chang agreed, and steepled his fingers in front of his face. “And let’s start with this tactic we’ve been hearing about of kidnaping and torturing Tahni soldiers, then leaving them on display to the others as an example.”
I nodded, feeling a bit of relief. If nothing else, maybe these spooks could rein in Braun’s madness.
“It’s brilliant,” Chang enthused and that relief flushed away down the toilet. “Classic psychological warfare. God, it’s straight out of the textbooks.” He sighed with regret. “Unfortunately, those textbooks were written about humans. We have no idea how Tahni will react to that provocation; it might be they’ve never run into it before; their society has been unified for a long time, millennia. And we certainly didn’t have the opportunity to try it in the last war; hell, we barely saw each other in that one.”
