by Rick Partlow
“So, what are you saying?” Sophia asked, looking as confused and perplexed as I was.
“I’m saying,” Chang motioned broadly as he spoke, “you can’t just skin a Tahni and plant him on a cross! You need to capture prisoners and ask them how that made them feel. Get intelligence, not just revenge.”
“Are you condoning what I was taught are war crimes?” I asked him flatly.
“Grow up, Munroe,” Kibaki snapped, impatience in her voice. “Do you think the Tahni signed any agreement with us about what constitutes a war crime? They’ve killed hundreds of thousands of innocent human civilians, and if they ever thought they had the capacity, they’d wipe all of us out, down to the last man, woman and child.”
“If that’s your position,” I growled, rising half out of my chair, “then you should have left me where I was, because I won’t be a part of it.”
Kibaki’s eyes narrowed, her hand subtly creeping towards her sidearm, and I had a sense that she was getting ready to do something violent.
“You’ll fucking regret it,” I said very softly, so quietly I was sure it didn’t carry beyond the table. Sophia looked at me wide-eyed.
“Please, let’s not argue,” Chang insisted, his voice plaintive. “We’re all allies here, and you, my esteemed Sergeant, are still a member of the Commonwealth armed forces despite the inconvenience of you being dead and all.”
“Yes, I am,” I said firmly. “And you aren’t. The DSI is a government agency, not a military one. You aren’t in my chain of command, and since you didn’t even know I was alive, I doubt you obtained any special orders regarding putting me under your control. If you want my help killing Tahni, I’ll kill the shit out of them for you, but I don’t commit atrocities for you or anyone else.”
“And who gets to decide what constitutes an atrocity?” Kibaki asked me, a hint of something in her eyes…maybe respect? I didn’t know her well enough to tell.
“Given that I’m the highest-ranking member of the Commonwealth military on the planet,” I said, “and the only one who’ll face court-martial if I make the wrong call, I do.” I looked between the two of them, considering whether I thought I could get both of them in time before they killed me, and whether I could count on Sophia to back me up. “I’ll make it simple: we don’t torture or mutilate prisoners. We put the safety of civilians as one of our top priorities and we do everything we can to avoid collateral damage.” I shrugged. “I know we can’t do anything to stop Tahni reprisals, but we need to try to get civilians out of harm’s way when possible.”
Chang’s head bobbed and his eyes flitted around as he debated the idea in his head, then he made a sour face and turned to Kibaki with a question in his eyes.
“Fine,” she said simply, the look on her face unreadable.
“It will limit our options,” Chang complained, “but I suppose it’ll make for fewer subcommittee hearings in the Senate after the war. All right, Sergeant, we have an agreement.”
I relaxed slightly, letting my hand drift away from the butt of my pistol.
“What’s our first move, then?” I wondered.
“We just finished looking over the latest intelligence reports from Amity,” Chang said, a hint of dismissiveness in his voice showing us what he thought of their quality. “One thing sticks out at me: food. The Tahni don’t seem to have much trouble getting adequate food, and although they don’t provide more than the minimum calories to survive to the residents they control, they could if they wanted to.” He glanced between Sophia and me. “Why haven’t you done something about that?”
“We always got our food by raiding their shipments,” Sophia said, a little defensively I thought, “or by stealing straight from the warehouses out at the farms. We thought about sabotaging the farms, but then we wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves or any refugees we took in. Plus, there’s the game. We’ve taken some, but the Tahni don’t seem to bother with it. If we cut off the farms, they could just start hunting and that would keep them fed for quite a while.”
Chang exchanged a look with Kibaki. “You might think so,” he told us, “but the truth is, the Tahni don’t eat meat, and they haven’t for over a thousand years.”
“Seriously?” I asked, taken aback. “That seems…not like them, somehow.”
“There’s a plant that grows on their homeworld that’s a very good source of protein and other nutrients we’ve gotten from meat, historically. It was so widely abundant, and relatively cheap, that they no longer keep domesticated animals.” He shrugged. “They have the technology to clone animal flesh the way we do, but they don’t bother. They haven’t had a hunting tradition for the last several millennia.” He grinned at me. “They give us spooks a bit more in-depth briefings than the grunts.”
“Even so,” Sophia objected. “If they’re starving, wouldn’t they kill animals anyway?”
“Oh, I hope it comes to that,” Chang’s grin grew broader. “Because to do that, they’ll have to come into the forest. We can have all sorts of nasty surprises waiting for them here.”
“You want us to destroy the agro factories,” I said, bringing it back to the part that was still bothering me.
“Loot them first,” Chang amended. “Everything we can get, and we’ll have to have a place to store it, someplace the Tahni won’t know about.”
“There’s a pretty big cave out in the hill country that might work,” Sophia mused, rubbing a finger across her lip the way she did when she was thinking. “But how are we going to get the food there without them seeing it?”
“By making sure they’re looking the other way.” Chang pointed a finger at me. “Our Sergeant Munroe here is very concerned about civilians. While half of us are taking the food, and destroying the farm factories, the other half will be breaking as many colonists as possible out of the city.”
“That could work,” I conceded, slowly nodding. “Still…without the agro factories, the ones still under captivity will be left to starve.”
“We’ll smuggle out as many as we can,” Chang said, raising a hand palm up, “but this is war, boy, and a guerilla war at that. War is an ugly thing.”
“…but not the ugliest of things,” I murmured half to myself, remembering a quote Gramps had once told me.
“John Stuart Mill,” Kibaki said, raising an eyebrow. Then she surprised me by completing the quote. “…the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” She shot a look at Chang. “We have ourselves a classically educated grunt, Robert.”
“Well, it’s only fitting, Amanda,” he cracked back to her, his tone mocking. “After all, he is the highest ranking military man on the whole damned planet!”
Chapter Fourteen
The Tahni, I’d decided after careful thought, weren’t very good at security. It was probably because, like Agent Chang had said, they’d had a unified government for a thousand years. They had still fought internal wars, at least until they met us, but those were structured parts of their culture, battles for succession and for the ascendance of religious doctrine that had killed thousands but never once by stealth. They didn’t spy on each other and they didn’t have internal dissent. If you disagreed with someone’s right to rule or their version of the holy writ, your forces met their forces in open combat at a prearranged time and place to minimize the collateral damage. They had changed to some extent because of their first war with us, but during that whole conflict, they’d never been able to occupy one of our worlds. This war was very different.
Chang had told me all this in his typical condescending, lecturing manner that made me want to punch his face in, but it was useful information. A culture like that, without internal dissent, wouldn’t know how to deal with a resistance move
ment; they were learning on the fly and we were their teachers. This Colonel K'tann-len-Renn-Tan was smart and more adaptable than most of their people; he could adapt to our tactics once he had experienced them, but he still couldn’t predict them because he still didn’t know us.
I wondered how he’d react to this.
“We’re in position, Munroe,” Sophia’s voice announced in my helmet speakers. We were risking radio communications for the first time since I’d arrived here, simply because coordination was more important than the possibility of being detected in this operation. “Ready when you are.”
I looked around the dimly lit cargo box of the truck, seeing the former technicians and netdivers and horticultural engineers sitting on the bed, dressed in jury-rigged bits of Tahni armor, carrying stolen pulse lasers and KE guns. Their faces badly hid their fear and apprehension and I wondered how ready they were, even after over a year of this. I’d trained most of them as best I could over the months I’d been here, and Chang and Kibaki had drilled them on this mission over and over during the last two weeks, but they weren’t soldiers and they sure as hell weren’t Marines. They were what we had, though, and that would have to be enough.
Even more crucial to the success of this mission than them, more crucial than me, was the device sitting in the center of the truck bed, its dish antenna pointed skyward. The antenna, the power source and the controls had been jury-rigged from local parts, but the guts of the jammer had been brought down in the drop pod by Chang and Kibaki. It was nearly as important as the chemical HyperExplosives that was the rest of their small cargo to making sure this worked.
I couldn’t see the outside from in here, but I’d linked my helmet to a remote camera mounted in the cab and I checked it with my HUD. It was late afternoon, and getting cooler as summer came to an end on this side of Demeter. The leaves on the trees which lined the dirt road were turning fiery red and gold, reminding me of a trip Gramps and I had taken to Maine in October; it looked beautiful. About a kilometer ahead was something less beautiful: the grey, weathered buildfoam dome of the algae farm, rising up above the trees and above the corrugated aluminum cube of the automated processing plant that turned the algae into raw powder for use in the auto-kitchens. I couldn’t see it from the view in my HUD, but I knew the warehouse was on the other side of the dome, forming a triangle with the farm and the processing plant.
A few kilometers farther down the road was the soy farm, another huge dome with engineered soybean plants that grew fast and efficiently indoors in a chemical bath. Sophia was there already with her platoon, and we would be in place soon.
“We’ll be set up in five,” I told her. “Stand by.” I switched frequencies. “Chang, what’s the sit-rep?”
That was the tricky part, the reason we were using the radios. Coordinating Sophia’s and my units on attacking two targets a few kilometers apart wouldn’t have been that hard; keying the timing on both attacks with Chang and Kibaki’s strike in the Amity housing camps was a pain in the ass. It reminded me too much of the plan that had stranded me on the damned planet in the first place.
Chang didn’t respond for perhaps thirty seconds and I was about to try again when I finally heard his voice.
“Apologies, we just passed through a checkpoint,” he said, sounding remarkably casual about it. “We’ll be ready to touch things off in five.”
“Roger.” Damn it. I should have been there. I didn’t trust the two of them to avoid civilian casualties.
But Chang had been right; infiltrating the housing camps needed more stealth and subtlety than I was trained for, plus I wouldn’t have been able to take my armor along, or any weapons heavier than my pistol. I thought I could have pulled it off anyway, but then no one would have been using the armor, at least not to its full capabilities, and that would have been a waste.
“We’re at the guard shack, boss.” That was Victor, who was up front with his brother, Kurt. I’d thought it would be awkward working with them again after the situation with Braun, but surprisingly, they were among the most embarrassed about what had happened. They were young, and I guess a Recon Marine was a bigger role model for them than a reactor technician.
I saw the security checkpoint coming up, a powered barricade across the road about a hundred meters from the gate through the perimeter fence, with an armored shelter on each side, and Shock-Troopers manning it. I signaled to the three fighters closest to the rear doors to be ready; if our clearance didn’t hold up, or they tried to search the truck, we’d have to start the party early.
This was the reason I’d been thinking critical thoughts about Tahni security, though; we all looked alike to them, and they didn’t even think of the possibility of infiltration into their computer systems. Okay, there was a reason for that: we’d never been able to do it before. Among the other toys the Spooks had brought with them for this mission were a few, conveniently small penetration modules designed to crack Tahni data nets. So, this shipment---and the one to the soy farm, and the trucks our people were driving to the gates of Amity even now---were all scheduled in the system and pre-approved. As long as no one looked too close, or took a personal interest in tracing where those orders had come from, we were golden.
Kurt stopped at the gate and, through the camera in the cab, I could see the Shock-Trooper lumbering up to the window, holding out a scanner. Victor handed Kurt the pass on a black lanyard he’d been carrying around his neck, and Kurt tapped the small, plastic disc to the scanner. I braced myself, an anti-armor grenade pre-loaded into my launcher.
There was a flat hum and the Shock-Trooper checked the screen of the scanner, then waved us through. I let myself breathe again, though I didn’t lower my rifle. Kurt handed the pass back to his brother, then slowly edged the truck forward through the rising gate. The big guys were pretty cool customers; I was glad to have them with me. And I was glad Carl Braun was on the mission with Chang and Kibaki; I didn’t need the distraction of worrying about him. He was still technically in charge of the Resistance, and the DSI spooks hadn’t told him otherwise; they were “advisors.” But he hadn’t argued with the plan and that was good enough. Sharon, Justin and their son, Aaron, had also gone along on the mission to Amity, since they still had contacts there. That left me and Sophia with mostly younger people in our group which probably just worked out just as well.
Kurt pulled the truck through the gate in the mesh fence and down the dirt track between the looming, fifty-meter-dome and the processing plant, towards the storage tanks. There weren’t any Shock-Troops inside the fence, probably because they figured the Resistance liked eating as much as they did and wouldn’t possibly do what we were about to do. The only Tahni inside the facility were a few lightly-armed technicians who were monitoring the human workers. Through the camera in the cab, I saw a line of the workers filing out of the dome’s personnel entrances, walking across to a small out-building while the Tahni half-watched them and half ignored them.
I waited until I could see that we were around the corner from the guard-post before I gestured to the team at the back and they moved like we’d rehearsed a dozen times, kicking open the door and jumping out, one of them losing his footing and sliding in the loose gravel before he followed the others into the space between the dome and the pump station that fed it water from an underground aquifer. They were out of sight before any of the human workers so much as turned to look at the truck, and the Tahni couldn’t have cared less about the regularly scheduled shipment. I knew the type by now, had seen them over and over in rear-echelon positions here on Demeter: they were older, lazier, interested in staying safe and well-fed.
Kurt kept driving, heading for a parking lot back by the storage tanks. Three other trucks were there already, big tankers that could pull up under the loading chutes of the huge storage drums and fill their bellies with raw algae powder to take into the city. It would be tricky getting them up the dirt roads to the caves, but the scouts we’d sent said it could be done.
“Trucks,” I said, nodding to the next three, two painfully young looking teenage girls who nevertheless could handle one of the big rigs better than I could, plus a chubby-faced older man who’d driven one of the trucks for a living. They scrambled out, splitting up to prep the tankers. Then, “Loader,” and a woman a few years older than me followed them and headed up the stairs to the catwalk on top of the storage tanks.
“Cover team in place.” The voice was soft and barely audible even over the helmet speakers; I knew the team was only about thirty or forty meters from the security checkpoint, just this side of the fence.
I bent over the jammer and touched the control to activate it; for the next half-hour, until their software could correct for it, the Tahni communications systems would be scrambled, but ours wouldn’t. It couldn’t last; the Tahni weren’t that primitive when it came to computer technology, although they lagged behind us. But it might be enough to let us get out of here without an assault shuttle crashing the party.
“Let’s go,” I waved for the last five to follow me as I jumped through the door.
Victor and Kurt piled out of the cab and two of the other fighters handed them their KE guns, armor and tactical harnesses. I went down on a knee, keeping watch while they geared up. This was the part I hated, the time when everything could go to hell in one second if the wrong thing happened. The brothers shot me thumbs-up, looking even more like Viking warriors in their improvised armor, the fat-barreled KE guns their 23rd Century version of axes.
“Assault team one in place,” I reported to Sophia and Chang. “Go on your mark, team three.”
“Thirty seconds.” Chang’s voice was flat and businesslike, very different from his usual shtick. Well, I guess he had to be good at what he did or they wouldn’t have sent him here.
