by Rick Partlow
As I fell to a knee inside the shadowed cargo box, I saw that I’d been helped in by the civilian workers. This close, I could see the ragged remains of the clothes they’d been wearing when they were stuck in this place months ago and the tangled hair and bushy beards and the dirt and grease rubbed into their skin and never adequately cleaned. None seemed painfully thin, though, probably because it was so easy to sneak food at a place like this.
The one who had hold of my left hand kept it in his for a moment, smiling through strands of grey beard. He looked as if he hadn’t smiled for a long time.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for coming for us.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied simply, gently disengaging my hand.
There were ten seconds left on the timer. I looked back around; we were about a kilometer down the road from the plant, heading for the forest. That was when it blew. There was a subdued “crump” as the chemical vat ruptured, then a heartbeat later, the fist of God Himself flattened the air above the processing building into a hammer of fire and everything was flame and pressure and sound.
The blast wave hit us from twelve hundred meters away and nearly overturned the truck, sending it fishtailing across the road before Victor got control of it, and a searing rush of air slammed the rear doors shut. The civilians with me covered their eyes and ears, yelling or screaming as the sound hit like a snare drum inside their heads, and I was again grateful for my helmet and the protection it provided.
Finally, the debris began to land with light patters on the roof and the occasional louder and more alarming “clunk,” but the worst was over and the civilians began to settle down. The man who’d thanked me looked horrified now, his face ashen.
“You blew it up,” he said, his voice raspy with disbelief. “You blew the whole damn thing up!” He looked at me. “What will we eat now?”
“The food we stole today,” I told him, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “The question is, what will the Tahni be eating?”
He didn’t seem totally convinced, but at least he wasn’t about to go catatonic anymore. I felt the gravel road turn into dirt track under the suspension, bouncing us rhythmically in tune with the terrain.
“You’re taking a big risk,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re going to get pretty desperate.”
“Yes, they are,” I agreed. “And desperate people make mistakes.”
Chapter Fifteen
I stared into the darkness and thought, not for the first time, that I should be crying. If I still had a conscience, if I still had a soul, I’d be crying.
“Are you awake?” It wasn’t the slurred, groggy voice of someone stirred from a sound sleep. Sophia had been up as well, lying in the pitch-black next to me, the two of us together but each of us isolated in our thoughts.
“Yeah.”
“You still thinking about the intelligence report?” It was a dumb question, but I forgave her the inanity; it was a roundabout way to tell me she couldn’t stop thinking about it, either.
“The people left in Amity are starving to death,” I said with a brutally neutral tone. “And it’s my doing.”
We’d both seen the videos the drones had taken. It had been a risk sending them, and a bigger risk retrieving the data-spikes; we couldn’t use any kind of a signal, not anymore. They’d gotten smarter, or at least more experienced, and they could trace down everything we tried to use for communications. Instead, we programmed the drones to crash and runners grabbed their spikes and took off, hiding for days to make sure they weren’t tracked.
The videos had shown skeletons, dressed in rags that fell off their emaciated bodies, penned out in the open on display in the center of the town square. They were trying to show us the consequences of our actions, trying to force us to give up the food we’d stolen. And, of course, using those civilians as shields to prevent any attacks in the city. Chang and Kibaki had shown me the videos in private, and they hadn’t wanted to share them with anyone else, but I knew that wasn’t going to work. Word would get out, and it would be worse if we tried to hide it.
“There’s nothing we can do for them, Munroe,” she said, rubbing my shoulder comfortingly. “We’ve gotten out all the people we could; the rest would just get killed if we tried, and get us killed with them.”
I stared unseeing at where I knew her hand was on my arm, and wondered why she was here. I wondered why I was with her. I certainly hadn’t intended on it. When I’d come back at the insistence of the DSI agents, I’d had no intention of picking things up where they’d left off with Sophia. I’d been full of righteous indignation and bitter hurt feelings, and I’d fully intended to keep our relationship professional.
Then we’d returned to base from destroying the algae plant and the soy farm and she was the first person I’d sought out. She seemed like the one thing I could hang onto out here, and I didn’t know if that made what we had special or just pitiful.
“We couldn’t feed any more people anyway,” I murmured.
It was even true. We’d smuggled out over two thousand people from Amity and the other, smaller internment camps close enough for us to reach, and resettled them wherever we could. We’d built lean-to’s in the foothills, poured buildfoam shelters in caves, even settled families into an old, abandoned, underground bombardment shelter left over from the First War with the Tahni. It had never been used; Demeter hadn’t been attacked. But it was still water-tight and housed over three hundred people.
Chang and Kibaki had discovered it in records they’d brought with them. Brought with them where I wasn’t quite sure, as I never saw either one of them consult a personal datalink. I was fairly sure they were using some kind of lens implant to stream data remotely, but I never saw the ‘link it was connected to. The two of them had been on-planet for three months now, and I didn’t know a single personal thing about either of them, despite the fact that Chang never shut up for more than two minutes at a time.
“We did the right thing,” Sophia insisted, maybe to me, maybe to herself. “The Tahni are hurting badly, too.”
She was right about that. That was the other thing the drones had revealed, the good news of the good news/bad news joke. Tahni stores were down to maybe a few weeks’ worth of food, and Chang was fairly confident they wouldn’t be able to ship more in. How he knew that, I wasn’t sure.
“Once they get hungry enough, and we’re not,” she went on, “they’ll have to come out and hunt for us again. And then we’ll kill them, again.”
That was what had happened immediately afterward: the Tahni had sent out air patrols, foot patrols, vehicle patrols, High Guard patrols, all trying to hunt down the food. We’d killed them by the dozens. Oh, we’d lost people as well, but we could afford it more. That had stopped after a couple weeks and they’d drawn in on themselves, a turtle pulling into its shell.
“All those civilians will be dead by then,” I said. It wasn’t a condemnation, it wasn’t an argument. It was just a statement of fact.
Her hands moved to my face and she cradled it gently, kissing my forehead.
“We can’t save everyone, Munroe.”
I pulled her to me, feeling the warmth of her bare skin against mine, my mouth finding hers. There was one sure way to forget about everything else, and maybe that was why we were still together…
A knock on the door interrupted us, and my hand went automatically to the portable light stuck to the storage room wall with adhesive.
“Yeah?” I barked, annoyed. This had better not be some bullshit thing they could have bothered Braun about.
“It’s Chang.” His high-pitched, annoying voice was muffled by the door.
I jumped up, noticing that Sophia had already pulled a shirt on and was slipping into her jeans. I dressed in seconds and unlocked the door, yanking it open. The DSI agent was grinning like the Cheshire cat in the darkened corridor, his dark hair longer now and pulled into a short ponytail at his neck, blending in with his dark fatigues. He was almost
spastic, fidgeting excitedly, and I wondered what the hell was going on.
“Gear up,” he told me. “We’re having some friends over.”
***
Winter had taken hold of the Revenant Forest and a cold rain pattered against the leaves with a staccato rhythm, hiding the sound of our passage. The night sky was shrouded in utter blackness, the low-hanging clouds blocking out the stars. When the storm cleared in the morning and the temperature crashed below freezing, everything would be glazed over with a thin film of ice. I was shivering already, despite the insulation of my skinsuit and armor; the wet chill penetrated them like needles through my skin even if the water couldn’t.
The wet and the cold didn’t seem to bother Chang or Kibaki. The taciturn woman marched stolidly without flinching as the rain matted down her hair, while Chang practically danced down the trail, as eager as a puppy. Neither of them had revealed who were going to meet, but it was only the three of us…for “operational security,” according to Kibaki.
I was getting along fine in the darkness with the thermal and infrared filters in my helmet, but so were the two of them and damned if I knew how, since neither wore any sort of night vision gear. I would have asked, but they wouldn’t have told me.
The forest was still and motionless, predators and prey alike huddled and waiting for the rain to end, which I guess made them smarter than us. We’d been heading away from the city, out near where the old resorts had been before the Tahni assault shuttles had torched them to keep us from scavenging materials in a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. The ground out there was uneven and rocky but we were moving quickly, counting on the rain to provide the stealth that our pace was missing. I had to suck down nutrient fluid from my helmet reservoir on the march because the DSI agents weren’t taking any breaks; and I was a Recon Marine so I wasn’t going to ask for one.
I wasn’t sure where our destination was until we reached it in the early hours of the morning, after a hike that had taken us since before midnight. When we stopped next to the charred remains of a burned-out storage building for one of the tourist resorts, I first thought that finally Chang and Kibaki had gotten tired and we were going to take a rest. I staggered over to the rusted hulk of a junction box and slumped down on it, sucking in breaths and propping my rifle against my leg. I was engineered at the genetic level to be as perfect a specimen as a human could be and still look fairly normal on the outside, and I’d been in perfect shape when I’d landed here, but months with no weight room and no running had taken their toll.
I saw Chang looking at me with an amused expression, seemingly unaffected by the hike, and I shot him a bird.
“Relax, Recon,” he told me in a sarcastic tone, which might have been the only one he had. “We’re here.”
I looked around at the charred and broken walls and the collapsed roof of what had once been a quaint, old-style structure built to fit in with the rest of the resort’s classic architecture, scanning it on thermal as well as infrared. Nothing bigger than a rat could have been concealed inside the wreckage, and the only foliage around was a lone pine tree not big enough around for even a skinny runt like Chang to hide behind.
“So, when are these friends of yours going to get here?” I asked, looking between him and Kibaki.
“Where’d you dig up the Marine, Chang?”
I was moving before I thought, throwing myself into the prone and bringing my rifle around towards where the voice had come from, out past the wreckage. The realization that the voice had spoken English with a western North America accent kept my finger off the trigger pad.
“Whoa there, fella’,” another voice said from the same direction. “We’re the good guys.”
I didn’t see them until they took off their hoods; they wore chameleon camouflage and blended into the darkness better than any Recon Marine I’d ever seen. They both had handguns strapped low on their thighs and carried some kind of outrageously big and heavy-looking rifle that I couldn’t identify. One of the men was tall and blond with a face weathered by exposure to the sun and wind, while the other was shorter and stockier, his hair a shade darker. And I realized, suddenly, that I’d met them before.
“Holy shit,” I murmured, levering myself to my feet with the butt of my rifle.
“You left him here,” Chang accused cheerfully. “He was with the Recon grunts you brought with you last time you landed here.”
They were the Fleet Intelligence operators I’d met on that moon outpost before we’d headed to Demeter. Not the ones I’d shared a ship with---that had been the really tall guy and the short, skinny one. These two had been there, though. They’d transported Second Squad, and been there with us during the ambush. What were the names they’d given us…?
“You’re Cowboy,” I said to the taller one. Then I pointed a finger at the other guy. “And you’re… Kel?”
“Fuck me!” Kel exclaimed, his light-colored eyes widening. And I didn’t know how he or the other one were seeing in this gloom, either, but by now I’d just come to accept it. “We thought all the survivors from the ambush died when the Tahni blew up Daniella and Valeria’s ship!”
I winced at that, but this Kel seemed oblivious to the fact that he’d just confirmed all my friends were dead.
“I was wounded in the initial ambush,” I told him, trying to keep the resentment out of my voice. After all, he’d just said his teammates had died that day, too. “I probably would have died if one of the people here hadn’t got me to an auto-doc.”
“Sergeant Munroe here,” Kibaki spoke up, surprising me, “is one of the reasons they sent us in. He was causing trouble for the Tahni weeks before we arrived.”
“It’s nice to see you still alive, Sergeant,” Cowboy drawled, walking over to me and offering a hand. I shook it, and it finally sank through my thick skull what their presence here meant. These two weren’t DSI, sent in for the long haul to work with the indigs. They were operators, sent for a specific mission.
“The Fleet!” I blurted, grateful my helmet hid my dumbfounded expression. “The Fleet’s coming back to Demeter!”
“Not just yet,” Cowboy said, shaking his head. “But we’ll be setting the stage.”
“Things have changed a bit since we were here last time,” Kel explained, shifting his oversized rifle easily, as if it weighed nothing. “That cluster-fuck that left you here, that wasn’t our idea; that came down from on high and we got stuck holding the tab. The brass has a bit more patience now, so they’re giving us time.”
“Time for what?” I wanted to know.
“Time for us,” Cowboy answered and he smiled in a way that wasn’t at all good-humored. “Time to let us do what we do.”
Chapter Sixteen
“What’s in the crates?”
I was leaning against the tunnel wall, my helmet hanging loosely in my hand, exhausted and trying to stay awake. I’d spent last night escorting Cowboy and Kel back to our base, then most of the day in an extended intelligence briefing with them, the DSI agents and Sophia---it had been a fight to get her included, but I’d insisted on it. This was her home and her war. Then tonight, I’d had to lead a working party to retrieve some supplies the two Fleet Intelligence operators had stashed in their drop pod, about twenty kilometers away. It was going to be morning in an hour or so and I hadn’t slept for three days.
I’d been “supervising” the unloading of the half dozen crates from the electric cart when I heard the question from the ramp behind me, where the tunnel ran up into the Research Center. I knew the voice, though I hadn’t heard it in months. It felt like a huge effort to turn my head and force my eyes open, but I did.
Carl Braun looked like shit. He’d let his beard go wild, and his hair looked like he hadn’t owned a comb since the Tahni invaded. His eyes were sunken and rimmed with red, and he badly needed a bath. Taking a whiff of him, I was tempted to haul him outside and throw him in the river.
“Some heavy weapons the spooks
brought down with them,” I told him, trying not to slur my words. He looked as if he was waiting for more details, but he wasn’t going to get them from me.
I saw one of the men carrying the crates glance at him quickly and look away, as if he was embarrassed. Carl’s status had fallen hard since the DSI had arrived, and he wasn’t taking it well.
“I guess things are going to change now,” he said, trying a new tack. I regarded him carefully, wondering if this was an attempt at burying the hatchet or just a gambit to weasel his way back into being relevant.
“Things are always changing,” I returned noncommittally. “It’s the one thing you can count on.” I let my head rest against the wall, feeling the cold leaching into me. “Honestly, Carl, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how much my life changed in just the last three years.”
I laughed softly, feeling a bit drunk with fatigue. “I had a life most people would have killed to get…” I trailed off, the smile leaving my face. “And I killed to get out of it.”
“My life was boring and stable,” he reminisced, his eyes searching beyond the walls of the tunnel, back in time. “I worked the same hours every day, and met Janie for lunch in the square and…” He trailed off, looking as if he might weep if he had the energy.
“I’m sorry about your fiancée, Carl,” I said. I’d always been sorry, but I couldn’t remember if I’d ever told him.
“Have you ever loved anyone, Munroe?” He looked me up and down, assessing. “You joined the Marines young. I know you and Sophia are…” He shrugged. “But so are a lot of people because what else are you going to do hiding in tunnels or walking through the woods all day? But have you ever loved someone enough that you wanted to spend every minute you could with them, no matter how long that might be?”
