by Rick Partlow
“I thought you’d be stuck in that thing for a while longer, Divya,” I commented, carefully not saying “I hoped.”
“No such luck, Captain Munroe,” she said with a smirk. I grimaced. She only called me “Captain” when she was trying to get under my skin. I’d never been anything higher than a Sergeant, but I was in command of this unit, so maybe I could technically have given myself the rank…if I were a complete asshole.
“The auto-doc kicked me out; I suppose I’m too nasty to kill.” She laughed, an unpleasant sound. “I was able to hear most of your discussion and I’m here to relieve you of the need to make a strategic decision. I have supplementary instructions from Captain West that cover these circumstances.”
“Of course you do,” Bobbi muttered, running a hand over her face.
I didn’t say anything. The fact she had instructions about this meant she---and Cowboy---knew more about the situation than they’d told us. That worried me, but I’d been trying to piece together Andre Damiani’s big-picture plan from the fragments that Cowboy and now Divya had given to us to accomplish, and this could be a large piece. What was out here that he wanted?
“What’s the op?” I asked her, trying to keep my face and voice bland and emotionless. Divya was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. If I seemed too eager, she’d get suspicious.
“Intelligence gathering.” She moved into the cockpit, squeezing between Victor and Kurt with a condescending pat on their arms, and sat down on the console beside me, uncomfortably close. She smelled of some strange, herbal scent that might have been a perfume or shampoo or maybe some sort of skin lotion, but it was cloyingly strong and I wished I could move away.
“I understand you’ve suffered a loss today,” she allowed, spreading her hands demonstratively, “and I wouldn’t ask you to jump into another combat situation short two soldiers…”
“They weren’t soldiers,” Bobbi corrected her. “They were both Recon Marines.”
She was right; that had become a prerequisite for hiring a new troop. Kane was Fleet, but he was our pilot, and Victor and Kurt had been civilians, but I’d grandfathered them in because I’d trained them personally on Demeter during the Tahni occupation. They’d fought in front-line conditions for a solid year as part of the civilian resistance, and gone through more shit than any three Marines I knew. Well, except me.
“My apologies,” Divya said, managing to shut down Bobbi and yet still sound condescending. “Short two Marines. But our employers require more detailed, boots-on-the-ground intelligence about the situation on Peboan and you are going to provide it.”
“We’re just going to land in the middle of Shakak,” Sanders asked skeptically, “and go marching down the street like we own the place? From what Munroe said, it’s basically a war zone right now.”
“Please remember who we work for, Sergeant Sanders,” she chided him. “We are not without contacts and connections, even out here. You’ll have to get us there; and I admit, that may be tricky. But once we arrive, I’ll get you where you need to go.”
“Get everything buttoned up,” I ordered, pushing away from the console. There was no use arguing with her about it; the last year with her had taught me that much. “We’ve been sitting here too long and I don’t want to wait around for that lighter to come back and finish the job. Kane, once we’re out of the gas giant’s gravity well, jump us into Transition Space and then bring us back in as close as we can get to Peboan.”
The others began to clamber out of the compartment, but Bobbi stayed behind and motioned back towards the utility bay.
“What are we gonna’ do with Corporal Shitbird back there?”
I followed her gesture, frowning in thought. We could strand him here. There were a couple pallets of food and water left back at the raider camp, which would last him until his people came to check on their squad.
“If you don’t want to waste ammunition,” Divya suggested sweetly, nothing in her pleasant smile suggesting the darkness deep down inside her, “we could shove him out the airlock once we’re in orbit.”
“We’ll take him with us,” I decided, scowling at her. “He might be useful as a go-between if we have to talk to his people.”
She sniffed, brushing past me on her way out of the cockpit.
“If I didn’t know better,” she scoffed over her shoulder, “I’d think you were going soft, Munroe.”
“Maybe you should be happy I’m going soft, Divya,” I responded curtly, “Otherwise, I would have left your ass out there to die.”
Chapter Four
Peboan was a white, harsh world with ice caps that stretched across nearly half the land mass of its polar continents and massive glaciers hugging the crags of the jagged mountains between. Compared to Earth or Demeter or Hermes or Eden or any of the other main-line human colonies, its oceans were small but numerous, separated by broad isthmus---isthmuses, isthmi? What the hell was the plural of isthmus, anyway? ---that might have been islands in a warming phase. And maybe they would be, someday; and when that happened, whatever civilization existed would flock to the world and it would be considered a paradise.
Right now, though, it was largely a frozen hell with narrow bands of livable territory near the equator that had been seized and ceded and fought over endlessly for decades by the outcasts and exiles and criminals that called this place home.
“Pretty,” Kane commented from the pilot’s station as we began to de-orbit.
I glanced at him with amusement as I felt the fusion drives kicking me in the pants, pressing me into my acceleration couch. The cyborg could squeeze more feeling and humor into one, atonal word than most people could into a soliloquy, once you got to know him.
“I thought you were saving up for more body mods,” I said, pushing it past the pressure on my chest from the acceleration. “It’s been almost three years now and you don’t have anything more than the day I ran into you on Belial. Doesn’t Cowboy pay you enough?”
He held up his right hand, making a fist then stretching out the fingers, and I noticed that it seemed more supple and flexible than it used to.
“Quality,” he informed me. “Not quantity.”
“Right.”
“There’s no orbital traffic control for this place?” Bobbi asked, strapped into the navigator’s seat behind us. “Shouldn’t some skeevy asshole be asking us for money by now?”
“Nothing,” Kane answered, and stopped as if that answer was satisfactory.
Frowning, I pushed my hands out against the g-forces and pulled up the communications display, turning the haptic hologram around from the incoming message tracker to a general signal analysis of all surface traffic. It showed a hiss of yellow static floating over the river valley in the northern hemisphere below us where the earliest residents had built the core of what had become Shakak.
“There’s wide-spectrum jamming down there,” I told Bobbi. I felt my brows knit as I examined the computer analysis. “And it’s coming from at least two different sources, maybe three or four.” I looked back to her, shaking my head. “They may not even know we’re coming unless someone happens to be looking up.”
“That can’t be good.” She sighed. “It sounds like we’re flying into a war zone.”
“Oh, it won’t be that bad,” Divya assured her. She was occupying the auxiliary couch that pulled down out of the bulkhead just inside the cockpit hatch, and I was fairly sure the only reason she’d waited till now to comment was the g-forces from the main engine burn weighing on her chest. “I mean, the two concerns are competing, of course, but they’re both businesses when you strip away the criminal veneer. Surely they can’t afford to make things too dangerous or they’ll be cutting off their own income streams.”
She’d changed clothes while we were prepping for takeoff from the gas giant’s moon; she was wearing something that wouldn’t stick out quite so blatantly in a place like Shakak, a utilitarian outfit that probably still cost more than I made in a year. She�
�d added a personal touch to it, though, a multicolored head scarf inlaid with metallic gold in designs that might have come from somewhere in Asia back on Earth.
“The Corporate Council is a business, too,” Bobbi snapped back at her impatiently. “But here we are, shooting people for a living.”
“Discreetly,” Kane put in and I laughed almost involuntarily.
“Is there still a spaceport?” Divya asked, arching an eyebrow.
I pulled up the sensor readout and zoomed in on the river valley, penetrating the cover of the decades-old trees that towered above the city, and running a thermal scan of the surrounding area. The primary star was beginning to set, so any heat sources should have shown up fairly clear. I shook my head slowly.
“There’s a field down there,” I answered, “with what might be ships on it, but none of them are powered up, not even on standby.”
“Head there,” Divya said, in an annoyingly commanding tone.
“I was under the impression,” I said, tightly controlling my anger, “that I was in charge of tactical operations. Where and when to land this ship seems pretty tactical to me.”
“We’re not under fire,” she pointed out, her tone dismissive, “and we’re not in combat or on a combat operation. This is a strategic decision and I’m making it. Land the ship.”
“You heard the woman, Kane,” I waved to the cyborg. “Land the fucking ship.”
His flesh and blood eye gave me a look and I shrugged. We both had a feeling for what was going to happen, but sometimes the best way to learn is to get your nose rubbed in the shit. Kane didn’t touch a control; he didn’t have to, with the interface jacks in his temples plugged directly into the ship’s systems. His biological eye went unfocussed and the Nomad began a gradual, shallow circle down through the partial cloud cover and down towards the broad river valley.
The setting primary star cast a red-gold tint over the trees and grass outside the city, and the lengthened shadows threw Shakak into harsh relief, making it seem sinister somehow in its sprawling, industrial ugliness. I didn’t see any vehicles, didn’t see any people.
I also didn’t see the anti-aerospacecraft Gatling laser turret open up until after Kane threw the Nomad into a barrel roll and a sudden dive that left my stomach about two thousand meters up. Even then, it was the merest flash of light across the threat display and a warning klaxon that filled the cockpit with its squealing clamor.
G-forces tossed me hard against my seat restraints and I clenched my teeth and my stomach muscles tight and counted on my implants to keep me from puking. I could hear Divya squawking in distress somewhere behind me, and even Bobbi was grunting with the effort of keeping her lunch in her stomach. I tried to keep my eyes open, but my vision was blurring and there was a roaring in my ears and I knew I’d just have to trust Kane to get us out of this alive because it was everything I could do just to stay conscious.
I felt something wet hit the back of my neck and I cursed, knowing it was probably someone’s vomit. Then we were back level for just the barest of moments and I drew in a breath before the belly jets roared to life and I was thrown forward against my restraint straps, feeling a twinge in my neck from the whiplash. I could hear a crash from the utility bay as something broke loose of its moorings and slammed to the deck and I just knew I was going to puke now from the negative g’s, but then we landed with a bone-jarring jolt and were finally still once again.
There was a barely-perceptible bouncing sensation as the landing gear settled in on their hydraulics and lifted slowly back up, and the turbines began to throttle down from a screaming roar to a faint, background whine. I opened my eyes and my vision stopped spinning long enough to make out our surroundings on the viewscreen display. Smoke was billowing around us from a brushfire started by the belly jets, and the tall grass we’d landed in was quickly burning away beneath us.
We’d touched down in a small clearing, barely large enough to accommodate the Nomad’s wingspan, and tall, imposing pines stretched over us, black and featureless as they were backlit by the sunset, swaying in the chill wind blowing off the mountains. The primary star still shone on those snow-covered peaks, bathing them in a rose-pink glow that was far too---what had Kane said? Oh yeah---“pretty” for a place as harsh as this.
“Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ,” Bobbi moaned from behind me and to my left. I hit the quick-release on my restraints, then turned the acceleration couch on its gimbals to face her and Divya.
Bobbi’s face was as close to green as a human could come, and she had a couple small puke stains on her armored vest, but at least she’d stayed conscious. Divya’s head was lolling and she was leaning slack against her restraints. There was a huge swath of vomit across the front of her tan jacket, but it was fading even as I watched, swept away by the self-cleaning material.
“Do we have any bogies coming after us?” I asked Kane, trying to get up enough equilibrium to stand.
“Nothing in the air,” he told me. “Not even drones.” The cyborg seemed as unaffected by the gut-wrenching maneuvering as he was by everything else. I wondered how much was a put-on, a game he played with himself. Then again, if you pretended to be something long enough, you really did become that.
I pulled up the sensor data from the last two minutes and whistled softly.
“We took fire from three separate laser turrets,” I told Bobbi, “and a guided missile battery, all from different quadrants of the city and surrounding areas.”
“How far away are we from Shakak?” She wondered, leaning forward to stare at the display.
“Fifteen kilometers,” Kane answered. “Northwest.”
“What the fuck happened?” Divya moaned, eyes still squeezed shut but her hands searching blindly for her restraint release. I limped a step across the cockpit, still feeling a bit of the bruising from the explosion earlier, and pulled it for her; she slid slightly down in the seat with a sigh.
“What happened,” I said and she cracked open one eye to look at what I hoped was one of my best I-told-you-so glares, “is that, guess what, we were under fire and we are in a combat operation after all. Maybe you should stick to relaying the orders from higher and stop trying to be an operational commander.”
She looked as if she was about to say something back, but I didn’t give her the chance, turning instead to Bobbi. “Go check on the others and make sure everyone came through okay, then get them ready for a soft recon. I’m going to go see how our guest is doing.”
I could hear the moaning and complaining emanating from the cabins as I navigated the narrow passageway back to the utility bay, but I left those to Bobbi. I knew they’d been strapped into their fold down seats so no one would be hurt that badly. Corporal Vilberg had been strapped into the cot still, which had been locked into moorings in the deck, and it was the only thing I could think of that would have made that big bang earlier.
Sure enough, the cot had collapsed, the brackets at the ends of the legs snapped off near the connections at the bottom. Vilberg was on his side, hanging out of the straps and cursing hoarsely, jammed into a corner of the compartment between two storage lockers.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, kneeling down and unlatching the straps, sending him tumbling a few centimeters to the deck.
“What the fuck?” He spluttered, trying to push himself to his feet but slipping down again with a moan, holding his head.
“We took some ground fire,” I explained, then cocked an eyebrow at him. “You could have mentioned that might happen, especially since your ass was on the line right alongside ours.”
“Shit,” he murmured, squinting at me. There was a nasty bruise forming on his right cheek, but I didn’t see any blood and he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. “They’re shooting at incoming ships now? It wasn’t that bad when we left, and that was just a few days ago.”
“We’re going to be hiking into town,” I said, offering him a hand and pulling him to his feet. He was solidly built, and the gravity h
ere was close to Earth-normal, and I had to brace a foot in a solid stance to help him up. “We need to try to figure out the situation, and I’d like to bring you along to explain things to your CO, if you’re willing.” I shrugged. “I won’t force you to come, not least because I don’t want to have to babysit you or make sure you don’t try to screw us over. But if you agree to not cause any trouble, I’ll take you back to your people and we can try to straighten things out between us.”
“Sure,” he agreed immediately. “I don’t want to be sitting in this damn ship tied up for days.”
“I want your word,” I warned him. “And if you break it, I’ll put a bullet in your head and not lose a wink of sleep over it.”
“In that case,” he said enthusiastically, raising his hands in acquiescence, “you have my word. Definitely. All day long.”
***
By the time we started walking, the primary was well below the horizon and the wind was picking up, a freezing-cold blast of air that moaned through the swaying trees and pushed away the clouds. A veil of stars hung over us, shockingly bright and so different from the constellations I’d seen in my youth in the desert southwest of North America or what I’d grown used to over the last few years on Demeter. I had to force my eyes away from them so I could concentrate on the rough, uneven game trail that was leading us out of the forest.
And there was game here, engineered and imported decades ago by the original settlers along with the grass and trees and insects and everything else, spreading with unnatural swiftness due both to the accelerated breeding and growth patterns engineered into the first few generations and to the total lack of competition. The algal growth that the Predecessors had left behind to engineer living worlds was insanely hardy and persistent, but one of its side-effects was the production of soil perfect for Earth-based plants to take hold; and when they did, it died and disappeared.
It was almost like they’d known we were coming and left the table set, on dozens of worlds throughout the Cluster. Sophie believed that was just what had happened, that they’d been able to predict humans…and maybe the Tahni as well…would become star-faring civilizations, and they’d wanted to leave us a legacy. She wasn’t the only one, either. There were people who worshipped the faceless mystery of the Predecessors as gods, and thought they still watched us and guided us without our knowledge.
