by Tanya Huff
“I are just thinking . . .” Presit’s small, sharp teeth gleamed as she continued. “. . . how much more you are being able to accomplish if you are being given a piece of the alien ship’s escape pod to study.”
“Escape pod?” The scientist snorted so hard her whiskers twitched. “There are being no escape pod! There are being no physical, actual piece of the alien ship to study. Our away team are all killed in the explosion, and no one else . . .” She stared at Presit pointedly. “. . . are bringing back samples.”
“It are possible the military are hiding the escape pod.”
“It are possible, but it are not happening. Our lab team are desperate for samples—we are knowing if there are an escape pod on board. We are not having allowed anyone to hide such a thing. If the military are saying they are hiding an escape pod, they are lying. And that,” she added shrewdly, “are actually what you are coming here to ask me—if the military are hiding an escape pod. No.” She sighed. “And it are too bad because Parliament would be making them give it to us.”
“Is there a chance . . .”
“I are telling you, no. I are top in my field . . .” On the other side of the room, three Katrien trilled. Craig had no idea if they were colleagues, grad students, or cleaning staff, and neither did he care. Gad a Tur durEdkabidge trilled something back and then ignored them. “I are knowing every structural components engineer they could be having called in—there are being not so many at a level to study alien construction. If there are an escape pod, I are knowing about it. I are not knowing, so . . .” She spread her hands. “. . . there are no escape pod.”
* * *
“I are remembering an escape pod.” Arm tucked so close into her side that the fur blended into the fur on her torso, Presit drummed her claws against a bit of hard plastic on the skimmer’s door. She had insisted that Craig set the recorder on the opposite seat and that he share hers. Given that he wanted to retain some hearing in the upper registers and the reporter was growing increasingly shrill, he’d given in. Even given how tiny she was, the two of them sharing a seat left little room for movement. “You are remembering an escape pod. Staff Sergeant . . .”
“Gunnery Sergeant.”
Her lip curled. “. . . Torin Kerr are remembering an escape pod. Everyone else are being made to forget. We are having been deep scanned by Big Yellow. Everyone else are not. It are not too large a leap to be assuming that the scan are having done something to keep our memories from being erased. That are what we know. What we are not knowing is who are erasing memories.”
“It has to be one of the Elder Races.”
“Why?”
“Because they’d raise high, holy hell if it was someone else.”
“That are undeniable,” she admitted toothily.
Craig could understand the teeth. The Katrien were among the Mid Races along with the vast majority of those who made up the Confederation and, like many of them, believed that the Elder Races were just that—elder. Not better; older. They resented the influence the founders of the Confederation still wielded and resented even more the fact that those founders were, at the very least, more intellectually, scientifically, technologically advanced. Ethically more advanced was a topic of hot debate on all the Mid Race worlds.
“Why are being nothing more than speculation. How are important only for scientists watching. Which of the Elder Races it are being, that is the story!” She craned her head back to stare up at him. “We are going to Ventris Station.”
“I’m not exactly popular at Ventris right now.”
She waved that off with a single flick of her small hand. “You are not being important. General Morris are being at Ventris Station, and General Morris are liking me very, very much. General Morris are being ranking officer affected, so he are who we are needing to speak to. I are convincing him, he are finding the escape pod, I are exposing paternalistic alien autocracy!” The possibility of exposing paternalistic alien autocracy had her bouncing in the seat. “I are winning the Retrenzic Award for this!”
He’d never heard of the award, figured it must be some kind of journo thing, but the thought of winning it definitely got Presit stoked. “It’s going to take some fast talking to get me a berth at Ventris.”
“You are leaving that to me.”
“When I say fast, I don’t mean speed.” Most Katrien languages sounded like a cat fight on caffeine.
“Am I looking like a vortzma?” she snarled.
No seemed to be the right answer.
As they pulled into the disembarking platform at the space station stop, Craig froze half out of his seat. “What if we’re the ones whose memories have been tampered with? What if Big Yellow planted the memory of the escape pod in our heads?”
Presit stepped out onto the platform. “I are liking to see it try,” she snorted.
Wrestling the recorder out of the cramped space, Craig couldn’t decide which he found more disturbing—that he found her certainty comforting or how much Presit was beginning to remind him of Torin.
* * *
At 0711, Torin watched the sunrise from the roof of the anchor and wondered how long it would be until the Others brought in drones to replace the ones destroyed with the power station. With all of the section to pull from and their destruction the only logical desired result, they’d soon be facing more than they had to date.
A single tank? Three long-distance drones? The activation of a couple of stationary trail busters?
Pathetic.
Granted it had been luck alone that no one had died in the minefield, and if the major hadn’t sent her out on point, the filament would have taken out one or maybe two of the lead team, but given what Crucible had on tap, they should never have survived the first night. Weapons that were no more than a challenge when the senior DI knew when and where and how to shut them off were lethal in the hands of the enemy.
It was hard to believe that the Others had gone to all the trouble of inserting a team this far behind the front lines and not included a hacker good enough to crack the individual security codes on the drones. Granted, that soldier could have been taken out of the action in any number of ways—probably not by suddenly going through puberty cubed; Staff Sergeant Beyhn would likely be the sole owner of that distinction for a while—but any number of other ways. And it was also entirely possible that the Others knew exactly how much time they had until the Navy returned and they were having a little fun. It wasn’t likely; Torin had fought against the Others all her adult life and wasn’t in the habit of demonizing the enemy, but it was possible.
Scanner down, she swept the horizon one more time.
Nothing.
Something about this didn’t feel right.
“Gunnery Sergeant Kerr!”
“What is it, McGuinty?”
“We’ve found the CPN!”
“I’ll be right down.” She studied the sky to the southwest a moment longer, then nodded to the sentries and went inside.
Jiir met her in the upper hall. Although body heat and kickass insulation meant the anchor had begun to warm up, the three Krai still wore their toques although Jiir at least had pushed the collar of his bodyliner down in under the edge of his combats. “We were overthinking it,” he said as they headed to the stairs, Torin matching her stride to the Krai’s. “There’s an admin office in this building, right? Kitchen, lockup, medical centre, community hall, and admin office. And what do you find in an admin office?”
“A desk?”
“A desk,” he repeated, standing aside to let Torin enter the office first.
Although the small window high in the outer wall remained unsealed, most of the light in the room shone up from the surface of the desk.
“The desk works?”
“The desk is the CPN.” Perched on the edge of an absurdly ordinary office chair, McGuinty grinned. Like the Krai, he was still in his toque. In spite of the dark circles under his eyes, made even more prominent by the lack of light, he looke
d both excited and confident. “It was all Major Svensson.”
“What was all Major Svensson?”
“He found it, Gunny. He got it to work.”
A week ago, Major Svensson couldn’t operate a therapeutic chair.
“Where is the major?”
“Major’s with the doc,” Piroj put in from behind McGuinty’s left shoulder. Torin was pleased to see he hadn’t assumed his duty’d ended now they were inside. “Said getting the desk working made his head hurt. She took him up to the medical center.”
“The big room on the second floor full of junk?” She’d gone past on her way down but hadn’t looked in.
“Says medical center on the door, Gunny. Seems like that’s good enough for the doc.”
Torin couldn’t really blame Dr. Sloan for trying to find a little normalcy in her situation, even if it was nothing more than a sign on a door. She walked into the room and ran her fingers along their reflection in the inert plastic trim of the desk. “So the Others still control the system?”
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.” McGuinty sounded surprised by the question. Then his brows drew in as he realized what it meant and surprised became mildly insulted. “You thought a Marine in one of the other platoons might have cracked it? Gotten control back?”
“It was a possibility.” And one she had no intention of apologizing for mentioning. “What else is in here?”
“Nothing. It’s just a CPN hiding in plain sight. I already have the staff sergeant’s slate slaved in—software was a little dicey, so rather than screw around, we’re on a hardware link—and as soon as I get in a little farther, I’ll download a worm I created to . . .”
Torin’s raised hand cut him off. “I don’t need to hear it. You know what you’re doing, and that’s good enough for me. Let me know when you’ve got results.”
“You know,” Jiir said quietly as they walked away, “Staff Sergeant Beyhn’s always saying that Marines don’t do if, they do when.”
“I know.” She knew because that was where she’d learned it.
The staff sergeant was still in the community hall—any space smaller and the attending di’Taykan were unable to cope with the strength of the pheromones. They’d slept piled around him and as it had calmed him—more than anecdotally, the doctor’s scanner had confirmed it—they kept as many hands touching him as possible. Hands because Torin had point-blank told them to keep their combats on.
“When those drones attack, they won’t wait ninety seconds for half the platoon to tuck their collective asses back into their uniforms. You don’t keep him calm by risking yourselves or the rest of the Marines in this anchor, and if he was in his right mind, Staff Sergeant Beyhn would tell you that himself.”
With the big windows sealed, the only light in the hall came from the units embedded in the combat sleeves. One of the shelter halves had been rigged up over the stretcher, and the staff sergeant’s light pointed up at it so its inner surface could reflect and diffuse the beam, illuminating the immediate area. The rest of the room was dark, most of the di’Taykan having chosen to keep their lights off. There were three, no, four around the staff sergeant, Ashlan and Kaimi were on the roof on watch with their fireteam, Iful was cannibalizing parts of the kitchen to ensure that the outer doors could be secured, three more were with their teams searching for the pieces removed to open up the smaller windows, and Oshyo was dead. That left four of the original fifteen unaccounted for, but as only orders would move them out of sight of the stretcher, she had no doubt they were somewhere in the darkness.
Standing in the doorway, in her own circle of light, Torin frowned. The staff sergeant’s condition had divided the platoon on species lines and that wasn’t good. If Platoon 71 came out of this thinking they were Human or di’Taykan or Krai rather than Marines, then the Corps’d lost all thirty-six recruits, not only the one Torin carried out in her vest. Odds were excellent that when the drones attacked, combat would focus them and 120 days of training would reassert itself, but—in the meantime—she needed to keep this rift from growing.
“Gunnery Sergeant Kerr.”
“Private Jonin.” He might have intended to startle her by appearing suddenly out of the darkness—he was still very young, and youth was a constant, mostly unconscious struggle to find a place in the pack—or he might have merely walked quietly across the hall while her thoughts were elsewhere. As it had been close to a dozen years since she’d been startled by anything short of heavy artillery, and that rarely, Torin decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“We were wondering if Ashlan was well enough to be standing sentry duty.”
We? And the benefit of the doubt lasted—she glanced at her sleeve—nearly seven seconds. After barely six hours in the safety of the anchor, it sounded as if they’d gone from a platoon of Marines with an injured NCO to a group of di’Taykan and everyone else.
“We thought that maybe one/three could come in and instead two/three could . . .”
“You thought?” Her tone made it quite clear that she doubted he had the capacity for thought. “Two/three gear up and join one/three on the roof,” she snapped, CPU on Group Channel. “We’re sending teams out to check the closer buildings and we’ll need better coverage. Three/one . . .” She locked eyes with Jonin as she spoke. “. . . and one/one gear up and meet me by the airlock in two.”
“Gunnery Sergeant . . .”
“Little less than two now, Private. And you’ve still got to retrieve your helmet.”
That would leave two di’Taykan with the staff sergeant and give the rest a new species to concentrate on. And as long as she didn’t hear what they were saying about her, Torin was fine with that.
* * *
“Sounds like things got busy for a minute there, Gunny.” Sitting up on an examination table, vest off and combats pooled around his waist, Major Svensson looked up from his slate and around Dr. Sloan. “Anything you wanted to tell me?”
“I sent a couple of teams out to check the closer buildings, sir. There’s extra coverage on the roof.”
“I heard that. What do you expect them to find?”
“I don’t expect them to find anything, sir, although they might. If the scenario was set up as a house-to-house . . .”
“And that would be the logical assumption based on the way the Corps has used settlements like this in the past.”
“. . . then there could be items of value in some of those buildings intended to be found.”
“Wasn’t the entire settlement checked last night?”
“Only for drones, sir.”
“I see.” He sucked air through his teeth as Dr. Sloan unsealed the front of his bodyliner and ran an extension out of her slate along his collarbone. “That’s cold.”
“Yes, it is.”
When that seemed to be all the response he was going to get, he sighed and returned his attention to Torin. “After two days’ hard humping, you wouldn’t think you’d need to keep this lot busy.”
Torin glanced at the doctor and chose her words carefully. The problem was not one a civilian needed to be advised of. “Marines need to be Marines, sir.”
A pale brow rose. “Do they?” He stared at her for a long moment, and she thought she saw understanding dawn. He was too good an officer not to have seen what was happening. “I leave it in your hands, then, Gunny. Not that I could get involved even if I wanted to—Dr. Sloan is giving me a full workup before we start getting shot at again. She seems to think I’m flagging a bit.”
If flagging meant running on nearly empty, stressing new body parts, and likely to fall flat on his face at an inopportune moment, then, yeah, Torin could agree with that. And if he’d been up early enough to get the CPN running, he hadn’t gotten much sleep.
“It’s hardly a full workup,” the doctor snorted. “I’m sure you remember what those are like, Major, and this is a lot less intrusive.” She sounded as if she regretted that.
He indicated his slate. “While I was being mol
ecularly dissected, I got a head start on writing up my report. How would you prefer to be referred to, Gunny? As rising heroically to meet the situation head-on or more than a little pissed about the whole thing?”
“Somewhere between the two would be fine, sir.”
Neither of them mentioned that the major’s slate might survive where they didn’t and anything he wrote would have to tell their story for them. Neither of them had to.
As the two sergeants came into the room, the major set his slate aside and caught Dr. Sloan gently around the wrist with his good hand. “That’s it, Doc. All we’ve got time for.”
She frowned, first at his hand then into his face. “I’m not done.”
“Bookmark it, then, because I need to meet with my people.”
“I’d rather finish.”
“And I’d rather be on Ventris drinking a cold beer and fairly certain no one was going to try and blow me up. Unfortunately, neither of us is going to get what we want.” He continued to hold her wrist until she moved the slate away and then he released her.
“You’re still my patient,” she pointed out sharply.
“And their commanding officer,” he told her, nodding toward the line of NCOs. “Right now, and until the NirWentry returns, that comes first.”
As the major pulled his combats back up over his shoulders, Dr. Sloan turned to Torin, clearly about to plead her case. Whatever she saw in Torin’s face both snapped her mouth shut and propelled her toward the door. Where she paused. “I want to go on record as opposing this interruption. Your health . . .”
“Is not more important than my Marines, Doctor. If there’s time later, I’m at your disposal.”
No mistaking the dismissal. Dr. Sloan pivoted on one good-to-forty-below heel and stomped out of the room.
All four of them remained silent while her footsteps echoed in the stairwell and then disappeared on the lower level. Torin figured she’d gone to check on Staff Sergeant Beyhn and wondered if patients who didn’t talk back counted as spending quality time.
Major Svensson glanced over at the window in the second-floor medical center—empty of anything that might be considered medical and then trashed by the “Others” as part of the scenario—and then back at the NCOs. “So, what do we do when the drones arrive; do we hunker down and assume the anchor can take anything they can throw at us for the next seven days, or do we stand up and fight?”
