by John Lumpkin
“Over there!” She pointed at a thick brush. Some of the soldiers near her looked at her strangely. Right, don’t have the English in the ranks. Harkins looked around for an officer, didn’t see one, thought Oh, fuck it, took the M6 off safe, and fired. The troops around her understood, and followed suit.
A great volume of fire followed, barely aimed, and shots returned from the brush. Above, the aerostat crumpled, and began an ungraceful fall to the road. Harkins heard screams to her left. After a long, fruitless exchange, the company at last set up some crew-served machine guns and raked the area, and the rebel fire stopped.
Two veteran squads carefully moved forward, a thin, gray-stubbled sergeant at their fore, and they found a single dead woman in reddish camouflage appropriate for another part of Entente. Her rifle was gone; others had been with her, but they had escaped.
The company’s scouts were alert after that, but the next six hours were more of the same: a small ambush answered with a massive volley of fire, and none or a few or some enemy dead, and greater casualties in the battalion. The firefights were typically at extreme range, necessitating massive expenditures of ammunition to kill or drive off an enemy. At one point, they encountered more than a dozen rebel snipers, and the battalion had to set up its mortars to smoke them out. But one mortar round fell short and exploded among a squad in the lead company, killing four and sending another seven to the medical unit.
Harkins knew she had killed at least one bad guy – she had seen him in her scope, watched the red burst when she put a bullet in the back of his head.
Stone age, she thought again, enjoying herself hugely. It was a fierce sort of contentment, a giving over of herself to her training and instincts, and all the usual guilt and resentment and anxiety washed away. Some deep hole inside her was filled; she realized she hadn’t wondered who her biological parents were, and why they hadn’t wanted her, since she had landed in Tecolote. She cherished the freedom from her usual unpleasant pathways of thought.
Beta was dropping lower in the sky when they reached the terraforming station. It was an expansive compound, walled off to create a closed environment for biologists to test how various Earth plants and animals did in the native regolith. A few intact domes were spread around the site, built to experiment with the sort of things that might float or fly away, but the view through Harkins’ scope showed the station was in deep disrepair. The two- and three-story square white buildings that once housed administrative offices and dormitories were at the center, a cluster of sugar cubes in the dirt. Steep, heavily forested inclines bordered the other three sides of the compound.
With a rise in the earth to protect them from any direct shots from the station’s defenders, the lead infantry company spread out in a loose line, about a kilometer from their objective. Harkins dismounted from her walker gear and joined a column of scout-snipers making their way into a forested hillside that looked down into the compound. The old sergeant she had seen earlier was their leader.
“Harkins,” Lieutenant Mercer’s voice said in her ear.
“Go ahead, sir,” she said quietly. The mic would pick up her voice at a whisper.
“We’re getting the CP and the artillery set up, and I’m getting information third-hand. Can you fill me in?”
“Sure, sir,” she said. At least he was asking; a lot of officers would simply demand information with no consideration that she was busy dealing with a dangerous situation. Her opinion of him climbed back up a step; she had wondered if a re-assessment of her former shipmate was in order during the long march to the compound. Why did he send me to be the decoy for the gunships when he could have run some of the mules out into the open to draw their attention? He was an officer and owed her no explanation for his orders, but what if the idea hadn’t occurred to him? A good sergeant could make such a suggestion, but she had hesitated to do so: She would push an option like that to protect the people in her unit, but to protect her own ass? No way.
She went prone, raised her rifle and peered through the scope with her right eye.
“I’m looking down into the compound,” she muttered, keeping the connection open to the lieutenant. “There’s about fifty bad guys spread out along the wall. I guess the wall is about two-and-a-half meters high, because there’s a bunch of chairs and crates and benches for them to climb up and shoot over. You might want to have the wee colonel tell his troopers to expect that enemy heads will tend to pop up in the same place.”
Neil chuckled. “Will do.”
“I can probably shoot a few of them from here, but it’s long range for me, and the snipers can do better. Unless you can order up an airstrike, sir?”
“That’s not going to happen,” Neil transmitted. “Tecolote just lost a bunch of planes, and I’m hearing that their senior command isn’t going to cut loose any more today.”
“Stupid,” Harkins commented. “We’ve got these guys by the throat, and that would save some lives. Anyway, near the buildings I can see an unarmed guy pushing a bunch of boxes on a cart. He’s in a hurry.”
“Do you see any heavy – ”
“Hold on, sir,” Harkins said. She needed silence to clarify a sound she thought she heard. She fiddled with some settings on her handheld to turn up the mic sensitivity, listened …
Presently, she said, “Sir, they’re powering up some skycars and buses in the middle of the compound. The vehicles are obscured behind a building, but there are several of them back there.”
“You sure they aren’t launching some combat drones?” Some drones used turbofans that weren’t all that different from those on skycars.
“Negative. I know my cars, sir.” Her adoptive father, a mechanic in Tallahassee, had made sure of that.
“All right. I’ll let the colonel know.”
Harkins watched the compound for a while, repeatedly switching between the scope and her own eyes. The activity picked up; people were scurrying, but the general direction of motion was toward the apparent parking area. Still, no cars rose.
Then she saw the little ones running and put it together.
“Sir,” she transmitted, “there are civilians down there, including children. I think they’re evacuating.”
The whistle of an incoming artillery shell cut off Mercer’s reply. Harkins saw a black blur in a single frame of her vision, and then the shell exploded against the wall of one of the sugar cubes. It released an orange gout of flame, and Harkins heard debris clattering to the ground.
The defenders panicked after that, and Harkins watched as a beige civilian skycar rose from behind a building. To her left, one of Aziz’s snipers fired a giant anti-materiel rifle, sending a round through the hood of the car and into the interior. The vehicle lurched, pitched forward, and crumpled against a building.
The sniper’s next shot sparked off the forward left nacelle of a rising passenger bus, and it began a slow spin as its driver tried to set it down on top of a building. Another whistle – an artillery shell actually struck the bus in midair, and Harkins’ view was obscured by smoke and dust.
In short order, Aziz’s artillery corrected its aim and blasted several holes in the compound wall. As Beta Comae Berenices set to their west, his infantry attacked, and within an hour it was all over.
Chita, Transbaikalia, Russia, Earth
Although they were expecting it, the explosion still made them jump. The windows rattled, and a weak cloud of dust fell from the hotel room’s ceiling onto the two men. Outside, about two kilometers distant, a gray cloud roiled upward.
This is fighting dirty, Donovan thought.
“Finn did well,” Gardiner Fairchild said. Donovan grunted in response.
It was a Sunday, so the mining camp’s security center would be emptier than usual, but the explosion was certain to have killed some company enforcers. Fairchild’s plan had come together beautifully: His agents had worked the Chinese labor movement into a frenzy, and they had ensured the right supplies reached the extremists among them. Fin
n, meanwhile, had been hired by the security forces, and he had used their access codes to get the bombers into the security center.
Now, we let the Russians do what they do best.
Near Sycamore, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin
All of them but Lopez hid their uniforms and rifles under a pile of rocks, and Rand donned some cheap tan-and-black civilian work threads that would probably mark him as an underpaid ranch hand. He had a brief, secret desire to put on one of the shiny violet outfits he used to wear to the casinos, but the mission here was to go unnoticed. Man, I need some leave time when I get out of here. Lose myself in a real city on Earth, eat a steak, win some money on the green felt, charm the clothes off a few of the …
“Ready, Castillo?” Violet Kelley asked sharply. “Your hair is still too short, so try to slouch a little when walking around in the detention camp. Your identification caster will check out with their security AI, but there will be real-live Chinese eyeballs on you from time to time, and the brains behind those eyeballs won’t recall seeing you before. If they get nervous, they’ll disbelieve the identification caster and run your face against their database, and at that point you’ll be lucky if all they do is kill you. So try to blend in, all right?”
“You bet, Violet.” Rand smiled sweetly at her, and he saw Aguirre and Lopez share a glance and smirk. It was a typical exchange for NSS operative and the artillery officer: worst case scenario from Violet, disarmed by no argument from Rand.
They had gotten to know Ruiz on the hike to the camp. He was 32, from somewhere in the vast working class sections of the Southern California megalopolis. He mentioned a rough childhood, a largely absent father, and being in range of the gang wars, although he said he didn’t take part “all that much.” But he had gone to school often enough, and he managed to absorb a few books about the great explorers of prior centuries, and the new ones of the current era.
“The world was bigger than twenty square blocks of south LA,” he said, his professional demeanor cracking ever-so-slightly. “But I couldn’t figure any way out but the military, so I signed up.”
They had waited until nightfall to go inside, and Ruiz led them to a storm drain outside the internment camp’s walls. “As far as we know, the Hans never found this exit point,” he told them. “It was part of the first camp on the planet, before Sycamore was formally laid out. It comes out in an arroyo in the tent city.”
Lopez remained behind, curling up in the mouth of the drain, rifle resting on her legs. The pipe was large enough they could crouch and duck-walk along it. Too easy, too easy, too easy, Rand kept thinking, wondering when the Hans’ vaunted internal security would shut the trap. One autosentry gun in here …
They emerged into the promised ditch, filled with weeds poking through the broken concrete embankment. More than a little trash had found its way down here, as well.
And they were in shadow, for the moment. Bright floodlights looked into the internment camp, and drones circled languidly above, the noise from their fans combining into a locust-like hum.
They waited. It was late winter in Kuan Yin’s northern hemisphere, and the days were now as long as the nights at Sycamore’s latitude: eight hours each. A curfew that lined up with darkness was unworkable under those conditions, but Chinese security forces paid far more attention to groups of people walking around the camp after the sun had set, Ruiz told them. Once dawn broke, they left Aguirre in the pipe, and Rand, Ruiz and Kelley walked out into the open, joining the loitering crowds of American prisoners.
U.N. Terraforming Station 27, Republic of Tecolote, Entente
Harkins tried to deal with the carnage in front of her by ignoring it. Instead she mourned for the waste of good cars, like the vintage 2118 Arrow Industries Dauntless that lay broken on the ground in front of her. Someone must have shipped this beauty from Earth years ago. What an end, shot down by a fifty-caliber bullet at the edge of civilization.
But the child’s bloodied hand, exposed in a mass of rubble, snapped her back, and she had to look away. It’s just war, she told herself, but a voice nagged at her. Did your parents die with you? she thought to the hand. Or are they somewhere else, wondering what happened to you?
Lieutenant Mercer didn’t look away, though. He stared and stared at the child’s hand, until one of Aziz’s aides walked up and said the colonel wanted to see him immediately.
They went, following the aide into a building. Its white exterior walls were pockmarked by a few bullet holes, but the structure was otherwise intact. From inside, it looked like a hospital, lots of long corridors and closed doors, with labels like “Cephalochordata Adaptation Lab.”
They descended a staircase into a hall lit only by red emergency lights. Harkins briefly wondered if some genetically engineered bug-eyed monster was going to leap out at them, but they quickly arrived in a spacious room. Thin pipes ran from floor to ceiling, and handcuffed to one of them was a large, rough man in the tan field uniform of the rebels.
Colonel Aziz stood before him, his back to Neil and Harkins. “You know this will be better than what Kathy would do to you,” he told the prisoner.
The captive gulped air and nodded. “I know.”
Aziz said, “I owe you that much, traitor. But nothing more.”
Neil cleared his throat, and Aziz turned to face them and smiled grimly. “Our biggest catch of the day.”
Neil nodded. “Colonel Tan Pierce.”
The defector colonel looked at Mercer and said evenly, “You’re backing the wrong horse, American. Conrad’s government is corrupt to the core. All these people want is a constitution that guarantees some basic rights, and for that, they get slaughtered.” He opened his mouth to say more, but Aziz gut-punched him, and he doubled over.
Aziz said, “Lieutenant Mercer, I doubt there’s much for you in here. We’ll ask him about what support the Chinese are providing. But I would like for you to inspect two other prisoners, in one of the rooms down the hall. One of them claims to know you.”
Mercer’s face was a mask. “All right.”
They walked into the hall, unescorted.
Harkins fell in behind the lieutenant, and asked, “What the hell is going on here, sir?”
He turned to face her. “They know it’s best if we don’t witness what they’re going to do to him. They’ll interrogate and probably torture him for a while, and then kill him. They’ll tell us he was shot trying to escape.”
“And this base? Why’d it go so easy?”
“I asked one of the company commanders about that. The rebels’ main fighting force wasn’t here, after all. Some of the prisoners said they had gathered their families here, and they were going to all go up to the north end of the island. That’s why we ran into all those little ambushes on the way up. They were trying to delay us so they could evacuate the noncombatants. Some of them got away; most didn’t.”
The room with the two prisoners was labeled “Accipitridae Acclimation.” Inside, seated and handcuffed to chairs, were one man and one woman, both with East Asian features uncommon to Tecolote. One of Aziz’s troopers, wearing a single sublieutenant’s bar on his cap, stood behind them, his rifle unslung and pointed at the ground.
The male prisoner was in his mid-twenties, muscular and good-looking, with a mop of black hair atop a sculpted, angular face. He stared straight ahead and made no sign that he noticed their entry.
The woman was glassy-eyed, but she was in slight, unsteady motion, a person fighting to regain her wits. Neil immediately went to her and kneeled.
“Your name is Misaki, isn’t it? We met in San José. You’re Akita’s assistant,” he said.
Who? Harkins wondered.
The woman’s head wobbled slightly, and she focused on him and nodded.
He looked at the Tecolote officer. “Did you do this to her? Drug her?”
“No,” the officer replied in accented English. He motioned to the man. “This one was questioning her in this room. He did not stop, even as we cam
e in.”
“Questioning about what?”
“He was speaking a language I do not understand.”
“The woman, she’s not an enemy. Release her, right now.”
Harkins thought the guy might argue, so she locked eyes on him and tried to look menacing. Without a word, the sublieutenant removed Misaki’s handcuffs.
“What about this one?” the officer said.
“Keep him restrained.”
They took Misaki to still another room, “Castorimorpha Breeding.” The lieutenant didn’t tell Harkins to do anything, so she posted herself by the door.
“Misaki, can you concentrate? Talk to me. What happened to you? Where’s Akita?”
“I remember you now, Lieutenant Mercer. But who is Akita?” It was the first time Neil had heard her speak.
Mercer’s head jerked back. “Your employer. Kitsune.”
She shook her head. “Akita, yes, his name here. They killed him! They took us after the riot and brought us here. They thought Akita was Kitsune, and when he couldn’t tell him anything, the Chinese interrogator gave up and killed him.”
“I’m sorry, Misaki,” Neil said. “Wait … they thought he was Kitsune? He wasn’t?”
She looked straight at him for the first time. “I am Kitsune. Akita was one of my public faces, my secretary and bodyguard. He handled the social aspects of my job … Ah, the drugs are making me say too much, with an unknown person in the room.”
Harkins said, “My name is Ruth. I’m all right, I promise.”
Misaki nodded. “They did not learn our true identities. They never asked the right questions, of me, or Akita, or we would have told them. They just assumed who was who.”
Neil said to Misaki, “You certainly fooled me. How did they know you were here?”
“Someone told. The enemy agent in your consulate. Did you share information about my presence with anyone?”
“No.”
“Then it was Gomez. Either she is the agent, or she told someone, who told that Chinese spy in the other room. Only you and she had knowledge of our whereabouts the day we were taken.”
