by Chris Lowry
Sometimes he liked to do that, just let the jumble of everything inside his head bounce around, bounce off each other, hoping maybe one or two will click together and form a plan or the kernel of a new idea.
Brainstorming, they called it, and he liked the way it felt because there was a lot of thunder and lightning cracking around in between his ears.
He glanced at the group around him.
The fire threw shadows across their bodies, playing against the trees.
Too large, he thought, too easy to see but he drew up short from kicking dirt over the edges to tamp it down.
They deserved a fire, and if any prying eyes from Lick or enemies otherwise unknown saw it, he wanted them to bring it on.
His squad was hard to identify in their suits.
Babe looked like Waldo, Crockett looked like Jake. All the same, all uniform. Hard to tell who was who unless the visors were up.
“That won’t do,” he muttered aloud.
“What’d you say, Lt?” Babe sat up.
“Just pondering some ideas Babe. Been thinking on our next step.”
“Get Lutz.”
“Yeah, that and one more stop to make.”
Babe glanced over at the still lump of a child under a pilfered blanket near the edge of the firelight.
“Drop off,” the big man nodded. “We’re picking up a lot of strays.”
He was ready to be rid of their new charge.
“We’re not strays,” Steph said from across the clearing, her back against a pine tree. “You rescued us. We’re just joining the cause.”
“Is that what we are?” Waldo joked. “A cause?”
“Names as good as any,” Lt said. “Course if you folks had been raised up right, you’d call yourself the Rebel Alliance.”
“That movie again, Lt?”
He nodded, earning a couple of half grins and smirks.
“You boys don’t even know,” he said. “It defined a generation. Practically a documentary.”
“My Dad liked it,” said Babe.”
“Jesus Babe, I ain’t that much older than you. I guess I’m just more educated on things that matter.”
“Like space movies.”
“We’re in a space movie,” said Jake. “The truth was out there, and then it came here.”
Weber popped his visor up.
“You talk too much when it’s time to sleep,” he said. “Real soldiers learn, eat when you can, sleep when you can.”
“We’re real enough,” Waldo said. “How many Licks you got notched up?”
Weber shrugged.
“I’ve got over a hundred,” Waldo continued. “Owe the Lt about nine hundred more.”
“How do you keep count once the killing starts?”
“After,” said Babe. “It’s a headcount.”
He waited for them to get it, but Weber just stared at him with his sky blue eyes glowing in the reflected firelight.
“We take their heads,” the big man clarified.
“I understood you,” said Weber. “I just don’t understand the reason.”
“We aim to make the Lick fear us,” Lt said. “The Lick will have nightmares of the atrocities it has seen in the path of destruction we carver through their invasion.”
Weber sat up, grunting as he propped against the tree. The nano had went to work on his injuries as soon as he dropped in the suit, and his body felt good. The grunting was habit for the most part, the aches ghosts of the pain they had once been.
“How’s that working out for you?” he asked, blue eyes curious in the firelight.
Lt pondered this, arms crossed across his knees. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure if the Lick were checking under their beds at night to see if he and his men were there. There damn sure was enough of them left to kill, that the numbers he and his squad had sent to meet their Lick maker didn’t seem to faze them much.
“I suppose we could do better,” he offered.
“You’ve been hitting the soldiers,” said Weber. His eyes drifted to a point over Lt’s shoulder, staring at a blinking light in the sky.
A distant star he thought, though he remembered hearing that you could see Mars from Earth sometimes. He wasn’t sure what part of the sky it liked to hang around in, so it could be Mars. Or Polaris. Or Alpha Centauri.
But Mars made him think of past battles and reasons they were lost.
“There are so many of them,” he said.
His voice was a growl across the clearing, carrying to everyone. Lt noted that no one slept, except Rugrat, and if she was awake, she was doing a fine job of fooling everyone into thinking she was not.
“Everywhere we went, across the face of the Red Planet,” Weber continued. “So many. At Citadel, thousands. They kept coming from all over. And when we moved on the colony, to take out the guns, more. Out of the sand, out of every hole. Like ants when you kick over an anthill.”
“Or hornets,” said Renard, with the same far off look in his eye. “When you hit a nest.”
“That’s how they beat us?” Lt asked. “Just sheer fucking numbers?”
Weber shrugged.
“Numbers. Tech. Maybe just indominable fighting spirit,” he nodded past the hovercraft in the direction where they had found the burned town. “Sometimes we’re too busy killing each other to stop the aliens from killing us. Hell, if they would have held back a couple of years, we would have finished the job for them.”
Lt grunted. He had no answer for that. Sure, Earth had some problems before the Lick armada popped up on long scanning radar. Politicians had even tried to keep it quiet for a while, but too many backyard astronomers with eyes in the sky made that impossible.
And still they fought each other.
Even as they sent soldiers to Mars, the countries jockeyed for power, for position, for lines on the map, and once humans started losing, for resources.
Lt sighed and squinted at the embers.
“I hear you,” he said. “Don’t seem like much worth saving sometimes, don’t it? Every worthless perckerwood in the bunch seems to show up when we’re at our lowest, trying to set themselves up a little potentate. Makes me wonder why I even bother every time I look in the mirror.”
“You got a mirror, Lt?” Crockett joked.
“Cracked one,” Lt grunted back.
“That explains the shave,” his man shot back and earned a snort of appreciation from his commander.
“I wonder why, if I’m being the philosophical sort and the mood strikes me right. But that kind of thinking stretches back all the way through history. Seems like we always done this. Invasions brought out the worst in a lot of folks. But I think we leave out some of the best parts. The good one’s don’t always make history, or history lessons at least.”
“That why you’re fighting?” Weber asked. “You want to go down in history as a good one?”
“Hell no, Weber,” Lt scoffed. “I want to be the damn Pol Pot of the Licks. I want to kill every last one of those motherfuckers and put all their damn heads in a rocket and shoot it toward their home world as a warning. I want them dead. Gone and scared as hell to come back. I don’t give a shit how history remembers me. I just want there to be a history to remember.”
“Do we still have rockets?” Jake asked.
“What?”
“You said put their heads in a rocket and shoot it to their home. Can we do that?”
“That’s a tomorrow problem,” Lt slipped back off his haunches and settled into the ground. “Rockets are tomorrow. Lutz is tomorrow. Dropping that Rugrat off is tomorrow. Tonight’s problem is getting shut eye.”
He laced his fingers across his chest and stared up at the stars. The dry wood in the fire popped and crackled as he heard the others settle in around him. He didn’t know if they slept, the silence didn’t share that much. But he watched the sky spin above him for a long time, until the eastern edge of the horizon slipped dark purple to hint at the dawn, and he was able to drop into a deep nap.
> CHAPTER SIX
The next morning dawned under wispy strands of fog that filtered through the trees and cowered over the still smoking embers of the campfire.
Lt kicked a pile of dirt over the glowing coals, burying them.
“Why did you do that?” a small voice asked from beside him.
He glanced at Rugrat through his visor.
“Keep’s from starting a forest fire. Only you can prevent forest fires,” he grinned, even though she couldn’t see it.
“A forest fire?”
“Damn kid, ain’t you ever seen a wildfire gone…wild?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t like fire,” she murmured and cast a glance over her shoulder in the direction of the still smoldering town on their backtrail.
“I bet you don’t,” said Waldo as he stepped up next to Lt. “Perimeter clear.”
“Crockett, start this boat up and let’s get going.”
He led them into the back of the hovercraft as Crockett engaged the throttle and lifted off of the ground.
Lt studied the road in front of them, letting information scroll across the display on his helmet. It took some getting used to.
The system was set up to deliver temperature, windage, distance to objects as they entered his field of vision. It also monitored vitals, and he could see a space where oxygen levels would show, but it was blank for him.
That made sense. The suits had been designed to fight in the harsh and unforgiving atmosphere of Mars, and would need oxygen. He wondered about how he was getting air now, here on earth and made a mental note to ask Doc about it when they got back to the compound.
If they got back, he thought.
He wondered if the suits were giving them too much confidence. But no, his small squad had done plenty of damage before the suits, still using the old school technology they had been left with after the alien first wave sent them almost literally back into the dark ages.
The confidence to take on a base with such a small force came from the ability to beat the Licks so many times. Plus, he was still thinking about a distraction. Something to draw the main force of their troops away from his point of entry, then hit them from the flanks and behind.
It was the sort of problem he couldn’t hit head on. It was like running into a brick wall through a mudhole. Slow and heavy. The way he needed to figure it out was come at it from the corners. Let the different inputs fall together in his mind, until all the pieces fit like a puzzle to show him a new picture.
That’s just the way his mind worked.
Dump a lot of data into it, and figure it out as he went.
“Lt?”
“Yeah Waldo?”
“We’re following the wrong trail.”
Lt glanced over the edge of the hovercraft.
“Nah. Crockett’s doing exactly what I asked him to do. What we need him to do.”
“Lutz has to wait while we find the assholes that did this?”
Lt nodded.
“Something like that.”
“You know Lutz is going through hell waiting on us,” said Babe.
“No, Babe, I don’t know that. For all we know, Lutz is gone,” he said it, but he didn’t feel it. He felt it when Leroy and Danish and Suds died. Same with Rook. But not so with Lutz.
“Thing is, Lutz is pretty good at taking care of himself if he’s in trouble, and he can keep his head down. But this,” he indicated the Rugrat. “This needs looking in to.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The hovercraft slowed to a halt and settled on the edge of the road. Lt hopped out and marched to the ridge where the asphalt looked like it disappeared.
It was an optical illusion. The road rose to the point of the ridge and slipped over the other side. Lt stood at the highest most point and let his eyes wander. The shimmering ribbon of blacktop kept going down a long glade that stretched for miles.
The grass on either side of the road was long, still green under the sun but with blooms of yellow hinting that the dry weather roasted the pasture. The road kept going through the land below, crossed a sliver of river on a suspension bridge and got lost in more woods on the other side.
But that’s not what drew his attention.
Another camp was set up on the riverbank. Camouflaged tents were erected in tight circles that made three rings, each surrounding a giant pavilion in the middle.
“Wonder who they think they’re hiding from?” Babe snorted from next to him.
Weber and Renard sidled next to Babe.
“What are they?” Renard asked.
“That’s the fellas that decided to burn up that town back there,” Lt growled.
“How do you know?” Weber asked.
“It’s them.”
He pointed to the churned up ground next to the asphalt, boot prints imprinted in the mud, the grass flattened.
“Big force came through here and they weren’t flying on hovercrafts.”
“Could be someone else?” Weber said.
“Who?”
The veteran shrugged.
“You’ve seen something like this before?”
“Nothing,” said Waldo as he joined them. “Of course, we haven’t been this far out of the forest in forever.”
“That’s a big group,” said Babe.
“Ain’t normal,” Lt observed. “Attracts too much attention. A group like that, they’re asking for trouble, or expecting it. If the Licks come along, the ones in the middle are getting protected. And if it’s humans, that set up is supposed to be intimidating.”
“So, we’re intimidated,” Weber said.
“I’m feeling something,” said Waldo. “I don’t think it’s intimidated though. How about you Babe? You feel intimidated?”
“You’re just remembering standing next to me at privy this morning,” Babe said. “Afraid you’ll never feel like a real man again.”
Waldo laughed and shifted his blaster up. The targeting software zoomed in on the camp. He could make out people moving, just vague shapes from this distance.
“Too far to shoot,” he said.
“Save your bullets,” Lt said. “I’m going down there to talk.”
“Lasers, Lt. And is that a good idea?”
“I’m not going alone, Babe. One of you is coming with me.”
Babe stood taller.
“Not you,” said Bonney. “You and Weber are going to sneak up on the other side of the road, be ready to pull my bacon out of the fire if it comes to it.”
“Then who’s going with you?”
“I will,” Jake volunteered.
“Chief,” Lt glanced back at him.
Babe frowned, but he didn’t say anything, just waved Weber to follow him. Lt watched the two suits march up the far side of the road.
“Let’s go Chief,” Lt said.
“We’re walking?”
“Crockett, keep everyone loaded up. You see trouble, you either come in to pick us up, or you get gone. Savvy?”
“Yes Sir, Lt.”
Lt led Jake on the asphalt. They trotted into a fast jog and ate the miles away to the camp below.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“What’s your name?” he whispered in the semi-darkness.
None of the lights worked in the warehouse where they were imprisoned, but there were windows along the top of the building that let in dim starlight. Not enough to make out details, but shapes.
He recognized her by the shape of her head and felt another thrill in his stomach as she turned.
There were guards they could see posted on either end of the building, but Lutz had found space in the middle, a piece of concrete to call his own. And the shadow crab crawling across the floor to sit next to him moved with a slow precision that wouldn’t attract attention.
“Don’t move so much,” she said as he rolled over to face her shadow.
“You crawled over here,” he reminded her.
“But I’ve had more practice than you.”
“Crawling?”
“Crawling, sneaking. I saw you. You don’t seem like much of a sneaker.”
Lutz snorted.
“I’m an excellent sneaker.”
“Oh yeah, when have you ever snuck up on anything? Snuck around anything? You make too much noise, attract too much attention. Strutting.”
“I don’t strut,” he said. “I’m a-”
He stopped short of telling her he was a soldier, one of Lt. Bonney’s men. While he bet she didn’t know who exactly Lutz was in the scheme of the squad, William Bonney’s exploits had spread among the surviving human population. Babe was the most popular of the men, he knew, and didn’t begrudge him the title.
There was something to be said about being an effective unknown member of the most devastating team to fight back against the alien invaders.
But this girl could be a spy.
And if she wasn’t, there were people around who might be. They could turn him in, trade on his identity for safety, or food, or hell, even survival.
“You’re a what?” she whispered.
Damn, thought Lutz. He hoped she would miss it. But she was paying as much attention to him as he was to her, straining to make out more in the milky glow leaking in through the upper windows.
“I’m just a prisoner, like you.”
“Slave,” she scoffed. “But not like me.”
He heard a noise in the corner, from the direction where the guard stood and held his tongue. He could feel her holding her breath beside him. Around them, people snorted, snored and made the kinds of noises people make when they’re sleeping. But Lutz noticed they were muted sounds, as if even in the act of sleeping, the prisoners were afraid of being noticed, of being found out.
The two of them held their silence, stretched for several moments, long enough for Lutz to wonder if she had fallen asleep. He strained to listen to her breathing, to measure the rise and fall of the dark lump at the edge of his field of vision.
“My name is Pomona,” she said.
“Like the horse?” Lutz whispered back.
“Like the city in California,” she sounded sharp.
