The Tetra War_The Katash Enigma

by Michael Ryan

“Can you meet up with Elefant?”

  “Roger. Where’s Avery?”

  “I buried him. He’s alive. I need you to get Elefant and meet me at the edge of this ridge.” Abrel sent a pic.

  “On the way,” Mallsin said.

  <>

  “Get on that, Veetea,” she ordered. “Tunning, get your…check that. I need two corporals to join me immediately.”

  A small unit of Dreki soldiers was approaching. Alone they weren’t a serious threat, but the group had two heavily armored infantry lizards with them. “Incoming,” Mallsin warned the squad. “Spread out and keep suppressing fire on those two monsters. Jesus, what a day.”

  <>

  Sergeant Veetea fired a pair of flares and a noise maker. “Mal, I’m out of antimissile rounds.”

  “Golvin…roger that,” she said. “Put whatever you have on that piece of armor to the left.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  “Tunning,” Mallsin ordered next, “get on the one to the right.”

  “Firing my last KE in three, two, one,” he said.

  Orders to squad leaders were made under the assumption that the sergeant would delegate as required. The original squad of ten had dropped to seven. Two casualties were in red status and had been picked up by a roving medi-transport, but the third was KIA. Mallsin quickly ran through the ammo status of the remaining soldiers.

  “Abrel,” she said over an IR-comm. When she didn’t get a response, she bounced a message off the Kuznetsov using the sat-comm. It revealed her position, but that had quit being a secret earlier. They weren’t the only ones running low on ammo and troops. Nobody fired on her, and Abrel connected over a relay. There was a delay in that type of communications, so she made it simple. “I need to pull back soon. Ammo’s low.”

  “Roger,” Abrel said. “I’m moving closer to you. Belay my last order. Switch to IR in three.”

  Mallsin spent the next two minutes assisting Dragon Squad.

  Elefant showed up.

  “Abrel sent us,” Sergeant Peterson said. “We’ve been hit hard. I don’t know if we can fight much longer unless it’s hand-to-hand.”

  “Hold one,” Mallsin said. She fired her last dome-spread antimissile. It was the most all-encompassing protection and sent a massive field of tiny spinning cubes into the air, creating a dome-shaped field. Missiles going through it either detonated or were otherwise rendered useless. The weapon was expensive, and she’d been lucky to be allocated two of them.

  “Okay,” she said. “Abrel will be here in a minute. Check that; there he is.”

  The small unit of Drekis that had moved against them had been eliminated except for one of the heavily armored soldiers, who retreated.

  “Give chase?” Tunning asked.

  “Negative,” she answered. “It’s either bait for an ambush or too risky to kill just one more of them.”

  “Roger, but we should get out of here,” he said.

  “Abrel?” she asked.

  “We need to move to this location,” he said. He transmitted a map to all three squads.

  “Golvin,” Mallsin said. “I don’t want to be a complainer, but we’re all low…”

  “I know, but there’s still six hundred infantry–”

  “They’ve lost half?”

  “And they’ll lose more if we don’t–”

  “Roger,” she said. “Don’t explain. You think Avery’s going to be…?”

  “He’ll live,” Abrel said. “He’d be just fine if we leave him there a month.”

  “I’m sure he’d appreciate not being left there–”

  “It’s just an expression, Mal,” Abrel said. “Let’s move.”

  The three squads followed Abrel’s lead into the fray with the Sixteenth Battalion.

  “Tell me more about what you remember from your childhood,” Callie said to the young woman through the muldvarp interpreter. “And your name.”

  The muldvarp named Polloz spoke to the woman.

  She looked into Callie’s faceplate and said, “Ah-lay-na.”

  Her accent was strange, but Callie did her best to repeat the name. “Alayna?”

  The woman nodded her head.

  “It almost sounds similar to English,” Callie said. “It’s pretty.”

  Polloz said, “She thanks you.”

  “Ask her if she’ll tell me about her childhood, before the Drekis…the Grems brought her here.”

  This was her story as interpreted by the muldvarp:

  I was happy when I was very little.

  I didn’t understand that the Gremxula came to take away people until one of my cousins was gone. My parents told me a story that Brielle had gone to a happy place. That she was free and that I shouldn’t be sad. I discovered as I got older they’d lied to keep me from being scared. The reptile soldiers came in big flying craft. I thought they were giant birds when I was only ten or eleven. I learned the truth after I first bled as a woman when I was about to become fourteen years old.

  I discovered for the first time that being able to have a child meant I could be taken away.

  I was angry and scared.

  My parents told me not to think bad thoughts, that maybe I’d be spared. Not all the girls in the village got taken away, but the ones that were taller and healthier usually got selected. I knew I was taller than most of my friends, and I’d been called pretty by older women for as long as I could remember.

  I got taken.

  Alayna’s face had hardened, and Callie hated that she’d asked her to repeat her stories. She also knew that Command wouldn’t spare the woman’s feelings. Even if this poor thing knew little of strategic value, intelligence was power. Callie decided she’d be better off if she got used to talking about her past. And Callie was also curious. “Can you tell me more about your early childhood and what your planet was like?”

  Alayna nodded and continued.

  Polloz relayed her story in Common English:

  We didn’t have war.

  Our little city was simple. We had farms and animals. There was a little school when I was a child, but there weren’t the things the Grems showed us when we came here on a big flying bird-machine, like metal things with stars and pictures. Our life was simple; there were no weapons such as the warriors had who saved us. I was scared when the metal men came, but I am happy now. I hate the Grems. They took me from my people.

  I helped my mother cook bread and cookies.

  We had a garden, and I picked fruit and vegetables in the summer.

  Callie interrupted and asked Polloz to see if he could determine if she’d merely lived in the country on an advanced planet, or if the entire world only had preindustrial societies.

  The muldvarp and Alayna talked for a few minutes.

  “She says she doesn’t know for certain,” Polloz said. “She has no recollection of anything like a computer or a vehicle in her childhood. I tried to explain things like electricity, computers, and skyscrapers, but she knows nothing of these things except for what the lizards here allowed. I can say in my work with the Katashie that they were never allowed to touch a computer. So it’s hard to say how advanced her culture is. It seems since she appears intelligent, that if she merely lived in the countryside, she’d have at least heard of lights, radio, or other advanced items if they existed on her home world.”

  Callie said, “Okay.”

  “I know of several other planets,” the muldvarp said, “where preindustrial peoples are harvested by the Grems. I have met other muldvarps with language skills beyond mine.”

  “How many languages do you know?” Callie asked.

  “I know three besides my native tongue,” he answered. “I also know two other languages besides those, but only the very basics. I learned the language of the lizards first. That was part of my initial training when I was sold to the Grems. Next, I learned Common English. Then the Katash tongue. It’s a complex language and often difficult to translate. The
y don’t have words for things like heli-jets or spacecraft. The other two tongues are unknown to the tri-planet people; they are the languages of other slaves who are similar to the Katashie.”

  “You mean from the same planet?” Callie asked.

  “I don’t believe so,” he answered. “I always assumed not. The other people are different races. But I suppose since there are very different species on Earth and Purvas, the other groups could be from Bailenua, too.”

  “That’s the…”

  “Bailenua, it’s the name the Katashie call their home planet.”

  “So…” Callie pondered out loud. “It’s a Katash enigma…”

  “Wrapped up in a mystery,” he admitted.

  “Ask her, please,” Callie said, “if she recalls anything about where her planet is.”

  “It’s a null question,” he said. “There’s no way I can ask her anything meaningful about that. She didn’t live in a society with batteries or engines. For all I know, the people there believe their planet is flat.”

  “This is sad,” Callie said, mostly to herself. “Tell Alayna I’d like to talk to her again tomorrow.”

  Having picked up on the JFUA custom of calling all officers by the title sir regardless of gender, the muldvarp said, “Yes, sir,” to Callie and then spoke to Alayna in her native language.

  Once alone, Callie searched her system for files of old Earth and Purvas documentaries about alien visitors. She found several and fell asleep listening to a human narrator explain how some researchers believed that the pyramids in ancient Egypt were built under the direction of strange star men.

  Abrel, Mallsin, and the three squads under their direction fought alongside the Leon and Moon Companies. The Sixteenth Battalion finally turned back the tide of destruction that had been battering them into oblivion.

  “To your left,” Abrel said.

  “I don’t see it,” Mallsin said.

  “Your other left.”

  “Oh.”

  “Women.”

  “Don’t go there, Abrel,” she said.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything. It’s just left is left, and right is right.”

  “I mix them up sometimes.”

  “Well, now that we’ve settled that…can you please shoot that lizard with the big gun?”

  “Roger,” she said. She fired a three-hundred-round burst from her left-arm coil-gun. Her right-arm gun was out of ammo. “I got him.”

  “Good. I think the right flank has fallen. That’s the flank over by that fallen tree.” He pointed with an exaggerated motion.

  “Screw you,” she said.

  “I love you, too.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Roger that. Me too,” Abrel said. He searched the field in front of him for enemies, but it appeared the area was only occupied by the dead. “Sergeant Blaasever, are you still out there on the edge of nowhere?”

  He received no response.

  “Blaasever,” he called again.

  “I think he bought it, Sergeant,” a corporal said over the squad comm. “He was working with Corporal Jones.”

  “Corporal Jones, answer. Over,” Abrel said over the platoon general radio channel. He wasn’t concerned with being tracked or triangulated; the Dreki force had retreated.

  “Corporal Jones here.”

  “I’m looking for Blaasever,” Abrel said. He had little hope that the sergeant was still alive.

  “Dead, Sergeant,” Jones said. “Sorry.”

  “Rally to me,” Abrel said over the platoon comm. “I want to get a verbal and visual count.”

  It wasn’t entirely unusual for a system to fail to update during battles. Also, a damaged system could inaccurately show icons in the green when the soldiers were dead. On rare occasions, a system would show red, yellow, or black icons when the trooper was unharmed.

  “Sergeant Tunning here,” the leader of Dragon Squad reported, and then began his inventory.

  The day started with thirty-three soldiers. It ended with twenty-five survivors, among them Avery, who was still buried in the dirt. Abrel noted a couple of new yellow icons, but there were no reds among the living troops, which was common in hard-fought battles. The seriously injured usually ended up dead when conditions prevented medical units from reaching them.

  “Major Stellezzen,” Abrel said over the Moon Company comm.

  “Go,” the commander said.

  “With your permission, we’re bugging out, sir,” he said.

  “Roger that,” the major said. “But send me an action report before midnight.”

  “Will do, sir.” Abrel typed himself a reminder and set an alarm on his system. He hated reports, but not sending one would lead to more reports on why you didn’t send the first one…if you weren’t careful, you’d be writing every night for a week.

  “We appreciate your support today,” the major said.

  “Sir,” Abrel said. To his squads, he said, “Let’s move. I want to dig Avery up pronto.”

  Twenty minutes later, the group found the spot where they’d left Avery buried like a corpse, and dug him out.

  “Is he okay?” Mallsin asked.

  Abrel linked into his medi-port. “Hold one second, I’m running a systems check now…yeah, okay. He’s fine. But he’s unconscious. We need a medical officer to check him. I’m not going to risk cracking into his system.”

  “I didn’t ask you to,” Mallsin snapped.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m just concerned,” she said.

  “I know. It’s late. We’re both exhausted.”

  “I’m glad Callie’s safe,” Mallsin said.

  “Sergeant Tunning, get a detail on this suit,” Abrel ordered.

  “And be careful with him,” Mallsin added.

  The three squads marched back to the rear in silence. Their route was littered with bodies. Occasionally, they came across a lizard that wasn’t quite dead, but close enough so that it would be pointless to take the creature prisoner. Abrel ordered the troops to put a few bolts through the near-dead enemies. The order was required because it wasn’t uncommon for the younger boots to want to torture the beasts in retribution.

  “They’re only foot soldiers,” Abrel said. “If you want to torture someone, figure out how to fly a starship to the reptilian home world and find their politicians.”

  “You think they have politicians?” someone asked.

  Abrel answered the question with one of his own. “Do they have war?”

  “That’s self-evident,” the corporal who’d asked the question said. “Look around.”

  “Well, then,” Abrel said, “it should be self-evident that they have politicians.”

  Forty minutes later, after dropping Avery off at a medical unit, they got in line to resupply their equipment packs.

  “Orders?” someone asked.

  “We’re back on the schedule in eight hours,” Mallsin answered. “But I don’t know what we’ve been assigned to do.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’ll be killing lizards,” someone said.

  “Killing lizards is a certainty,” she said. “Get some rest.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

  ~ Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

  General Balestain finished his perfectly cooked eggs.

  “Can I get you anything else, sir?” a sharply dressed corporal asked.

  “That will be all, Corporal,” he answered.

  The general stood and surveyed the officers’ mess. He recognized an old friend and approached his table. “May I sit, Colonel Farrext?”

  “General, yes,” the colonel said. “Please. Can I offer you something?”

  “I’ve already eaten, thank you. When did you arrive?”

  “In the middle of the night,” he answered. “By your ship’s clock. The Sergeev is six hours behind the Kuznetsov.”

  “Regretfully, Admiral Wessonite d
oesn’t believe in unifying starships to mean-Volasniton time,” Balestain said. “A minor inconvenience. He does, however, believe in hiring well-schooled Rhanskad chefs.”

  “And providing fresh eggs for senior staff,” Farrext said.

  “A must. I was forced to survive on reconstituted eggs for a decade during my early career on Earth. Never again.” Balestain waved to a steward. “Tell me news of the tri-planets.”

  “You haven’t read the latest–”

  Balestain held up his hand. “I don’t mean the filtered news reports that accompanied the Sergeev and the Chernavin. I’d like to hear something more in line with reality.”

  Colonel Farrext frowned. “Your steward,” he said, pointing.

  “Ah, yes. Bring another pot of stimlentize,” the general said. “And real cream, Corporal.”

  “Of course,” the servant replied.

  After the steward was out of earshot, the colonel said, “I’m surprised you’re so casual with your request for real news. Are there no political officers–”

  Balestain laughed. “I’m the political officer appointee for the senior staff. Don’t worry, Alarraje, I won’t turn you in.”

  “Versus,” he cursed under his breath. “I never know when someone says something like that if it’s a test or not.”

  “Trust me,” Balestain said. “On this ship, even the admiral is a figurehead when it comes to politics. I could have you arrested and summarily executed within the hour. Or promoted to lieutenant general by the week’s end.”

  “You’ve garnered more power than I imagined.” The colonel rubbed his chin and appeared to be thinking about his next words carefully. The steward reappeared with a pitcher, so he dropped his hands to the table and waited.

  “Sirs?” the steward asked after filling the general’s mug. “Will there be anything else?”

  “That is all,” Balestain said. He poured cream into his drink and sipped. “So?”

  “Yes, of course,” the colonel whispered. “Magnify all the bad news by double or triple. Cut the good reports in half. And, frankly, General, that might be on the optimistic side.”

  “Versus. I suspected. What have they hit the hardest?”

  “Vilantroplie, Metronic, Dalistint City, New Amsterdam on Purvas, Tolpponist. They’ve created havoc in capitals all over Talamz, even in the smaller states. I could go on, Abast. Honestly, it’s all bad news. The attacks seem…well, more like a warning. Or perhaps revenge. They don’t seem strategic…more like a child throwing a tantrum.”