"Planter, this is Crystal Fortress." That was the callsign for General Maitland, the regional commander. "Confirm you have one KIA at your location, one kilometer west of Habitrail."
"Crystal Fortress, Planter confirms we have one KIA, and five wounded have been evaced by Buzzard. Location is correct, no sign of enemy activity here, over." I hoped to get more air support, before we drove back through the town.
"Planter, standby one." The voice on the radio ordered.
"Planter, listen carefully." The voice this time was General Maitland himself. "We need to show the hamsters that this isn't a game," his voice sounded strange, like he was slowly reading a script, "that they can't hit us with impunity. Go into Habitrail, and take eight Ruhar at random, your call. If anyone resists, use deadly force. Line those eight Ruhar up in the center of town, and shoot them. We want this to be public."
I had to lean back against the fender of a hamvee to keep my legs from buckling. My face must have gone white, people were staring at me. Captain Rivers silently mouthed 'what's up, chief?' to me.
I flashed back to when I was eight years old, fishing in a creek with my friends on a warm, humid summer day, the kind of summer day that happens so rarely in northern Maine that when it gets to be 75 degrees, the natives complain about the heat. Me, my friends Bobby, Tommy and a new kid Michael. Not Mikey, Michael, he told us when we first met. He was a jerk, but his father was a big shot at the paper mill where my father worked, so we had to be nice to him, and let him tag along with us. He was from Wisconsin, and kept telling us how crappy Maine was, and how we were stupid for living here, we only lived in Maine because our parents couldn't get jobs anywhere decent.
We were at a creek, having the type of free-range unsupervised kid fun in the woods that freaked out city parents, looking for salamanders and fishing. Michael had a new fishing pole with fancy lures, the rest of us had old equipment and used wadded up bread and pieces of cheese for bait. Bobby caught three good size fish, keepers for dinner, and Tommy and I were having fun, but not catching anything worth keeping. Michael was in a bad mood because he hadn't caught anything, complaining that the fish in the creek were stupid, that we were splashing and casting shadows that scared away the fish. We mostly ignored him, until he hooked a frog by accident.
He tortured that poor frog. It was bad enough that he hooked its belly, and tore it open while reeling it in. Michael was a sadistic little shit, he gleefully started using a hook to peel the skin off the frog's leg, while the animal struggled and he choked it.
I didn't do anything to stop him. I stood there, ashamed of myself, and did nothing but stare at the ground. Bobby's father also worked at the paper mill, but Bobby was a better person than I was, even at eight years old. Bobby snatched the frog away and stomped it on a rock to put it out of its misery. Michael started a fight which Bobby and Tommy ended real quick, they thumped Michael and pushed him into the creek. When Michael shouted that he was going to tell his Dad, Bobby waded into the creek and held that little shit's head in the muddy water until he cried 'uncle'. Before we left, Tommy broke Michael's new fishing pole over his knee, and threw his fancy tackle box of lures into the deep pool of the creek. And Bobby told Michael that if he told his father, or we ever saw him again outside of school, we were going to beat the shit out of him. At eight years old, that was a threat Michael knew meant business.
We never saw Michael again. His father transferred to a mill in Oregon that September and took the family with him. Michael, I figured, would grow up to be a wife beater or serial killer or both, two sides of the same coin.
My mind must have flashed back to the moment, because that was a time when I stood by and did nothing to defend the innocent. I was not doing that ever again. And I especially wasn't doing that while wearing the Army uniform.
"Crystal Fortress," I said very slowly, loud enough the soldiers around me couldn't miss what I was saying, "confirm you are ordering me to murder eight civilians." My lower jaw was quivering as I spoke. "Execute eight random civilians, in public." I had put my zPhone on speaker, and Maitland knew what I was doing.
"Damn it, Colonel Bishop. I don't like it any more than you do. We're barely hanging on here, this shit can't continue. You have your orders. Carry them out."
"Sir," I said as I looked one soldier after the other in the eye, "I can't do that." The looks I got back were as shocked as I felt. Even if I gave the order, it was doubtful anyone in the convoy would obey. What the hell had we gotten ourselves into? Shit, we should never have left Earth. Humans had no business being out here.
"Goddamnit, Bishop, you're not wearing that bird on your uniform for show."
"Sir, respectfully, you don't have the authority to override the rules of engagement, or the code of conduct." Why the hell was I even having this conversation? "We can-"
A strange voice broke in, a voice I recognized as a Kristang using a translator. "Colonel Joseph Bishop, you are refusing to obey a direct order?" Even the translator couldn't remove all of the lizard hiss to the voice.
Lizards. I glanced upward involuntarily. They had ships in orbit that could vaporize my entire command here. I needed to be careful with the lives of the twenty humans under my command, very careful. I turned off my zPhone for a moment, sticking it in a pocket. Hurriedly, I explained to the soldiers around me. "The lizards showed me who they really are, when I was up there for the promotion ceremony. The rumors you heard about messages in fortune cookies are true, they didn't rescue Earth from the Ruhar; they kicked the Ruhar out so the lizards can rape our planet for themselves. We're fucked either way, the only thing we have left out here is our humanity, and I'm not giving that up. The lizards are ordering me to murder eight random hamsters."
"Why eight, sir?" Olafson asked, which I thought was not exactly the most important question to ask at the time.
Holding up my hands, I explained "Lizards have four fingers on each hand, they think in terms of eights, not tens like we do. We're supposed to kill eight civilians for every one human killed. When the Nazis held Rome, and the Italians resisted, the Nazis shot ten or twenty civilians for every German killed. Grabbed random civilians off the street, lined them up on a bridge, shot them and dumped their bodies in the river. The United States Army doesn't do that." My facts were kind of fuzzy on the subject, but the basic elements were correct. The zPhone back on, I responded. "As a soldier in the United States Army, I am required to refuse illegal orders. Deliberately murdering civilians is an illegal act."
There was an enraged Kristang screech that didn't translate, then my zPhone went dead. I mean, completely dead, no lights, the lizards must have deactivated it.
"What now, sir?" Captain Rivers asked.
How the hell was I supposed to know? Nothing in my training had prepared me for this fucked up situation. "Let's get the lead truck detached from that busted trailer." The back of the truck's cab was scorched and the windows blown out, but the solid tires were still round and functional. The other two trucks were in bad shape, their powercells had caught fire from the heat. "I'll take the truck by myself, if the lizards upstairs decide to slap me down for disobedience, I don't want to take anyone else with me. And don't argue, that's an order. We roll out, back to base, keep the hamvees dispersed." While the lizards could hit us from orbit no matter how widely we were dispersed, I wasn't going to make it easy for them. Maybe we should put all the zPhones in a bag and I'd keep them with me, so the lizards couldn't target us by signal-
Rivers put a hand to his earpiece, then handed it and his zPhone to me. "Stinger for you, sir." So, they hadn't deactivated all of our zPhones, only mine.
"Stinger, this is Planter, go ahead."
"I heard your comms traffic sir. The Kristang ordered me to target the school in Habitrail. I refused the order." Disobedience was getting to be popular.
"Roger that, Stinger, thank you. We're going to roll out-"
"Shit!" Stinger shouted. "I've lost control! Controls aren't responding! My gunner
can't lockout weapons!"
"Scatter!" I yelled, waving my arms and pointing at the Chicken that was approaching low from the southwest, weapons pods extended. "The lizards have control of the gunship!" Everyone ran, I dove into a ditch on the side of the road, until I realized in a flash how stupid and useless that was. And selfish. The lizards had a problem with me, not my command. So I stood up and waved my arms at the Chicken, trying to attract attention. My plan, if you could call it a plan, was to give a single finger salute after the lizards launched a missile at me. That was stupid also, the lizards probably didn't recognize rude human gestures.
Except they didn't launch at me. The Chicken's remaining two missiles streaked off the rails, over our heads, and hit the school with a fiery explosion. "That wasn't us!" Stinger shouted frantically. "Oh shit! They cut power! We're going down!"
As I watched, the Chicken staggered in the air, then dropped like a stone from about three hundred feet, smashing to the ground with great force and plowing a trench in the soil a quarter mile south of me. Without me saying anything, soldiers began running to the crash site, I got there first because I wasn't weighed down with the full battle rattle of the others.
The Chicken was way more intact that I expected, whatever the hamsters made them of was tough stuff. The tail and both winglets had broken off, the whole thing had rolled 360 degrees, but the cockpit and power center behind the seats was mostly in one piece. Not so for the two human occupants. The gunner in the front seat didn't have a head, an engine fan blade had broken loose and sliced him up good. The pilot behind him, I saw the nametag on her flight suit said 'Collins'. She was missing the lower part of her left arm, and blood was running from her mouth. She wasn't conscious, carefully I unbuckled the strap and lifted off her helmet, which had a big crack front to back. It was ugly.
God damn. How the hell was a girl, I mean woman, this young flying a Chicken? Even beat up like she was, she looked younger than me. "Uhhh." She groaned and opened one eye.
"Shhh. Don't move, Collins. I'm Colonel Bishop, I’m Planter."
"I couldn't stop, sir, I couldn't, stop," her voice faded, although her lips still moved silently, trying to talk to me.
"It's all right, stay with me. Collins? Collins?" Her head slumped while I was holding her, a last bubble of blood came out of her mouth, and she was gone. Her last words had not expressed fear, she had been telling me that she did her duty, that she hadn't killed hamsters at the school. Somehow, through some combination of circumstances, Collins had gone from being a little girl, to joining the Army, to helicopter flight school, to volunteering for duty with UNEF, qualifying to pilot a Chicken gunship, to here. Dying in the arms of a total stranger. Killed by an alien species who did not have their own concept of 'humanity'. There was no good reason for her life to end there, that day. I broke down and cried.
I wasn't alone in standing with my shoulders slumped, sobbing quietly. Lt Collins wasn't the only person we lost that day, her death was the last straw that broke our reserve. She hadn't been killed in combat, she'd been murdered by beings who were supposed to be our allies, our protectors, our saviors. The whole situation on Paradise had gone to shit so fast, we'd lost almost all hope in a matter of a few months.
Rivers tapped me on the shoulder, looked me in the eye and shook his head once, silently. I got the message. The senior officer needed to set an example. I straightened up, angrily wiping my eyes with the back of a sleeve. Handing the zPhone back to Rivers, I told him to give a sitrep to UNEF HQ, as I didn't think I could keep professional at that moment.
None of us knew what else to say. There wasn't anything to say. After a while, we got the two bodies out of the Chicken and loaded into the back seat of the truck I drove. After we crossed the western bridge, instead of following the road through Habitrail, I directed us to drive across fields in a wide circle, which we could do now that we weren't loaded down with trailers. It took an hour to bypass the town, involving a lot of hunting around for paths to ford streams, bumping across dirt and mud, the work and concentration kept people focused on the task of getting back to base. I lagged behind in the truck, keeping enough distance from the last hamvee that if the lizards decided to take me out with a railgun strike or a missile, there wouldn't be collateral damage among my people. It also made sense to let hamvees scout the best path across country, as the truck wasn't as capable off road.
We were back on the road for less than half an hour before the column ahead halted, and I stopped a quarter mile behind them. Rivers called me on the zPhone I'd borrowed. "Command says to wait here, sir, they're sending a Buzzard." Why, Command didn't say. One Buzzard wasn't enough to evac all of us, and I couldn't imagine UNEF wanting to abandon functioning hamvees. Maybe the situation ahead was bad enough that Command was bringing us reinforcements with heavier weapons? I tried calling myself, but my zPhone could only connect to Rivers. That's what happened when another species controlled all your comms. We shouldn't have let that happen.
Of course, another species controlled all our food and other supplies, and the high ground, and Earth, so comms on Paradise might be the least of our problems.
A Buzzard escorted by a Chicken roared in circled us, and landed on the road ahead of the column. I saw Rivers walk ahead to talk to the soldiers. My zPhone rang, it was Rivers. "Sir, they want you up here." There was a note of warning in his voice. I left my M4 in the truck and broke into a trot. As I passed hamvees, soldiers stood and saluted me, some had tears in their eyes, they all looked angry. What the hell was going on? I reached the group gathered around the Buzzard and saluted a Captain Randolph. The Buzzard was US Army, along with all the troops it carried.
"Captain Randolph."
He saluted me, looked me quickly in the eye but didn't hold his gaze. Whatever was going on, it made him uncomfortable. "Colonel Bishop, I have orders to place you under arrest. Surrender your sidearm, please." He held out his hand, almost apologetically.
"Arrest?" I was genuinely shocked. "On what charges?" I demanded.
"Refusing orders from a superior officer, sir."
"Refusing to carry out illegal orders, Captain."
"Sir, that's above my pay grade." He said lamely. "Colonel, you're not the only person UNEF HQ has ordered arrested, word is a lot of units refused those orders. We hear," he lowered his voice, "the Kristang hit some units from orbit then they refused orders directly from, uh," he pointed toward the sky with his thumb. "Please, sir, I can't risk my men's lives by failing to arrest you." The implication was the lizards were watching, and would kill all of us if I didn't surrender.
"Colonel," Rivers started to say, meaningfully glancing at his finger on the safety of his M4.
"Captain Rivers, you're in command here. Get these people back to base safely, avoid trouble along the way." I ordered. Holding my sidearm with two fingers, I handed it to Randolph. "You're taking me to UNEF HQ?"
"No sir," his Adam's apple bobbed up and down, nervously "all prisoners are going to a liz-, a Kristang base. I'm sorry, sir."
CHAPTER NINE JAIL
They put me in prison at the only Kristang base on the planet, staffed by the roughly thirty Kristang who had been inoculated with an experimental drug to protect against the biohazard on Paradise, all volunteers. An advanced guard of the most gung-ho, or the most desperate for promotion. Everyone one of them, fanatical assholes. I was kept in isolation, true isolation, I didn't even see any lizards while in my cell, food was delivered through a sliding drawer once a day. For entertainment, I watched the sunlight change direction in the tiny window, high up on the wall. And listened for the screaming that went on intermittently, and rifle shots in the mornings. On the fifth, maybe sixth day, I had a visitor from the United States Marine Corps.
"Bishop, I'm Major Cochrane, how are you, son?" He glanced around the cell, looking for a place to hang his cover, then tucked it under his arm. He looked even worse than I felt, dark circles and bags under his eyes, and he was gaunt. UNEF HQ officers were setting
an example by cutting their food rations. It was a race to see if we ran out of packaged food supplies before our first crops were ready for harvest.
I leaned back against the wall, there being no place to sit, or lay down, other than the hard, cold floor. "Well enough, sir, considering. No complaints. The chow could be better, and this bed is hard, but at least it's not lumpy." I joked lamely.
"This is serious," Cochrane frowned, "the Kristang want to make an example of you, you and the others who defied their orders."
"How many others? I've heard the firing squads, in the mornings."
Cochrane looked stricken. "Americans, that I know of, seventeen, we're trying to get an exact count. Plus Brits, Indians, and Chinese, a couple French troops."
"All on death row?"
He nodded slowly. "That doesn't count the deaths when the Kristang got impatient, and hit units from orbit. Collateral damage, they say," he said with a nervous glance at the ceiling, as if that were the only place the lizards count put listening devices. "The sites they hit, just happen to be where our people were hesitating to carry out orders to retaliate." he glanced at my out of the corner of his eye. "Your people were lucky. If you hadn't been famous to the Kristang, they would have wiped out your command with a railgun strike, along with Habitrail. As it is, they wanted you to watch when they destroyed that school. The Kristang don't tolerate defiance from lesser species."
"Retaliation is when you hit back the people who hit you. Hamster women and children didn't hit us. That's just murder. They made me a colonel," I pointed to the bird on my uniform, "said I'm a hero for killing Ruhar soldiers, now they want to kill me for refusing to murder Ruhar women and children."
Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1) Page 23
