Titan's Fall

by Zachary Brown

  “Right.”

  A whole division of the Colonial Protection Forces quartered here. Almost nine thousand armored soldiers. There were more human forces deployed around Titan, but the bulk of them were around Shangri-La.

  Welcome home, I thought as we kissed dirt. The Accordance had wanted all this for themselves, no humans out past the moon, the point we’d been unable to cross by ourselves before the Accordance came to Earth.

  But now that the Conglomeration had found Earth and the solar system, now that war was in full swing, human workers were everywhere toiling away for the Accordance.

  It was necessity. All the planets I’d memorized as a kid, if I just reversed the names, it became a list of places the Conglomeration had taken for itself over the last three months. They’d pushed everything back to Saturn, where we held the moons and bombarded it constantly.

  The Accordance needed human boots. And the Icarus Corps, built out of the Colonial Protection Forces, was still being trained and built up.

  But the Accordance didn’t really trust humans fully. The squid-like Arvani who held the top spot in the Accordance truly didn’t regard humans with much more than disdain. We were often left guarding supply routes, protecting machinery. Like the massive weaponry being built here in Shangri-La to safeguard Titan.

  Rumors were, something big was being planned for Saturn. Maybe a steady asteroid barrage or nukes. But all of Earth would just be a speck on Saturn’s windy clouds. How could you attack something so vast?

  + + +

  Down in the bunkers, barracks lit by eerie Accordance bioluminescence embedded in the walls, I met up with the rest of the platoon. Most of them were waiting in the common room for us, lounging on utilitarian cots. News had spread quickly.

  At the front, squad leaders Min Zhao and George Berkhardt jumped up. I nodded at them. “Any of you have a pad?”

  Min gave me hers, and I fingerprinted in and snagged my dossier and then looked back at my new additions. They were snapping their helmets back down, and I was looking at tired, relieved faces.

  Most of them were older than me. But they seemed younger somehow. And they were looking at me expectantly.

  “Tony Chin?” I called out, glancing down at the pad. The squad leader raised a hand. “Over to my left.”

  He took a few steps over. I glanced at the pad. “Maria Lukin, Lilly Taylor, Yakov Ilyushin, over to Sergeant Chin. Rockhoppers, meet the new Charlie squad! Now, Yusef Obari?”

  Yusef likewise raised a hand.

  I waved to my right. Yusef moved over. “Aran Patel, Mohamed Cisse, and Suqi Kimmirut, join Mister Obari. Rockhoppers, this is Delta squad.” I updated our documents.

  Berkhardt moved up. “I can help you with your armor,” he said to Tony. “You can call me Chef.”

  “Chef ?”

  “George Bork-Bork-Bork Berkhardt,” Min Zhao explained.

  Berkhardt shrugged. “I can’t cook for shit, but I speak a little Swedish. And Sergeant Zhao is ‘Max.’ Should be obvious where we got the nickname.”

  “Everyone shuck down and clean your armor, stow your weapons,” Ken ordered. “If you have any questions, Chef, Max, or me are here. We have bunk beds ready, look for your last name on the rack. We don’t have a dedicated shuckdown room, you take your armor off and plug it in next to your bunk. You’re never more than a quick sprint away from your armor, got it?”

  “Yessir!” they chorused.

  I had been looking over Alpha and Bravo squads. Zizi Dimka, Chandra Khan, and Lana Smalley under Sergeant Berkhardt for Alpha. Sergeant Min Zhao’s Bravo squad included Greg Vorhis, Jun Chen and Erica Li. That was almost everyone.

  “She’s not here,” Ken said, seeing me survey the platoon.

  “I know.”

  “She’s supposed to be here.”

  I grunted. “I know.”

  Erica Li was telling the new platoon members they should turn over any food they’d smuggled in to her. “I’ll get them into the platoon safe. That shit is in high demand around here, and unless you’ve got it locked up, people will steal it. They’re that sick of alien dog food.”

  “If you don’t handle it, it will go up the chain,” Ken said. “It has to.”

  “I’ll go find her,” I snapped.

  One of the new platoon members gingerly pulled a chocolate bar out and handed it over to Erica.

  “I’ll deal with that,” Ken said, jerking his head in the direction of the chocolate bar.

  “Right.” I turned for the stairs up to the surface.

  Behind me Ken shouted at Erica. “Froyo! Hand the chocolate back over. Taylor, there is no safe down here for food. Come on.”

  + + +

  I found Amira at a northeast hilltop, perched on a slab of rock, watching a hundred or so contractors in simple EVA suits working away at an EMP turret. The gun was a fifty-­foot-long barrel with power cables as thick as a car running off down the nearby tunnel, which itself sank deep under Shangri-La.

  The barrel had yet to be winched into place.

  From her perch I could see the whole Shangri-La basin as well as the job site, now dominated by the cloudy shells of the Pcholem starship sitting the middle of it all.

  “You ignoring the platoon open channel?” I asked her.

  “I was busy. Welcoming the newbies is not high on the priority list. We talked about this.” Her armor was streaked with dirt and peeling paint. What hydrocarbon-filled lakes had she been mucking around in?

  “We hit a cricket scout cloud coming back. Lost the jumpship. Lost Alexis.”

  Amira stood up and turned to look at me. The name patch SINGH was missing its S.

  “I told you they’d be coming here,” she said.

  “Could be a fluke,” I said. “Accordance holds orbit. The surface was cleaned before we got moved here, before we lost Saturn. Maybe the crickets snuck through.”

  “No,” Amira said. She stepped close enough that I could see her face behind the helmet. The silvered nano-ink tattoos were bright against her brown skin, and her eyes flashed like a cat’s as light caught them. “I can taste them, they’re out there, just on the edge. Accordance security says I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I think our systems here have been compromised. They won’t let me get in and audit them. They don’t want humans sullying their systems.”

  “We’re not trained—” I started, trying to bleed some of the anger out. She interrupted me.

  “I’ve been playing with Accordance networks and tech for years. It’s better but not infallible. You know that. The Conglomeration snuck past them to get to the moon, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. And we took the hit for that.”

  “I know.” I thought back to watching the jellyfish-like Conglomerate ship hovering over our training base. The flash of explosions. Stepping over all the corpses of recruits, reaching for emergency oxygen, the crystalized eyes.

  Only three of us survived: Amira, Ken, and me. The heroes of Icarus Base. The survivors of the Darkside War. The three humans who took down an entire Conglomerate starship ourselves.

  But it hadn’t been just the three of us. There’d been all the others who’d died helping us.

  And the new squads who’d died during the drop onto Saturn. And the retreat from Saturn.

  “I was hoping you’d come say hi to the fresh meat like everyone else,” I said.

  “Then you should have ordered me.”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I should have. But you don’t ever listen to me when I do that.”

  “Well, just because the Accordance has leverage on you through your parents back on Earth and can promote you to be Pet Lieutenant doesn’t mean I have the same strings on me. But keep playing your cards right, you can be an Accordance lifer.”

  “Fuck you, that’s uncalled for,” I shouted. “The Conglomerate is the worst thre
at. I’m here to make sure Earth survives.”

  “Then do you want me sniffing out the Conglomerate threat, or dancing to orders because it makes you look good to HQ? Do you want me to pull back? We’re the only platoon out here with a dedicated intelligence officer. I may be under you in rank, but we know what I am. I can go anywhere else and run intel for them, and they’d trip over themselves to have me. I expect this rules-following shit from Ken, not you.”

  Why the hell did this always have to be so hard? “It’s not rules,” I explained. “You need to know some of the names and faces who will have your back in the next firefight. They need to know you. That’s how it works. We’re trying to fashion a team out of all these human bits and pieces. I’ll block for you while you go hunting, I just want you to take support with you, get them used to working with you. Alternate the new squads in and out daily while you prowl. I want someone to have your back, is that so wrong?”

  Amira turned and looked back out of Shangri-La. “You know, I could be jumping at shadows. Don’t put yourself out there on my behalf, I can take the yelling if HQ gets pissed. Say I did it against your recommendation.”

  “You and I both know there are a lot of shadows out in the universe that want us dead,” I told her. “Take the squads with you. I’ll hold the line.”

  3

  Armored up and fresh after a day down, I took the Delta squad out for a roll with Alpha alongside. The new additions were adjusting to Titan gravity and getting a little jumpy. Which was understandable. They’d come screaming down out of orbit in a hurry, been shot out of the sky by Conglomerate crickets, stood their ground by a propane lake, and then flown into Shangri-La, where’d they’d met an unimpressed platoon.

  Now it was time to stretch their legs and keep their attention focused forward. Amira had taken the other squad out past the hills on one of her glitch hunts, though she hadn’t told them that. I’d ordered her to take them with her.

  Far, far under our feet as we bounded about the Shangri-La plain, the civilian contractors worked to tend the heart of Shangri-La: an Accordance-made dark matter generator, half a mile deep in the rock. This would power everything from our EMP cannons to the skyscraper anti-spacecraft weapons, which we were told could vaporize a rock the size of Manhattan dropping on us.

  Which led you to wonder if there would be any on their way anytime soon.

  “The Canadian from up near the Arctic, Suqi,” I asked Ken, her wide eyes flashing back into memory, “she got bounced around. Is she okay?”

  “Physically. She’s still a bit wary of me, I think,” Ken said.

  “You’ve watched too many movies. Leadership isn’t just yelling.”

  “And you need to stop letting them stare at you like some movie star,” Ken shot back. “You need to give them some tough orders, make them realize what it is we’re in the middle of. We need them to be ready, not starstruck.”

  A message from HQ pinged and scrolled down in the lower left of my helmet’s visor. A request for a meeting. “Damn. HQ.”

  “Yeah?” Ken asked.

  “They want an in-person.”

  “I can have Chef take lead and come with you,” Ken offered.

  “Nah.” I shook my head, even though Ken couldn’t see it. There was friction between me and Ken, no doubt. And we’d buried most of it back on the moon. But I still didn’t want him to stand there and watch me get chewed out for something he’d warned me would be a problem with that “see, I told you so” look on his face. “It’s Amira. They’re going to chew on my head a bit, no reason for you to get backsplash. Plus, I need to get Shriek back to our barracks. Keep showing Delta the terrain. I want them to be able to bounce around the basin with their eyes closed. Every loose rock—”

  “Every loose rock and every hidey-hole,” Ken interrupted, completing the sentence.

  + + +

  HQ, like our barracks, was just under the surface. So we could boil out on the basin like cockroaches from our crevices if the Conglomeration came at us. It was farther into the center of the basin, underneath the bulk of the Pcholem spaceship that had landed and come to dominate Shangri-La.

  Major General Foster didn’t spend a lot of time armored up; he was in Colonial Protection Forces gray BDUs, which almost matched the gray coming in at the temples, and he had a perpetually tired look. He stared at me as I clomped into his office. Behind him on the wall was the Icarus Corps logo, the moon and an Earthrise, surrounded by a sawblade-like sun.

  Usually, shit ran downhill. Foster would yell at someone lower in rank, and then on down, and eventually a company captain would end up nervously having a “chat” with me. But most of the CPF captains had come in after I’d fought the Conglomeration at the Icarus crater. They didn’t want to shout at the hero of the Darkside War.

  So now I was standing in front of a major general.

  “Lieutenant: why the hell are you wearing armor in my office? You can barely fit through the door.”

  “Rockhoppers shuck for sleep and showers,” I told him. “Never more than ten feet from armor.”

  Foster stared at me. “You telling me you don’t trust how secure my base is?”

  “Rockhoppers shuck for sleep and showers,” I repeated neutrally.

  We stared levelly at each other. Foster may have been my superior and my elder. But my Rockhoppers didn’t shuck for anything but sleep and showers.

  “Fuck it. I really want to talk about Sergeant Amira Singh,” he said, a sour look on his face.

  HQ was a giant circle filled with pie slice–shaped offices. What looked more like the bridge of a spaceship occupied the center: consoles for comms, massive holographic displays with maps of Titan and Shangri-La, as well as theater maps of the whole system. Soldiers coming in and out from various parts of Shangri-La. When I shuffled around Foster’s office, I turned my back to all that.

  One thing I liked about it: few aliens over us. Our overlords, the Accordance, had basically given Shangri-La over to human oversight.

  To Foster’s oversight.

  Foster didn’t like me. He’d worked hard to get human oversight. He’d worked hard to get the Arvani off his back and he didn’t want that to change. I was something that might fubar everything he’d gotten set up.

  “Amira is—” I began.

  “I’ve explained,” Captain Foster said, tapping his glass desk. “You’ve agreed. She can’t be haring off on some intuition based on her unauthorized networking and hacking abilities. I said no unnecessary trips out past our defensive coverage.”

  “Absolutely, sir,” I said, as flat and mechanical as I could.

  For a month, Foster’d been demanding that Amira focus on beefing up security. Adding trips to the network against outside interference.

  But she’d been doing her own patrols. Heading out past the basin, scouring the plains and lakes in her spare time.

  “In two weeks, the farms below go operational. We become a real damn fortress here on Titan. Supplies can’t be hit.” Foster worried about that a lot. “With EMP cannons up, the anti-ship batteries, our emplacements on the hills, we are Fortress Shangri-La. We have ammo foundries now. Foundries. We are dug in like a tick on the ass of Titan and we will not be dislodged.”

  “I get that, sir.”

  “I don’t want a loss of focus. Everyone stays behind the walls. Secure. Safe. We destroy anything that comes over the hills. We keep beefing up the hills. The aliens trying to kill us won’t be able to touch us. And the aliens that took over Earth, well, maybe they’ll leave us alone as well. This is important!”

  That was new. I hadn’t pegged Foster, a lifer, as having any ill will toward the Accordance. He was old enough to remember Occupation. The accommodations Earth had made to the aliens as they came down to Earth and changed everything.

  Apparently, he saw this base as a place to carve out some space from the Accorda
nce.

  That made Foster somehow slightly more likable. I wasn’t a lifer. I’d been forced into the CPF because my parents were pacifist protestors against Accordance rule. Join the CPF and they lived under comfortable house arrest. If I hadn’t, they would have been executed.

  “If you don’t rein Sergeant Singh in,” Foster warned, getting back to the subject. “I will. Demote her, toss her in a brig, something. I’m done. I have no more patience. Shut her down.”

  “Absolutely, sir,” I said, lying through my teeth.

  + + +

  Up from HQ a level, several carapoids had trundled down out of the Pcholem ship. The pony-sized beetles thudded as they walked, natural armor making them something you gave a wide berth as they unloaded new batches of armor onto carts.

  Old-fashioned manual labor: a carapoid could easily lift all several hundred pounds of an entire suit of armor.

  Several of the carapoids had chiseled symbols on their backs. Swooping letters and what appeared to be umlauts to my human eyes. I’d never seen that on the carapoids down on Earth. They’d been painted official colors, depending on their roles in the Accordance, to match the uniforms of other Accordance members.

  I hung back a bit, thinking to ask, but the carapoids kept busy and didn’t slow for an instant as they trucked back up toward the surface. They’d by cycling into the outside without any gear. The carapoids could fold their carapaces tight to themselves and pass up to an hour in some extremely hostile environments. I’d seen them fighting hand to hand out in the clouds of Saturn when stripped of suits by the enemy.

  I ranged through a few more tunnels, nodding and stepping aside for officers.

  Shangri-La’s medical facilities were located inside a spotless white cavern. The Accordance didn’t see much point in private rooms for general care; most of their technology resided in the ovoid pods stretched in rows by the hundreds. The floors were grilled, the better to flush away any fluids, and could heat up to render the floor sterile again.