by T Q Chant
Miller was firing, blanketing the targeted area with hyper-velocity death. Williams put rounds out into the surrounding area, kicking up sprays of dirt and the occasional puff of blood. “Bug out!” she snapped, once she was satisfied that whatever the fuck that thing was had been knocked out by Miller's fire.
The two of them slid down from their vantage point and sprinted away. Behind them, their position was saturated with hardround fire, the heavy tearing noise of a machinegun firing from somewhere behind the hostiles' forward positions telling her they got out just in time.
“I can take that...” Kora began to say.
“You shut that fucking weapons system down right fucking now!” Williams yelled. “You shut it down or I fill it with holes!”
They were covering ground fast, coming up on the drop site. The pod was still smoking, the ground around it shimmering. Yvgena was still in the heavily-laden Achilles but had her coilgun ready, the weapon looking like a toy in the suit's gauntlet. Dirchs was crouched over Ortuz's body, rotorcannon spun up and ready to unleash.
Williams knew there was nothing she or anyone could do for their commander, but she still stopped by his body. The needle had made a hell of a mess, and the stench of spilt blood and burnt flesh filled her nostrils – even seeing it on Dirchs's feed hadn't prepared her for the reality of it.
“We'll work out what the hell happened later,” she told them as she dashed to the packs slung on Yvgena and hunted through it for what she needed. “Right now we need to get back to camp. Miller, Kora, point – Kora, I want to see your sidearm out and Medusa doing nothing but following you. Yvgena and Cahaya in the middle. Dirchs, you're rearguard with me. Let's move.”
“What about Ortuz?”
“He's dead – what about him?” She pulled up the left leg of Ortuz's jumpsuit, knowing she'd find a copy of his tag there. Any soldier who'd seen combat knew not to rely on the tags worn round the neck. She scanned the active-tatt on his calf with her Engager's scope and logged date, time and position of his death, then cracked open the thermplus gel packet and dumped its contents over the body.
Dirchs put a hand on her arm. “You sure?”
“We can't bring him with us, and he wouldn't want us risking our lives for his stiff. Now you watch our rear and you kill any of those fuckers you see.”
They extracted under fire, the hostiles moving up on them just as they started the yomp back. Dirchs's rotorcannon roared death back at the enemy, spitting out explosive shells at five thousand rounds a minute while Williams tagged and obliterated any sign of heavy weapons with streams of high-velocity pellets. They left Ortuz's body burning, the high-energy incendiary consuming what was left of him and sending up a single column of black smoke.
“Contact right,” Miller reported, followed by a snap of fire. Kora was up next to him, an issue Global Arms sub-machinegun in her hands ready to tackle anything that got in close. Williams couldn't remember the last time she'd seen Kora holding any weapon but Medusa's control pad.
“Yvgena, push up and engage. Miller, Kora, advance. If we get pinned down, we die.”
*********
You've got one shot at this.
Samrit hesitated only briefly before she started running towards Cho and her gaggle of workers. She waved one hand over her head as she went, hoping for an effect of slight panic rather than aggression.
It didn't stop Cho drawing the large pistol that she wore belted on her hip –
– flash of fire illuminating hate-filled eyes –
but at least she didn't aim it at Samrit's unprotected head.
“Stop right there!” the older woman barked. “What do you want? You know the Saved cannot come too close to those awaiting their journey into the Brightness!”
Samrit didn't know that, but it was a useful bit of information. “It is a great fortune you are here, Marshal!” she gasped out, only having to exaggerate being out of breath slightly. “There is...there are...sinning...”
Don't overdo it. “I think there are people fornicating in the great machine there,” she indicated, feeling a strange but passing stab of guilt. Glancing back, she could see Bethany standing with her hands on her hips, staring after her. It would have been better if she had got clear.
Cho's eyes were narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“I saw...” Saw what? Two couples having a bit of fun. “I saw them doing it.”
That was all the encouragement Cho needed. “Lafarge, Adams, come with me! The rest of you dogs stay put!” The angry glare was turned on Samrit. “You as well, but do not let me see you speaking with these...infidels.”
With that, she took off at a run back towards the harvester. Samrit turned to the Unsaved, and was slightly taken aback by their hostile stares. “I... I had to...”
The old man – older man – who had recognised her some days before pushed through to the front. It was impossible to tell how old he really was – his skin was leathery and tanned to a dark brown, and crows feet surrounded his eyes. What hair he had left was salt-and-pepper. “You did – it's been pretty obvious for a while that Cho's out to get you. I think she's the reason you keep getting sent to the Bright Place. You won't remember me. Name's Janssen.”
There was something oddly familiar about him. “Did I know you, before I was brought here? Before I was saved?”
Someone snorted derisively from within the crowd. “Do we have to do this again?”
Janssen glanced over his shoulder. “She remains our only hope. Folks, we may as well sit down. You too, Sam, maybe sit a little way from us and with your back to us. Got some truths to impart to you.”
She did as she was told. As she folded herself down onto the ground, she saw Cho pulling herself up into the harvester and disappear into the darkness, while Bethany stood some distance away, looking backwards and forwards between Samrit and the machine, obviously distressed. The two disconsolate Unsaved who had been pressed by Cho stood below the gaping black maw of the machine.
“No, I don't know you from before you were brought here. We've met before, I think after the second time you were taken to this Bright Place of theirs.”
“The second time? How long have I been here?”
“We first saw you a hundred and twenty or so local days ago. You were little more than a zombie, shoved out into the fields to start learning about being Saved.” Janssen couldn't keep the bitterness from his voice. “There were more of us, then.”
“And things follow the same pattern every time,” the younger, sardonic man said. “You start asking questions, find a way to make contact with us, and then get caught somehow. You betray yourself, someone betrays you, and they send you back to the Bright Place.”
“How...how many times?” she whispered.
“This is the fifth.”
“But...why... Why are they doing this to me?”
“Because they love you and want to save you, obviously.”
“Hush now, Lucien. I think they're experimenting on you, but we don't know why you were chosen when they already had plenty of guinea pigs here. We don't even know where you came from – you're not from our colony.”
“Colony? Bethany said Jonathan led his people to this planet to be saved.”
“Jonathan is a lying sack of shit, and I wouldn't trust Bethany.”
“Hussain, let me speak. We were colonists here, InterGlobe Corp sponsored. Think, Sam, think. It will come back to you – it comes back every time, no matter what they do to you.”
Samrit was watching her mentor as they spoke. Bethany seemed torn by indecision and worry, and nothing more sinister than that. Samrit felt sick to the bottom of her stomach. “Has she been my mentor each time?”
“No, there is a new one each time. We're not sure what happens to your mentors when they fail – nothing good, I'd think.”
There was shouting coming from the inside of the harvester now, and the sound of a gunshot. Samrit flinched. “What have I done?” she whispered as Cho threw the first of her c
aptives, naked, from the back of the ancient vehicle. From the ragdoll way he fell, it was clear he wasn't a captive but a victim of Cho's swift punishment. People were running towards the area now, drawn by the noise.
“What you had to do. These are not good people, Sam, though many are just brainwashed drones. Cho, though – Cho is one of the worst.”
“Queen bitch even before they took her,” someone muttered from amongst the slaves. Cho was throwing others from the harvester now, also naked, two men and a woman, these ones alive. She gestured angrily at Lafarge and Adams, and the two slaves started tying up the prisoners.
“What do you want from me?”
“The question is what you want – to break free, to escape. What we want is for you to take us with you, if you can.” Janssen sounded tired, hopeless as he spoke. If he was telling the truth, this was not the first time he'd been through this with her.
Samrit looked over shoulder, assessing the tired, ragged state of the prisoners. Something struck her. “Where are the women? Do they keep you segregated?”
Janssen's shoulders sagged. “We don't know, not exactly. They separated us when we arrived here. You worked out they were somewhere deeper in the colony, somewhere in the hospital and hospice complex where they keep you. You were caught last time when you were trying to find out.”
An image flashed unbidden to her mind, of closed and locked doors beyond the maternity ward; the only doors she had seen in the wards without windows.
Samrit opened her mouth to speak again. Someone hissed at them to be quiet, and she snapped her head round to see Cho marching towards her, pistol raised and aimed.
“Were you talking to these dogs?”
**********
“KIA details noted and recorded. We are of course all deeply saddened to hear of Captain Ortuz's demise.”
The Chief's voice gave no hint of his sadness, but Williams hadn't really expected it to.
It had taken them three hours to get back to their basecamp. The hostiles had broken contact after a brisk hour of fighting on the move, though opinions were divided as to why. They'd all confirmed kills. Even Cahaya had hit with his issue sidearm – the first time he'd taken a life, emptying out the skull of a hostile who was trying to gut him with a machete during a close-action ambush. Dirchs and Miller were sure they'd bloodied the enemy enough to drive them off, but Williams wasn't sure if it was that or the fact that they were close to the mesa that housed the old jSpace array.
There was definitely something – not right about the place, and she was becoming convinced that whoever their opponents were on this rock, they were afraid of it. Her own people, back home in the South Austral Fed, had certain places that were treated with fear or veneration – it wasn't hard to imagine others believing similar things.
“Thank you, sir. I'm transmitting a data package with everything we have on the hostiles, including limited holo from our rigs.”
“It was a shame that you couldn't get better pix.”
“We were engaged in a fighting retreat, sir, we didn't have time to gather intel.”
“Gathering intel is exactly why you are there, Sergeant. What of the malfunction in your combat support unit? Or was it user error?”
“The system was hacked,” Kora said, her voice hovering somewhere between petulant and angry. Williams wasn't sure if she'd ever get over the fact that one of her drones had killed their commander – if she was going to, it wouldn't be any time soon. “Nothing I've ever seen before.”
“I can confirm that, sir,” Cahaya said more calmly. In contrast to Kora, the little Indonesian guy was remarkably calm, perhaps too calm. “I've been analysing the code as best I can with Snoopy – I mean the field intel unit – under quarantine. I'm pretty sure it's human coding, at least most of it is – I can recognise the logic and some of the language. But it's very...weird.”
“Define weird, Specialist.”
“Not right? Recommend you have your people look at it, sir, but on a system that doesn't even have a hard link to anything else.”
“Recommendation noted. How did were your systems infected?”
“We're still working on that, sir.”
“Sergeant Williams – you're mission command on the ground now, the call is yours. Do you want to be pulled out?”
Williams looked round the rest of the team. Dirchs and Miller both looked like they were having the time of their lives – but then, you didn't get into specops unless you liked fighting and killing, at least a little bit. Kora was shut down, Yvgena was her usual unreadable self. Cahaya just met her gaze calmly and nodded once, firmly.
“Sir, we're an intelligence gathering unit, and there's still intel to be got. We'll stay put for now. Request the nest is positioned to provide orbital support.”
“Understood, I shall relay that request.” The cutter didn't have a lot in the way of artillery and nothing specifically purposed for orbital bombardment, but everything would help with Medusa out for the count for now.
They'd just have to be really, really careful how they called it in. A rock dropped from space would ruin anyone's day.
**********
Janssen bolted from the group pretty much as soon as Cho had spoken, moving surprisingly quickly for someone who appeared so frail. The one he'd called Sergei shouted something, as did one or two of the other prisoners. Samrit realised what she had to do.
“He's getting away!” she shouted, leaping to her feet and waving her hands to Cho, pointing after Janssen. The Marshal's eyes widened in anger and she loosed a shot, going wide in her haste, the enormous hand cannon kicking in her grip. Samrit ducked out of the way, in case Cho decided to make a more decisive move in her undeclared vendetta, but the other woman was intent on the fleeing slave.
Other overseers – all of them Jonathan's people, as far as she could tell, a cruel fucking twist – were running to head Janssen off. He was slowing fast, but Samrit knew he had done what he'd intended.
They brought him down a mere fifty metres from where he'd started. He tried to fight, striking out with a rock he scooped up when one of the overseers tackled him down. Samrit couldn't see from where she was, but from the cry of pain the rock connected. Janssen screamed a moment later, a terrible animal keening, and she forced herself to walk away, to walk towards Bethany without looking back as the overseers continued to beat the man who had helped her.
Bethany was wringing her hands and watching everything with fear-filled eyes, standing on the edge of the growing crowd that surrounded the three shamed Saved. Samrit walked up to her, suddenly unsure of herself. “What have I done?” she asked quietly.
Bethany took her arm and turned her away from the scene. “The right thing,” she said firmly, a note of pride in her voice, as she led Samrit away to the hospice.
“What happens now?”
“There will be an Inquiry. The three who were caught...caught...sinning will be punished. The Unsaved who ran – I do not think there is any hope for him.” The slightest pause. “And that is only right.”
“Their sin was terrible – I remember this from... I don't know why I know that.”
“It is part of going to the Bright Place.” Bethany took both of Samrit’s hands between her own. “You are so lucky, Samrit. What I spent years learning, you had revealed to you. When you go to the Bright Place, you are given everything you need to be Saved.”
“That seems a little too easy,” Samrit muttered, her tone of voice new to both her and Bethany. Luckily for her, a bell started ringing urgently throughout the hospice. Bethany's face blanched. “What's the matter?”
“It is the punishment bell. All must attend.” Another slight pause. “I have never known it to be rung so soon after an offence is discovered.”
The sound was louder in the corridor as the two of them stepped from Samrit's room, but she could see no speakers. They joined the flow of people heading out from the hospice, Samrit sticking as close as possible to Bethany. She realised that the crowd wo
uld carry them into an area of the city where she had not yet ventured, having for the most part been confined to the route between the hospice and the fields.
She looked around curiously as the mass of people carried them along. They were moving down rough-hewn tunnels, some of them dipping so low even she could have touched the ceiling if she reached up far enough. On either side of this main thoroughfare, smaller subsidiaries branched off, people coming out of dormitories or workshops to join the throng.
“Will the whole settlement assemble?”
Bethany, for once, was not amused at her obvious naivety, but nor was she angry. She seemed deeply worried. “No no. Many thousands live here – the punishment bell summons only the neighbours of those who...”
The crowd was spilling out into a square, no doubt the centre of this sector of the city. It was underground, but with a high vaulted ceiling that drew her eye up to a small aperture at the top through which sunlight blazed; the work was obviously older and finer than the tunnels in which she lived.
She dropped her gaze as she heard voices arguing on the raised platform in the centre of the plaza, and stopped dead when she saw Janssen.
His punishment had obviously already been decided and carried out – a minor thing, no doubt, punishing an Unsaved. His head topped a pole that stood at one corner of the raised platform, his naked and mutilated body hanging upside down below it. Samrit felt her gorge rise but fought it down, let herself be pulled forward again. Bethany's face was pale and drawn but she seemed determined to be as close to the front as possible.
It's going to be hard, but you gotta blend in. Gotta be seen to approve.
CHAPTER FIVE – MISSION CREEP
“Mission parameters remain the same,” Williams told them. “Scope out the sitch onplanet, determine if Security Specialist Cane's mayday had anything to it, gather intel on any hostiles. Secondary objective is determine whether Cane is alive or dead.”
“Safe to say she was right on the money – so tick that off the list.”
