by Ben Weaver
“Captain St. Andrew?” came a voice over my channel. “This is CW Pilot Kenner, copy?”
“Copy you, Lieutenant.”
“We’ve just left the skimmer. Punching the hole now. ETA to your location: two minutes, copy?”
“Copy. We’re taking out some bunkers down here, but we still got a ground force. Got them on your scope?”
“Got ’em. We’ll lay down some suppressing fire.”
“Copy. Flare’s up now.”
“See you on the ground. Kenner out.”
I reached into a small pocket built into my boot, withdrew the microflare, thumbed a switch, tossed the flare straight up. It took off like a rocket, leaving a brilliant green streak that Alliance Marines could not erase.
Of course, that streak gave up our location to those Marines, and they opened up with everything they had. I wanted very badly to charge them, turn all of their beads back toward themselves, but the bond felt weak. I agonized over taking the chance, then just remained with Hollis, huddled behind the rock, as rounds chiseled away at our cover.
Paul’s eyes flickered open, and he raised his head, took one look at his bandaged arm, and shuddered violently. “Fuck it, Scott. Leave me here. Dina’s gone. There’s nothing now, man. Nothing. It was all for nothing.”
“No, it wasn’t. You have to come back with me now. You have to tell your old man the truth.”
“Yeah, and stand court-martial.”
“Don’t worry about that now.”
He was about to say something, but the approaching whine of our dropshuttle overpowered even the incoming. I caught a glimpse of the silver ship, its boxy nose and heavy landing gear making it look more dog-than birdlike as it zeroed in on the Marines opposite us. A salvo of acipalm-three bombs dropped from its belly, struck the ground, and heaved all hell in a rumbling wave. You could hear the Marines screaming, smell the flesh melting as the dropshuttle’s exhaust turned the dropzone into a sandstorm.
“Rooslin?”
“Yeah, I see our ride,” he said. “Don’t leave without me.”
The dropshuttle had not taken any artillery fire, so I had to assume he had neutralized the bunkers. Even as the ship landed and its bay door cycled open, Halitov appeared through the whipping dust. He limped forward a few steps, stumbled, fell onto his stomach.
“Go!” I ordered Hollis, as two Colonial Wardens dressed in navy blue utilities jumped out and jogged toward us.
She looked at Paul, saw that the Wardens would carry him, then ran toward the ship.
I sprinted back for Halitov, reached him, then rolled him over. Shit. Round in the leg. Round in the shoulder. Gaping cut across the forehead. With help from only my surging adrenaline, I dug hands under his arms and dragged him back toward the ship. I didn’t realize that I was being fired upon by two Marines who had escaped the acipalm-three strike. Later on, the pilots would tell me that those rounds had chewed into my back, weakened my skin, and torn through my shoulders. All I knew was that by the time I got on board, I couldn’t understand why I felt so weak. I remember thinking, Good-bye, Dina, as the ship blasted away.
The ride back was equally dramatic, though I couldn’t describe it with much detail since I passed out even before we broke atmosphere. I heard that we had taken several direct hits, that our landing gear and guidance systems had been destroyed, and that were it not for the expert piloting of the skimmer’s captain, who managed to scoop us out of orbit with the ferocity of a mother bird saving her young, we’d all be dead. She was the first person I thanked with a bottle of expensive bourbon. Kenner, the dropshuttle’s pilot, preferred Tau Ceti vodka. Hollis, the only cadet to escape Exeter, had trouble meeting my gaze when we were wheeled into the Auspex’s sickbay. I thought of reassuring her that I wouldn’t report her insubordination, but I didn’t get the chance. She was examined, extensively debriefed, then shipped out, all while I spent the next forty-eight hours recuperating. She didn’t even come to say good-bye. I thought for certain she’d at least bid farewell to Paul.
At my request, they put my gurney next to Halitov’s, and beside him lay Paul, whose temples were going gray.
“Three stooges, huh?” I said.
“Who?” asked Halitov.
“Stooge. What does that mean?” added Paul. “Is it like a musketeer?”
“Just forget it.” My father was a film buff who really enjoyed the old comedies; I shouldn’t have expected them to understand the reference.
Kristi Breckinridge entered the bay, lips glossed and hair freshly gelled. I didn’t feel much for beauty marred by cunning. However, Halitov examined her every curve as she nodded to us, then approached Paul’s bed. She knew we would listen in, but she didn’t seem to care.
“I’ve sent word to your father,” she told him.
He threw his good arm over his eyes. “So?”
“So he’ll be thrilled that you’re alive.”
“Now he can watch his son get thrown in jail for going AWOL.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, you’ve got three things on your side: a good lawyer, a famous father, and a war in which every conditioned officer is needed. If you do any time, it’ll be short. And your father will do everything he can to get you reassigned to the Wardens.”
“Just what I’ve always wanted,” he said grimly.
She pursed her lips. “You’ve been through a lot. The doctors say you’re responding well to the nanotech repairs. That’s good. And you’ll come around. Get some rest.” She was about to leave, then stopped. “Oh, one more thing. I’m sorry about Dina.”
“Get the fuck out of here!” he suddenly screamed, then rolled over and buried his head in his pillow.
She shook her head and started out. As she passed my bed, I gestured her over. “Don’t we have anything to discuss?”
“Like what?”
I scrunched up my eyes, turning my gaze into an old man’s. “Call me insane, but I don’t think any of us wants to be flapping our gums and using a cane before we’re twenty-five.”
“I told you that the aging’s not that predictable and that the meeting’s being rescheduled.”
“When and where?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ve had some problems.”
“Like what?”
“Like in a few minutes, Disque is going to come in here and relieve you of command of Zodiac Company.”
I sat up, winced as the synthskin over the wounds on my back pulled a little. “Say again?”
“You’ve lost Zodiac.”
“Why?”
“Apparently somebody high up, maybe your friend Ms. Brooks, wants you and Halitov running Special Ops. They say you work better with small teams.”
“So I’m getting transferred to the Wardens,” I concluded.
She shook her head. “The Seventeen’s putting together a new special forces group, codename Rebel ten-seven. We think it’s in reaction to the rumors that we’re tying to manipulate the government.”
“So our new government doesn’t trust its own special forces and decides to create another unit…to do what? Combat the first one?”
“Maybe.”
“Jesus…divided we fall.”
“Yeah, well, you and Halitov are being groomed to become key players in this new Rebel ten-seven, but we’ll keep doing everything we can to get you transferred to us.”
“I thought that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“So did we. But like I said, somebody upstairs is really pulling some strings. The colonel’s pushing hard but getting nowhere. We’ll need you to put in your own transfer request.”
“Let’s have that meeting first.”
She nodded. “I’ll get back with you as soon as I have something. And by the way, your AAT will start up tomorrow.”
“Combat training? I’m not even healed yet.”
“You will be. And I hope you’ll be ready for me. While you were down on Exeter, I came up with a new move I want to show you.”
“Can you show
it to me, too?” asked Halitov, his salacious tone making me grimace.
“With pleasure. Of course, it could make you sterile.”
He frowned.
“Kidding,” she finally said, then turned to me, her lip quivering. “Say hi to your mother for me.” She hurried toward the door.
“Captain?”
She froze, didn’t look back. “What is it?”
“Maybe one day you can tell me about your brother…”
She faced me, shook her head, then left.
“What a nice ass,” said Halitov. “What a very nice ass.”
“Yeah, on a woman we can’t trust,” I reminded him.
“What do we got to lose?” he asked.
I glanced past him to Paul. “Hey, Paul. You all right?”
He rolled back over but kept his arm over his eyes. “Oh, yeah, I’m fucking great. How’re you?”
“Stupid question. Sorry. Dina was a hero. You know that, right? You know that.”
“Yeah, well now she’s a corpse.”
Halitov looked at me, shrugged. “You had to ask, huh?”
I thought a moment, decided it best to change the subject. “Paul, what do you think about Breckinridge? About the Wardens?”
“I don’t fucking care about any of that,” he said. “I need to get back to Exeter. Dina deserves a proper burial. I should’ve tried harder to get her off that machine. I should’ve carried her out of there.”
“There wasn’t time,” I told him. “You did the right thing.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“How’re you going to get to Exeter now?” asked Halitov. “Go AWOL again? To do what? Bury her?”
“If I have to.”
“Paul, we’ll work it out. I’ll send word to Ms. Brooks. She’ll come up with a plan to get Dina. If you can’t get there, I will. You’ll just need to tell me how to get inside that machine. We’ll bring her back and bury her properly.”
He tightened his lips, then shifted over, his back to us.
“Far as I’m concerned, I never want to see that rock ever again,” said Halitov. “Never again.”
“Yeah, but you never get what you want,” I reminded him.
He looked at Paul, then at me. “Neither do you.”
I lay back on my bed, closed my eyes, thought of Dina hanging on the wall. Although I had said the words—Dina is dead—the reality of her loss finally took hold. Back at the academy, she had been my counselor, my savior, my strength. Though she had rejected me at first, she had spoken so gently and honestly that she had made me love her even more. I’m not sure how or why, but she understood me when no one else could. “There’s something about you,” she had said. “I don’t know what it is. I just get the feeling that I was meant to know you. And that mark on your face? I think it’s a blessing. You just don’t recognize it.” I’ll never forget those words. And knowing her was the greatest blessing of all.
Good-bye, Dina.
My thoughts shifted to Paul, to the guilt I felt for having fallen in love with his girlfriend, and I knew then what our relationship would be. No matter how jovial we appeared on the outside, we would always feel the burn of jealousy and mistrust. Still, I felt like I owed him something, an apology at least. Then again, I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. I had always thought of him as the privileged one, the guy who had no trouble with women. He would find another love. I was a gennyboy. Who would understand me the way Dina had?
“Captain? I got some bad news for you and good news for me.”
Slowly, I opened my eyes and glanced at Disque’s ugly face. “Want to trade?” I asked.
He smiled darkly. “All right, son. Listen up…”
A few years ago, I ran into Disque at a veterans’ benefit. They wheeled what was left of him into the hall. The son of a bitch didn’t even remember me.
PART 2
Treading Water
7
Just two weeks after our narrow escape from Exeter, Halitov and I found ourselves running like hell across the deck of the Eri Flower, a floating research vessel nearly two kilometers long and sailing at four knots through the great Northern Vosaic Ocean of Epsilon Eri III. We weren’t running for our health; then again, maybe we were. Our cover had been blown, and four Alliance Marines skinned up and were charging after us. Particle fire punched through a pair of life tubes just ahead on our right and purple coolant spilled through the Swiss cheese of their bright blue hulls.
“They’re going to run our tac codes through their system,” cried Halitov, sprinting a few steps ahead of me. He hit the coolant, fell on his ass. Swore.
I helped him up. “We’re done here.”
“But how do we call for extraction? They’ll be jamming our comm now.”
“We’re not calling.”
“The hell you talking about?”
“This is a recon mission,” I reminded him breathlessly. “We already got off the signal. The brass have everything they need about the Alliance’s occupation here.”
“So we’re expendable.”
“Says so on our résumés.”
“Not on mine.”
We kept running, dodging the fire and squinting against the planet’s bright, K2 orange star. I had no plan, and I suspected Halitov knew I had no plan. We had been told that if we were discovered, we should use any and all means necessary to escape. And if we were captured, a single coded message to our tac’s computer would put us in cardiac arrest with no chance for resuscitation. As we continued toward the ship’s bow, I thought it might very well come to that.
Four scientists in lab coats stood near the railing ahead, measuring something with small instruments. The Eri Flower was an aquacultural researcher’s paradise, and over fifty thousand brains from nearly all seventeen systems lived aboard her to study new ways to improve cultivating marine or freshwater food fish or shellfish. Those brains were instrumental in improving food supplies in over half the colonies, and consequently, the side who controlled the ship gained a valuable proving ground for both the academic and business communities. We had lost the Flower during the first month of the war. Only now was the new colonial government interested in recapturing the ship. It seemed obvious to me that without a strong food supply, you couldn’t fight a war. I would’ve defended the food and other supplies first, but that idea was naive and made too much sense. I’ve learned without surprise that government officials are sometimes bribed by representatives from conglomerates like Exxo-Tally and Inte-Micro. In fact, scuttlebutt had it that we had lost the Eri Flower because most of the troops assigned to defend her had been moved to Drummer Fire, a terrestrial planet well-known for producing an expensive lubricant called Crude 57A. We saved the production plants on Drummer Fire. The crude continued to flow. Colonial profits continued to be made. And the Eri Flower fell into the hands of the alliances.
But now, Halitov and I were part of an intelligence-gathering mission to win her back. We had tawted in posing via expensive DNA forgeries as Western Alliance security officers attached to a government research team from Luna. We had reveled in the idea of running an op on Epsilon Eri III, a world whose continents were entirely covered by seas and whose breathable atmosphere was purportedly the result of Racinian terraforming efforts. Neither of us had ever seen a real ocean, and we had both been disappointed when we learned that we wouldn’t get a chance to see AQ-Tower, a modest-sized province whose largest buildings rose up through shallow waters. AQ was still held by colonial forces, as was Jones Rigi-Plat, an experiment in creating a kind of massive raft of biologics on which a city of two hundred thousand had been constructed, a city whose limits constantly grew. Both were impressive sights to see, but we weren’t on vacation.
And the rounds buzzing near my ears continually reminded me of that.
The scientists craned their heads as we thundered by them, and I figured our gray security uniforms said we were responding to a call and not the reason for one. I caught up to Halitov, and as we sprinted on, I couldn’t
help but notice the calm, endless sea ahead of us, the water supposedly the same color as Earth’s Pacific Ocean near the California coastline. A great wedge of sunlight lay across the waves and narrowed toward the horizon. The open space, very uncharacteristic of the mines where I grew up, had made me feel warm and at peace from the moment I stepped aboard the ship. Now it reminded me of how cut off we really were.
“Aw, shit,” moaned Halitov as four Marines rounded a corner ten meters up the deck and leveled their rifles at us. We could’ve run perpendicular to the rail, if we hadn’t reached Research Platform Skid #17, a launching ramp for jumpsubs and other small water craft. I looked at the placard identifying the area as such. Escape Plan B, though pathetic, took hold. Maybe all that water held the answer.
“Let’s go,” I told him, throwing one leg over the rail.
“We’re jumping overboard?” he asked.
“Abandon ship.”
“Let’s steal a jumpsub.”
“No time.”
The fact that the Eri Flower’s deck stood nearly four hundred meters above the ocean’s surface probably had something to do with his reluctance, as did the hirosasqui, who ruled the planet’s seas. Indigenous fish often compared to Earth’s great white sharks, the hirosasqui are three times as large as the great whites and have seven dorsal fins. Halitov and I had been aboard the Eri Flower for about a week, and nearly every day one or both of us had spotted one of the beasts hunting smaller bait fish near the ship’s hull. Combat suit or no, entering those alien waters would test our bravery and sanity.
But it was either that or take on all the Marines, pray the bond wouldn’t fail us, kill them, and reveal that we weren’t just spies but conditioned officers. Maybe we could hit the water instead, swim under the ship to an access point before they were able to launch a jumpsub. We’d find a dive hatch, get back on board, and evade those Marines long enough to find another way to signal for extraction. Pretty naive thinking, now that I consider it.
I didn’t give Halitov a chance to argue further. I jumped, and even as I fell, I yelled, “Come on!”
