Outpost

by W. P. Brothers

  “You want to know where I’m from, huh?” Steven’s facial expression hardened, and his face turned red. “You must think I’m some kind of idiot. You think I’d tell you where my folks are? You think I’d let you send the company goons after them?” Steven’s shouts reverberated off the concrete walls, and Jack heard the metal frame of the bed squeak as the young man pulled against his restraints. Then Steven’s face crumpled with pain, his movements no doubt reminding him of the bullet hole in his leg.

  “What are you talking about?” Jack’s brow knotted. “What company goons are you talking about?”

  “You know who they are!” Steven shouted back. “You’re working with them. Why else would you fight us? We’re trying to save you!”

  Jack looked up from Steven and over at Osterman, who was sitting on an empty medical bed against the wall near the door, his chin in his hand, his eyes fixed on Steven, his expression unreadable in the dim light.

  “Okay…” Jack began, gathering his thoughts, wondering if the kid was insane. “Just tell me what you do for a living.”

  Steven glared at him suspiciously, he nostrils flaring.

  “I don’t think the goons will find your family just based on your job.” Jack crossed his arms behind his back, did his best to make his voice unthreatening.

  Steven swallowed hard, winced again. “I’m a machinist.”

  Jack nodded. An industrial worker. That made sense, and it explained the work clothes, though not his thin, undernourished appearance. What it didn’t explain was why these people had attacked Kensington, a week away from any industrial planets.

  “And what did you machine? What sort of product?”

  “I milled small parts.”

  “For which company or organization?”

  Steven shook his head, sweat rolling down his face, his jaw clenched against the pain. “No. You’re trying to figure out where my family is. I told you… I won’t let you get them.”

  “Listen,” Jack said, kneeling near Steven’s head, an idea coming to him. “We’re with the military, do you understand me? We are not trying to kill your family. Whoever you’re afraid of, we can protect you from them if you just tell us who sent you to attack us.”

  Steven shook his head again, more frantically this time. “You’re working with the enemy. You’re serving the monster!”

  Jack sighed, massaged his temples again. This was going nowhere. Jack had never heard any human in the Alliance react this way to a member of the armed forces. Every child in primary school grew up learning that the military was all that stood between the Alliance and its destruction. The Frontin, the Milipa — they all demanded a constant show of strength to keep them at bay. Facing so much fear and conflict, so many people were in uniform, and it seemed to Jack that the news was always showing servicemembers as heroes. To be treated like an enemy was something Jack had never expected. There could only be one answer.

  “Have the Milipa trained you to think we’re the enemy?”

  “The Milipa?” Steven’s eyebrows rose with surprise. “Don’t you see what they’ve done to you? They’ve convinced you we’re working with murderers! We just want to save ourselves, save you!”

  “From who? Who do you think we are working for?” Jack’s voice rose as his temper flared, causing Steven to flinch. Jack stepped back from the bed, breathing deeply, trying to reclaim his calm. None of this made any damned sense.

  “You talked about the monster. Who is the monster?” Osterman had stood up, and had walked to stand next to Steven on the opposite side of the bed from Jack. “If I’ve been tricked into serving someone, I want to know who it is.”

  Steven looked from Jack to Osterman, his complexion pale.

  “You work for the companies.” Steven whimpered in pain.

  “The companies.” Jack repeated, his mind blank.

  “Yes. Our… Our bosses.” Steven’s eyes closed. “And you’ve killed all of us. And now you’re going to kill me. Oh God. Just let me go home! Let me go home!” Steven babbled on, his voice becoming ragged, the pain of his wound and the weight of his fear no doubt wearing him down.

  Jack looked over at Osterman, and saw the same comprehension he felt dawning in the major’s eyes.

  “Steven. Steven!” Jack reached out, put a hand on the prisoner’s shoulder. “You’re trying to fight your bosses? You’re trying to fight the companies you work for, is that it?”

  Steven nodded, his eyes meeting Jack. “We won’t let them keep us down anymore. We… We need to fight back. You killed them! You broke in at night, we were late on the bills, you knew I was going to the meetings… and Mom tried to stop you. You killed her. You killed her!” Steven was writhing in the bed, becoming more hysterical with every moment. Jack could tell that whatever window he had to talk to Steven was closing.

  “Steven, who is we?”

  Steven glared up at him. “We… We are the United Worker’s Legion. We… We’ll destroy the capital class.” Steven’s eyes bulged from his thin, ashen face as he spat the words up at Jack. “We will bring justice to the Alliance!”

  “This barrel has a thousand shots in it before your accuracy will start to degrade. Maybe two. If you can avoid rapid fire, that’ll make it last longer.” Sergeant Collins, the company armorer, pulled the muzzle gauge out of the barrel of Christine’s carbine and handed the weapon back to her, its smooth metallic surfaces glinting in the moonlight.

  “I’ll arrange it with the enemy so I can shoot more slowly.” Christine slung the carbine over her shoulder and stood up from the overturned crate that Collins had been using as a chair for rangers and marines visiting his makeshift foxhole workstation.

  “Anything else I can do for you, Lieutenant?” Collins looked up at Christine through blue eyes ringed with dark circles and wiped his forehead with hands mummified by athletic tape.

  Given the heavy, sustained use that all the weapons in the company were getting, Christine had no doubt the armorer had been working his fingers raw. Stacks of rifles and carbines leaned against the foxhole’s earthen wall next to a bucket of assorted parts. The small worktable in front of Collins — another upturned crate — was scattered with tools, broken rifle parts, and grease stains.

  Movement drew Christine’s attention, and she looked to see the shadowy outlines of Commander Wilcox and Major Osterman returning to the bunker, no doubt finished with their tour of the defenses. They’d been spending a lot of time walking the lines after they’d broken the news about their enemy’s identity, no doubt trying to gauge the effect of the information on everyone’s morale. Christine could only guess how successful they’d been. She herself was still trying to make sense of it all.

  “No, that covers it. Thanks, Sergeant.” Christine clambered out of the foxhole and took a moment to re-orient herself in the darkness. She then strode off just along the edge of the clearing that surrounded the bunker, behind the network of foxholes that the rangers and marines were settling down into for the night. She took in the sandbagged machine gun pits, the teepee stacks of rifles, the men and women cutting open ration packs with bayonets and nodding at her as she passed. She returned their acknowledgement, but her thoughts had fallen back to the officer’s meeting that Wilcox had called an hour ago.

  “We believe we now know exactly whom we are fighting,” Wilcox had begun, leaning forward onto the metal briefing table in the radio room, his face grim. “These people are workers from industrial centers — we don’t know which — who have initiated a full-scale revolt. Their objective appears to be the destruction of something our prisoner called the capital class. We can only assume that means the wealthy — bankers, industrialists, company owners.”

  The officers had been silent for a moment, none of them knowing how to respond. Christine had shaken her head slightly, not wanting to believe what she was hearing. She had almost expected Wilcox to grin and say that it was all a joke.

  Finally, Lieutenant Arnot had spoken up. “And what about the Milipa, or the F
rontin? Do they seem to be involved at all?”

  “Negative, Lieutenant. There seems to be no outside influence here at all.”

  “How big is this revolt?” Squires had looked oddly pale in the lamplight, his uniform sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his bare arms crossed in front of his chest.

  “We can’t say for certain,” Major Osterman had said, stepping forward. “But based on what we got out of the prisoner before we had to sedate him, it sounds like there may be millions of workers involved.”

  “We don’t know what their leadership looks like yet.” Wilcox had stood up straight, meeting the gazes of the officers in the room one by one. “But it sounds like they have some kind of organizational structure. They call themselves the United Worker’s Legion.”

  Worker’s Legion?

  Ever since they had discovered that their enemies were human, the rangers and marines had been debating non-stop who was behind the attack on Kensington. Christine had overheard some entertaining theories. The marines, who had apparently had a confrontation recently in Derek’s Triangle with a group of humans in league with the Frontin, had thought that maybe their opponents on Kensington were part of the same plot. The rangers had favored the Milipa or even troops from the old Black Star Empire as the culprits. One had suggested mass mind control. Corporal Lazaar, looking up from the comic section of Alliance Servicemember’s Magazine, had suggested that maybe their enemies were some kind of zombie, stricken by a disease. Christine would almost prefer that to the truth.

  After all the wild theories, their enemies were just angry workers, part of some kind of revolution like the ones back on Earth in ancient Russia.

  Some of her rangers had reacted with anger when they’d learned.

  “You’re telling me they want to kill us because they don’t like their bosses?” Private Clos had stood up, her voice rising high enough that her squadmates had shushed her and pulled her back to where they were all seated on the ground.

  “Don’t shush me.” Emotion had made her voice crack. “We’ve been burying our friends because of these assholes, and you’re telling me they don’t have the Milipa bending their arm? How could they do this? They’re animals!”

  “None of this means they can’t still be zombies,” Lazaar had added, the slight grin on his face collapsing into a scowl when Private Miller punched him in the arm.

  But then Henrikson had expressed the dark, slimy feeling that had been growing in Christine’s chest. “They’re not animals. They’re just like us.”

  For what felt like the hundredth time since the officer’s meeting, she could see again the dim, cramped house of her parents, the bowls laid out to catch the rain, her father’s haggard face as he came home late from the factory.

  “They’re cutting wages until we get productivity up.” Her father had said, hanging his helmet by the door.

  Her mother had put her hands on her hips, her schoolteacher’s uniform faded and worn, her face filling with anger. “But they can’t do that! You need to tell—”

  “Who? Who are we going to tell? The magistrate’s campaign was funded by the company!”

  Christine had watched the argument from where she was playing on the worn linoleum floor, not really understanding, but learning to hate the phrase, “the company.” As the years passed and she’d seen her father gradually crushed beneath his job, she’d wanted desperately to get out, to run away, to leave the factories of her home world behind.

  “I’ve enlisted in the Army,” she’d told her parents, tilting her chin up, expecting them to shout her down. “I’m going to be a ranger. They’re the hardest to get into. The pay’s better. I’m leaving next week.”

  She’d figured waiting to the last minute would make the parting easier. She’d been eighteen, and she wasn’t going to let anybody tell her what to do.

  Her mother’s eyes had run with tears, her lips pursed. But her father had broken into loud sobs and moved toward her so quickly that she had stepped back. He’d raised his arms, and she’d thought he was going to strike her, but then he’d taken her face and held it gently in both his hands.

  “You made it, girl. You’ve made it away from here.” He’d pulled her against him, and held her so tight that she almost couldn’t breathe. Her mother had come over a second later, holding them both in her willowy brown arms. Nine years later, after the accident, it was that hug that she remembered the most.

  Were the people they were fighting animals? No. They’d killed people under her command, murdered countless other servicemembers, her brothers and sisters in arms. She hated them. But some small part of her understood them, and that frightened her. She’d much prefer monsters or zombies to fight. It would make pulling the trigger easier.

  Christine cleared her thoughts as she continued walking along the foxholes and machine gun nests, pressing against her ring with her thumb, concentrating on the warm, smooth feeling of the gold band. If only Ryan were here. He was the professor, the scholar. He’d have some philosophical conclusion to offer her.

  She finally reached her own foxhole, took a deep breath, and stepped down into it. Sergeant Néri, Corporal Lazaar, and Private Henrikson looked up at her in the dark.

  “Got it working again?” Henrikson pointed over Christine’s shoulder at her carbine.

  “Yeah.” She pulled the weapon off her shoulder. She leaned the carbine against the side of the foxhole, and looked about in the dark for her pack. She needed something to keep her hands busy, to stay occupied. That, and they’d be heading out on patrol again tomorrow. She wanted to make sure her weapon was clean when she needed to use it again.

  “Are the troops handling it okay?” Néri held out Christine’s pack with one arm, meeting her gaze, his face unreadable in the dark.

  Christine took the pack, put confidence in her voice. “Yes. They’re doing fine.”

  “I see.” Néri leaned back against the foxhole. Nothing ever got past Néri, and from the pensive look on his face, she doubted he’d believed her.

  Christine sat down, looking through her pack. She found the small bag that held her cleaning kit and set it down beside her. She unzipped the kit, pulling a rolled-up cleaning mat, a collapsed rod, a couple small brushes, and little bottles of oil and solvent out of it.

  “You’re doing that now?” Lazaar shifted where he sat next to his radio unit, which was set to scan. “How are you going to see?”

  “I paid attention in basic.” Christine checked her carbine to double-check that it was unloaded, then laid it out on the cleaning pad and began breaking it down into its component parts.

  “They must have punished you with a lot of disassembly drill.” Lazaar’s voice intruded on Christine’s concentration.

  “Or maybe she’s not an idiot like you, Ali.”

  Christine smiled at Henrikson’s response, returned her attention to her weapon. In truth, she always enjoyed cleaning and disassembly. Something about the routine predictability of the procedure was soothing for her.

  “You made it girl. You made it away from here.”

  She organized the major part groups of the rifle in front of her — trigger assembly and fire control circuitry, barrel and receiver group, and the various handguards — stopping only to check the battery on the weapon’s light. She knew from experience that it was best to not disassemble those pieces any further in the field.

  “I’m so sorry to give you this news, Corporal Flores. There were no survivors.”

  Christine tried to shake the memories out of her head and set to work cleaning the bolt and barrel raceways, wiping away the gooey mixture of dirt and old grease that had built up on them. All the hiking and fighting in the muck and dust had got the weapon dirtier than it had been since, well, ever. Once every moving part had been cleaned, Christine lubricated them with generous blobs from her grease bottle, then started reassembling the jumble of parts in front of her.

  “I’ve enlisted in the Army. I’m going to be a ranger.”

  “Th
is is the RAS Verdun to any remaining Alliance forces on Kensington. Please stand by to receive an encoded message.”

  Christine glared at the rifle components in her hand, chasing away the memories, the image of the burning house in her head, but her thoughts kept racing.

  “Congratulations, Lieutenant. I know how much this commission must mean to you, given the circumstances.”

  “I say again, this is the RAS Verdun to any remaining Alliance forces on Kensington. Please stand by to receive an encoded message.”

  Christine blinked, the partially assembled carbine in her hands. That last voice, the one tinged with radio static. That wasn’t a memory. That was happening now. Christine cursed herself for not paying attention, met the wide eyes of Sergeant Néri and the gaping expression of Lazaar, who was looking at his radio as if it had sprouted legs.

  “What the hell—?”

  Christine didn’t hear Henrikson finish his sentence, but set down her carbine and sprang out of the foxhole, running for the bunker.

  “RAS Verdun, please confirm identity.” Jack’s hands shook as he held the radio handset to his mouth. A bright, almost painful relief was expanding in his chest, but he held it down. If the fort had somehow managed to hack into the secured radio channels, they could be trying to trick him to give away his position. Then again, despite the heavy static that crackled on the signal, that voice sounded a lot like Chief Baudouin.

  Jack waited for a response, sliding into a chair at the radio console, each second seeming to last four times as long. They’d been about to pitch their sleeping rolls on the floor of the radio room when they’d heard the voice, grated with static. The transmission quality had been so bad that they’d almost ignored it, thinking that the radio was picking up environmental noise from a storm somewhere. But then the call had come again, and Jack had almost fallen over himself to get to the radio.

  Please. Please let this be them. Please let them be alive.

  “Are they in orbit?” Major Osterman was standing behind him, his arms crossed over his chest.