Patriots in Arms

by Ben Weaver

  “When was this?”

  “A couple hours after you came the first time. He said he wanted to talk to you. Did he find you?”

  “Yeah, he did. Asshole.”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem as in love with himself as usual. I think he finally realizes that he isn’t any better than us and a round will kill him just the same.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, we’re tawting out real soon. I have to head off.”

  We said our good-byes, then I gave him a final hug, doing my best not to choke up. I told him I’d send messages regularly if I could, and he said he’d do the same. We kept our promises, but nearly a year would pass before we would meet in person again.

  When I returned to Vanguard One, my tablet beeped, and the message was from Mr. Paul Beauregard himself, who said that he, Rooslin, and Jing were waiting for me aboard a G21 in bay 9B. I was already on the bay level, so I wove my way through the crowded corridor, toward them. Vanguard One was on Jump Seven, meaning we needed to be battle ready before the tawt and prepared to initiate a rapid-fire deployment of forces the nanosecond we made orbit. Any delay could cost all of us our lives, which was why every tech, pilot, ground troop, and gunner wore the same look of utter intensity, a look and a feeling I found very contagious. I was nearly running by the time I reached our G21, where the troop carrier’s flight crew of two was still doing their walk around inspection.

  “We’ll be checked out in just a minute, sir,” said the ship’s pilot, a young lieutenant who fired off a crisp salute and shifted with a painfully familiar confidence.

  I returned the salute. “When’s T-time?”

  He consulted his tac. “Eight minutes, sir.”

  “Very good.” I crossed to the aft-loading ramp and mounted the platform.

  Inside the hold, Halitov, Jing, and Paul had already climbed into their jumpseats and were hugging the safety bars. Our QQ90 particle rifles stood tall in their deck mounts before the seats. Jing flashed me a strained look as I settled down beside her and lowered the bars over my head. “How’s your brother doing?” she asked.

  “Better.”

  “That’s good.”

  I nodded curtly, then glanced to Paul. “Are we it? I figured a small fire team at least.”

  “Change of plans,” he said. “Which I have to say I don’t mind. Spec ops rule number one: The larger the force, the greater the chances that we’ll be detected.”

  “You know, I haven’t told you how happy I am about returning to Exeter,” said Halitov. “I have such fond memories of that piece of shit rock. I almost flunked out of the academy there, got screwed-up alien conditioning, nearly got my ass shot off like what, twenty, thirty times? Last time, if I recall, I took one in the leg, one in the shoulder, and got my forehead slashed up.” He ran a finger across the head wound. “And I don’t care what they say, synthskin or not, I can tell the difference.”

  “My memories aren’t exactly pleasant either,” said Paul. “But it’s vital that we recover that facility. And it’s vital to me that we recover Dina’s body. It’s something I have to do. And I appreciate you helping me.”

  “When did you become a politician?” Halitov said, scrutinizing Paul.

  The colonel’s son closed his eyes. “You have no idea how hard this is for me.”

  “Yeah, well you got me along, so it’ll all work out,” Halitov said, squirming in his jumpseat.

  I chanced a quick look at Jing and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, but the apology didn’t loosen her frown. I was sorry that I had hurt her feelings but not sorry that I had asked her for the truth.

  The tawt warning echoed through the bay, and the pilots hustled onboard and fired up their systems. When the tawt finally came on, it clutched my gut and squeezed until I thought I’d pass out. I writhed a moment, blinked, and saw the massive bay doors parting swiftly to unveil a deep, star-dusted field fenced off to port and starboard by hundreds of brilliant blue streaks: our own atmoattack jets spearheading the invasion force.

  “Dust Devil Six, ATC five-niner-five in the slot with systems nom, over?” said the pilot to the bay’s flight boss.

  “Clear on mark,” said the boss. “Keep your vector.”

  “Clear on mark,” repeated the pilot as the ATC turbines growled even louder. “Good vector.”

  “On the count,” said the boss. “In four, three, two—”

  The turbines wailed at full power as the G-force shoved me hard into Jing, who jerked herself under the pressure. We blew free of Vanguard One , the ship shrinking before you could steal a glimpse of her outline. We rocketed along with those blue streaks, became one, and then, through the porthole opposite me, the streaks focused into fighters with cannons jutting menacingly from their wings and bellies. Our pilot banked hard to starboard, slid, then came around, bringing the mottled brown moon of Exeter into view. Behind the little rock hung the great Jovian-like gas giant 70 Virginis b, a protective mother of swirling gas and dust.

  Halitov leaned over, glanced through the canopy, and scowled. “Fuckin’ place,” he muttered.

  “All right,” said the pilot. “Looks like the Alliance fleet is exactly where we thought they’d be. Diversionary force is kicking on. We’ll be riding the planetfall slot in about a minute. I’d skin up, though. We’ll take some stray fire on the way down.”

  I had just finished activating my tac when a particle missile struck us head on, the ship’s own skin straining to absorb the energy. Scintillating veins wormed across the canopy, flashed, dissolved, then reappeared as a thunderclap or something similar rang through the hold. I flashed back to the drop I had made on my homeworld of Gatewood-Callista. Our ATC had been shot out of the sky, and I had stared through the shattered canopy as the surface had come up hard.

  All of which reminded me that—given my malfunctioning conditioning—I was getting too old for this shit. And so was Halitov, though I suspected he had taken Ms. Brooks’s advice regarding our appearance. His hair looked suspiciously darker, and I made a note to ask him about it later.

  Cannon fire boomed and reverberated once more as it drummed along our starboard side, and the pilot suddenly dove, the moon scrolling across the canopy with dizzying speed.

  “All right, we’re in the upper atmosphere,” he reported.

  “Which means jack,” Halitov told us. “We ain’t safe till we’re on the ground.”

  Withering salvos came in triplets and took out the four fighters at our two o’clock, proving his point. The fire grew brighter against Exeter’s hundred shades of brown. The canyons, mesas, cliff walls, and great basins materialized rapidly. We were hauling extreme ass, and I was about to question the pilot’s decision to take us in so quickly when we rolled to port, cutting through a gauntlet of surface-to-air particle fire that woke a hard shudder in my neck. I glanced at Jing, wanting to ask if she thought we should will ourselves the hell out of there, but my head snapped back as the pilot throttled up and wove sharply away from a missile on our tail. While I couldn’t see the projectile, the tactical display flashed red, and that was a color you didn’t want to see, ever. Then, without warning, the missile prematurely detonated.

  “You see that?” cried the co-pilot.

  “I saw it, and I like it,” said the pilot. “And look at that. STAs thinning out. We’ll make planetfall.”

  “What happened?” Jing asked.

  “They’ve broken off their attack on our wing,” Paul said. “We’re overrunning their defenses.”

  Halitov opened his mouth in mock surprise. “You mean we’re actually going to win a battle?”

  “We gain air superiority—and he wants to take full credit for it,” I said, grinning at Jing.

  We streaked in low over Arantara Canyon, then headed west toward the buttes, mesas, and valleys near Virginis Canyon, where we would find the Minsalo Caves and Dina. Crimson rock faces blurred by as off to port, perhaps a kilometer out, our atmoattack jets launched missiles at unseen fighters. If all we
nt well, there would be no dogfights. Jets would annihilate each other from extreme distances, and those pilots would hardly taste war the way all of us had. They were lucky.

  “Which entrance are we using?” I asked Paul, realizing that our pilot had just taken us over the cliff we called Whore Face, our old training ground, then we descended sharply toward the caves.

  “Found a new entrance while I was living in there,” he said. “It’ll put us exactly where we need to be.”

  “Coming up on the DLZ now,” our pilot chipped in, then pointed at a broad, flat stretch of Virginis Canyon, where a beacon, a small strobe affixed to the top of a three-meter tall tower and one I assumed was ours, flashed from one small mesa to the east. We zeroed in on that beacon, then the pilot wheeled us around and began his vertical descent. We threw up our safety bars, grabbed our particle rifles, then stood near the aft loading hatch.

  “It’d be nice if you told us what kind of resistance we might face down there,” Halitov said to Paul. “Call me anal, but I like to know how many bad guys might be shooting at me.”

  “Probably none,” he answered.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not,” he said confidently.

  “I hate to sound grim, but Dina’s been down there a while,” said Jing.

  “That’s all been taken care of,” Paul answered.

  “All right, on the ready line,” said the pilot as the ATC thumped onto the mesa. “Hatch down.”

  An achy feeling crept over me as I hustled down the still-lowering ramp. While Halitov had come to despise Exeter, I still held great affection for the rocky little moon. Yes, I knew the academy lay in ruins. I knew that my old barracks was gone. I knew Dina’s body lay somewhere below my feet. Yet the ache, a kind of homesickness, made returning seem right, even necessary. We would recover Dina’s body, and maybe, just maybe, the Wardens would take back the facility and get it back online. Halitov and I would finally be reconditioned.

  I turned back as the others jogged away from the ATC and couldn’t help but grin as that earthy scent wafted up on the breeze and my combat skin kicked on the polarizers, allowing me to see more clearly in the brilliant sunshine.

  “What’re you laughing about?” Halitov asked.

  “You wouldn’t get it.” I regarded Paul. “It’s your recovery op.”

  He waved us on past the beacon. I casually spotted a serial number on the tower, and cerebroed data identified that unit as a Western Alliance PX CG Mobile Navigation and Sensory Array Unit. I raised my rifle and cut loose a pair of rounds that struck dead on and shattered both the beacon and its antennae.

  “Pilot should’ve taken this out,” I said.

  “Encryption jamming is confirmed,” Paul argued.

  I snorted a little. “Confirmed doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

  “So if this thing got off a signal—” Jing began.

  “Then the alliances can pinpoint our location,” Halitov finished. “Scott’s right. That dumb ass pilot should’ve known that and blew this thing before we got within sensor range.”

  “Point is moot now,” said Paul. “But we’d better de-skin so they can’t track our signatures.” He swung around, his combat skin rippling off, then he jogged off toward a V-shaped fissure barely two meters across. He reached the opening, set down his rifle, then lowered himself down another meter until he stood on the floor of a subsurface tunnel. “Okay, it’s tight in here, but it’ll open up in a couple hundred meters.” He snatched his rifle, then drew a small light from his tactical vest. “Just stay close.”

  “Why I’m going along with this, I don’t know. I should’ve stayed onboard and played Vesbesky’s games,” said Halitov, switching off his own skin. “Same difference, right? I mean now I’m going to shove myself down this little tunnel—just like a rat.”

  “Can you move your ass?” Jing said, warily studying the sky. “I don’t want my last conscious act to be listening to you bitch and moan.”

  He ducked into the fissure and crawled behind Paul. Jing slid deftly into the tunnel, then I wriggled down after her, nearly forgetting to fetch my rifle and taking a last look at the beacon I had destroyed.

  With Paul’s light picking out the path, we crawled forward, the tunnel bumpy and damp yet remaining level for the first fifty or so meters. Soon, we began a lazy descent, accompanied by a slight turn east. The tunnel grew no wider, and that concerned me because I knew Halitov would react.

  “You okay?” I heard Paul ask, a few meters later. “Come on, Rooslin.”

  “I’m…it’s…okay,” he said, hyperventilating.

  “How much farther?” I asked Paul.

  “We’re about halfway.”

  “Rooslin, can you close your eyes?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Does that mean I’m going to do that now? No.”

  “You’re all right, man. No one’s coming inside with you. It’s just you. We’re out here. And we’re all going on together,” I said, playing shrink and remembering the night he had almost killed me:

  “I’m not going to kill you. I’ll just take you real close ’cause that’s what you’re doing to me every time you screw up. You gotta know what it’s like not to breathe, to be closed in—I mean really closed in—and there’s no one to help. There’s just me, laughing at you, the way they laughed at me.”

  “Rooslin, come on,” Paul urged him.

  Something must have clicked in Halitov, since Jing suddenly shifted forward, and I followed. We moved even more quickly, and in what seemed like only a few minutes we reached a wide chamber whose ceiling swept up on two sides like a gabled roof. Paul’s light cast a shimmering glow over the alabaster walls, slick and highly reflective. The familiar stalagmites and stalactites ringed the perimeter, and as I glanced up I thought I saw a shadow pass behind one, then reasoned that I had actually seen Paul moving gingerly ahead, rifle leveled, legs slightly bent in anticipation of an ambush.

  “I don’t see a way out of here,” Jing said, squinting through the darkness ahead.

  “You’re right, this is a dead end,” said Paul, swinging back toward us—

  As the shuffle of boots sounded from the rear. I gaped at Paul, then craned my head back. Four Western Alliance Marines haloed by combat skins blocked the tunnel and lifted their particle rifles.

  “What the fuck is this?” Halitov cried.

  “Oh my god,” gasped Jing. “Paul, I trusted you.”

  “You trusted him?” I asked. “You were working for him?”

  “Yes, but he lied! He lied to me!”

  With that, Paul raised his rifle and fired once, twice, a third time. Something struck me in the neck, and my hand went reflexively for the wound. A hiza dart had impaled my jugular, its onboard computer ordering the syringe to fill my veins with whatever drug Paul had chosen. “Paul, why?” I asked, eyes bugging, knees beginning to weaken.

  Jing, who was tugging on her own dart, vanished a moment, then reappeared. “What are you doing to us?”

  “Forget the bond,” he said with no malice in his voice. “I’ve put your mnemosyne to sleep.”

  The four Marines fanned out as another five, maybe six poured into the chamber, effectively surrounding us.

  “Paul, what’re you doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Scott,” he said, his voice as shaky as the hand gripping his rifle. “I don’t know anymore.”

  I finally managed to yank the hiza dart from my neck, but the damage had already been done. Besides numbing us to the quantum bond, whatever drug he had used left us lethargic. In fact, Halitov had already fallen to his rump. I lowered myself to the cold, wet floor, then eyed Paul with so much hatred that it scared me. “You gave them our codes at Columbia?”

  “I had to.”

  “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  “I do, Scott,” he said softly, painfully. “I do.”

  PART 2

  Ice Age

  7

  18 February, 2322

 
Over two decades have passed since that fateful day when Paul Beauregard had told us the truth. He had sold us out at Columbia and was, in fact, the traitor we sought. Every time I consider that revelation, the hairs stand on end. Yes, I had harbored some mistrust for him, but I had never thought he was capable of something so grave, so…unimaginable. I could hardly bear to remember it anymore, so I turned to the window and concentrated on the skyline as our shuttle made a final approach.

  The first time I had been to Manhattan, I had marveled over the history bound up in all that architecture. I had never seen buildings as ornate. I thought I had heard the centuries-old whispers of those who had lived and worked in the heart of the Western Alliance. I felt rooted to the place. I felt, somehow, that I had come home.

  Now, nearly ten years after that first visit, I was returning, and so much had changed. As we landed outside the capitol building, I neither marveled at the buildings nor heard those whispers. I felt as though I were entering a great concrete-and-glass den of wolves and that my true home lay light years away. Security personnel were literally everywhere, posted on rooftops, along perimeter walks, near entrance doors, and, of course, lined up on the tarmac. Although the city’s protective energy skin had not been activated, I knew that on a moment’s notice the bubble would go up, and while it would drain power from the entire island and cost millions to keep activated, it would effectively shield the president from a first strike. Consequently, our cruisers in orbit would not waste their time targeting Manhattan. Their sights would be set on the densely populated—and unshielded—suburbs of nearly every North and South American city. Sadly, the three alliances had the technology to shield all of their people, yet none could fund a project of that magnitude. The rich would survive a war. Mining kids like I had been were expendable, and that sad fact underscored the importance of my mission.

  A group of five men wearing dark trench coats ran toward our still-humming shuttle, their breaths misty and trailing, their path marked in a thin layer of snow.