by Ben Weaver
However, Halitov and I sat blithely unaware of all that firepower—
Until the first round blew with an unholy rumble and came within a couple meters, displacing so much air that we suddenly rolled to port, as though evading some incorporeal missile.
And that’s when Halitov ordered up satellite images of our location and announced the obvious: “Six batteries down there, set up along Rinca-Mushara Crater.”
“Only six?” I asked.
He gave me a look. “If those artillery guys can’t shoot one gliding ATC out of the sky, then they don’t belong in the Marine Corps. And what’s really pissing me off is that the fucking universe can’t decide which way to kill us.”
“Listen,” I said. “Listen.”
“What?”
“They’re not firing.”
“Yeah, that was a warning round. They’re waiting. The next one will finish us.”
“Maybe our pilot’s sweet-talking them,” I said.
“Or maybe Eugene got his energy back and is working a little Racinian magic on them.”
“Check the GPS for our altitude,” I said.
“Checking. Oh, this is wonderful. Twelve hundred meters and falling fast.”
The crater’s rim wiped by then rose as we plunged into the great belly of bluish-white ice hanging above an oppressive gray sky that seemed to crush the landscape. I forced the safety bars up, then stood, pulling myself weakly yet steadily toward Halitov. I worked the keypad above his jumpseat once, twice, a third time, but the lock had been damaged.
“Come on, man!” he cried.
“It’s not working.”
“Then you jump. I’ll ride it out,” he said.
I crawled back toward one of the dead Marines, still locked into his seat, and withdrew a Ka-bar from his calf sheath. I brought the knife back to Halitov and jammed it into the main lock mechanism above the bars. Sparks jumped. The bars held fast. Somewhere, light-years away, Linda Haspel smiled.
Desperate and without thinking, I straddled Halitov, took the bars in both hands, and tried pulling. The drug Paul had given us still robbed me of most of my strength—not that I could have freed Halitov, but at least my attempt would have been valiant.
“Get off of me, you ass. That won’t work!”
A tingle in my neck said look up, and there, framed by a ragged rhombus of steel, lay the slick and bumpy surface, unfurling just meters below. At any second we would strike that sheet of ice and slide uncontrollably toward the crater’s opposite rim, where we would strike the wall. If the collision didn’t get us, the fire would. Of course, any other obstruction along the way, say a ten meter tall hill of ice rising at a sharp enough angle, would render us just as dead, though more expeditiously so.
“We’re going to touch down!” cried Halitov. “Jump!”
I hung on to his safety bars.
“Jump, you ass!”
Particle fire burrowed into the ice and frozen methane behind us, blasting up an astonishing barrage of fragments that flew into the hold and rained like flaming hail onto the fuselage. Tiny fires outlined each strike, appearing like the navigation lights on a tarmac as the methane burned a moment before dying. My skin rippled as more fragments caromed off, then—with a double thwack!—we met the surface and began fishtailing to port.
“Oh, shit, here we go!” Halitov shouted.
We rolled onto our side, still spinning, still headed God knew where. I dangled from Halitov’s safety bars, while he looked down at me, pinned himself against the bars. Suddenly, we rolled again, onto the ATC’s back, then once more, onto the starboard side, even as I lost my grip and went crashing into the portside seats. Ahead, the cockpit bubble faltered a moment, then winked out. Val d’Or clambered into the hold, heading toward the aft exit conveniently opened for us by those fighters. Surprisingly, he was skinned up. I glanced to the cockpit, where the pilot sat slumped in his chair, yet he still wore his tac. I figured Val d’Or would’ve used the pilot’s override codes so he could “borrow” the tac. Perhaps our old rival had never smashed his own tac. He had hidden it while on Exeter, only to fetch it moments before his escape. He was a lot smarter than I had thought.
“Rooslin’s trapped,” I called to him. “How ’bout a little help?”
“I’m out of here!”
“You were training to become a Guardsman! We’re your brothers. You don’t leave us behind!”
Val d’Or picked his way past us, fighting against the shimmying hull as we screeched over the ice. He reached the edge of the hold as I struggled to my feet.
“No one gets left behind!” I cried.
And I’m unsure whether the steel in my voice or his guilty conscience won out, but he gazed across the crater at the jagged runway we were cutting, then scrutinized us. His expression remained as frosty as the crater. Still, he charged for Halitov, leapt up, grabbed the safety bars.
“Come on, give!” he shouted. “Give! Give!”
I shifted toward him, fell onto my side, pulled myself back up, as the terrain grew more ragged and that ATC rattled even louder but failed to drown out the particle fire booming from somewhere outside. It wouldn’t be long. The wall or those fighters would finish us if we didn’t abandon ship. I jumped up and gripped the bars, dangling from them with Val d’Or. We screamed in unison, and during that scream, an idea chilled me.
“Let go,” I told Val d’Or. “I’m going to brace myself in there, then turn up the power on my skin. Maybe the rebound will blow the bars.”
“I’ll do the same,” said Halitov.
“You take right, I’ll take left,” Val d’Or told me, then swung his feet up so that he could jam himself between the bulkhead and the bars.
I did likewise, straining despite Icillica’s weaker gravity. “All right, we’ll reduce power then roll up to full on three,” I said. “Ready?”
Neither Halitov nor Val d’Or responded. And I wouldn’t have been able to hear them if they had. The cockpit took a direct hit, and, amid fountains of sparks and arcs of flames, it tore away from the rest of the ship and booted us upright for a moment before the jagged edges of the forward hull bored into the ice, driving us down one meter, two, three until we stopped so abruptly that Val d’Or and I sailed across the hold and collided with the rising ice mound behind us. Through dust clouds of ice, I saw Halitov was still locked into his jumpseat, yet the seat itself had detached from the bulkhead and had fallen forward, pinning Halitov between it and the deck.
“Rooslin, you all right?” I called.
“Shit. Do I look all right?”
Shadows wiped across the ice outside, accompanied by the tinny drone of thrusters. I couldn’t tell if they were approaching or not. Maybe they were circling, getting ready for the final kill.
“Come on, let’s get him,” I told Val d’Or, but when I looked over at him, he lay there, unconscious. He must have turned down his skin power so much that the collision had knocked him out. Damn. I could’ve used his help. I crawled over to Halitov, seized the jumpseat’s edge, then pushed him onto his side.
“Wait a minute,” said Halitov. “Son of a bitch.” He drove his forearms against the bars, and they gave.
I grabbed his wrist and pulled him from the seat, then started back for Val d’Or.
“To hell with him,” said Halitov. “Let’s go.”
“No one gets left behind.”
“Only the dead.” His gaze darted over the hold. “Where’s that Ka-bar?”
“He was going to help you.”
“I don’t care. Never liked him. Never will.”
“You can kill him later.” I didn’t mean that, and Halitov knew it as he glanced dubiously at me, then stormed forward, picked up Val d’Or, and slung the man over his shoulders as I retrieved the Ka-bar and tucked it into my calf sheath.
We kept tight to the bulkhead, reached the edge, then I scanned the sky. Those fighters were still up there, but they banked away as great tracers of particle fire rose from the crater’s rim
behind us, the angle of those streams growing tighter as the jets dove and finally disappeared on the horizon.
“Locals putting up a fight?” asked Halitov.
“Let’s find out.”
We hopped down from the hold, crossing tentatively onto the ice until our skins created enough friction to help us stick while also accounting for the lower temperature and surface pressure. We had forgotten to set our tacs for autoenvironment, but the computer recognized that error. Sans our footsteps, the crater remained eerily silent. Out there, far behind us, lay our cockpit, a toothy hunk of silver smoldering at the end of a bluish-white trench, otherwise the crater floor remained flat, with the occasional shallow depression. We trudged off toward the rim about a half kilometer away, minding our steps but even more mindful of the sky and the looming walls of ice whose pockets could hold any number of Alliance Marines posted as snipers or sentries.
“Okay, got another one for you,” Halitov said. “Seems this captain was having a hard time getting his unit motivated. So he goes to his XO and says…”
“Says what?” I asked.
“You mean you haven’t heard this one?”
“No.”
He chuckled under his breath. “Well, I’m not going to share it with you because you’re an ungrateful bastard who can’t sit politely through an old joke.”
“I thought I was a demanding bastard.”
“That too.”
Something glimmered near the foothills ahead. “What do we have there?”
The glimmer darkened into a definite form, a boxy ground vehicle that my tac identified as an SS MORROW A1 TRACKED TROOP CARRIER.
“After all that, we get to walk right into the enemy’s hands.” Halitov lifted his glare to the heavens. “I’m sorry, Linda Haspel. I’m sorry!”
9
There was no point in running. We would stand our ground against whatever emerged from that transport. We had experience. We had a knife. We had seriously bad attitudes.
Halitov set Val d’Or onto the ice, then waved his hands.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Giving them a bigger target. Maybe we’ll die quick.”
I stood there, dumbfounded, then resigned to the absurdity of the moment and began waving myself.
The tracked vehicle rolled right up to us, a metallic beast with a heavily armored snout, domed back, and rows of cannon ports along its flanks. It was not unlike the tracked vehicles of centuries’ past and was far cheaper to manufacture and operate than a hovercraft of equal size. Since Icillica wasn’t the most valuable of the Seventeen Worlds, the Alliances spent the least amount of money to equip the garrison while still maintaining control. But cheap or not, the SS Morrow could easily intimidate two poorly armed officers carrying an unconscious man across the vast plains of an ice-covered crater.
A rear hatch rolled open, and out leapt four civilian miners wearing bright blue Exxo-Tally standard-issue environment suits with transparent helmets that fit tightly around their heads. I knew they were miners because in addition to the company’s logo on their breasts, mining identitags common to every mine, including those back home on Gatewood-Callista, dangled from collar clips. The miners held QQ90 particle rifles at the ready, and they fanned out and confronted us like a small team of well-trained Wardens.
One miner, a man towering a full head above us, stepped forward and raised his rifle. Beads of sweat dappled his pale, shaven head, and he studied us with green eyes so bright, so inhuman that they startled me. “What is your calling?” he asked, his voice amplified by the suit’s external speakers.
“I’m Major Scott St. Andrew. This is Captain Rooslin Halitov. We’re with the Fifth Battalion, Eighth Regiment, Colonial Wardens.” That wasn’t exactly the truth. We’d been removed from the battalion, but force of habit prevailed. “We were taken prisoner on Exeter, tawted out here, and technically speaking, made a pretty half-assed escape attempt.”
The man stared unblinkingly, then, for a moment, I thought a wave of sadness passed over his expression. “I didn’t ask who you are. I asked what your calling is.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. But you people are civilians, right? Was that you on that artillery fire?”
“Yes, it was.”
I proffered a hand. “You saved our lives. Thank you.”
He took the hand, didn’t shake, just squeezed. “You’re not really alive. Not yet, anyway.”
I withdrew. “Maybe you’re right. So what’s happening here?”
Cocking his brow, the miner shook his head, saying, “You have a lot of questions because you are a man without a calling.”
“Uh, Scott?” said Halitov. “I think we got a neovic. He fits the profile.”
Before I could dip into all of those records the Guard Corps and Wardens had dumped into my brain, the bald miner gestured that two of his team retrieve Val d’Or. As they did, he said, “Come with us. We have a calling for you.”
“You can skip the calling with me,” said Halitov. “A little food, a little shelter, and a big ticket off this rock. That’s what I’m about.”
“You have no idea what you’re about,” the miner warned. “Everyone aboard. Now.”
We fell in behind two women loading Val d’Or into the SS Morrow, then reached the crimson-lit hold, settling heavily into jumpseats as the driver, hidden behind his broad seat, abruptly kicked the vehicle into gear.
“What’s your name?” I asked the bald miner, who had taken a seat beside me.
“Hardeson Poe. And the captain is right. I was born a neovic.”
At that instant, everything I never wanted to know about the moon’s predominant and fringe religions flashed through my head. The neovics existed on the periphery of religious circles, and while some of their philosophy had been borrowed liberally from Buddhism, Hinduism, and even the Colonial Church of Christ, their beliefs rested most heavily on data recovered from the Racinian ruins on Drummer Fire. The primary concepts were easy to grasp: the universe is alive, experiencing itself, and our minds are the universe. All power, all matter, all particles are within our minds, our spirits, if you will. They worshiped the power of the human mind and strove to reach a tantric state so they could tap into the bond between particles without the aid of the Racinian conditioning that Halitov and I had received and had learned to love and hate. They wanted to achieve the power Halitov and I had been artificially given, and the first step toward experiencing the universe on a quantum level was to understand your calling, your natural, preordained place in the universe. I didn’t bother to skim the records anymore. While I appreciated the connection between physics and mysticism, and, for the most part, kept an open mind, I seriously doubted that the neovics could tap into the quantum bond without the aid of mnemosyne parasites introduced into their brains. The human body had simply not evolved enough to do something like that.
“I respect whatever religion you choose to practice,” I told Poe.
“It’s not a religion,” he said. “It’s life.”
“All right. No debate. Because right now I really need to contact some people with the Wardens. It’s imperative that I get a chip out to them immediately.”
“All long-range communications are being disrupted,” Poe said. “And that includes the signals from your tacs. The only way to get a comm drone out is to divert their orbital support.”
“You mean those two cruisers up there in polar orbit.”
“Exactly.”
“So if you control the artillery here around the crater, we can use it to create that diversion. How many people are with you?”
Poe smiled, his weird eyes going distant.
“How many?”
“Major, you need to slow down, assume nothing, and consider the fact that another calling may await you.”
“With all due respect, sir, if I don’t get a message out, the Alliances could very well win the war, and your home here will revert right back to the days of Alliance discriminati
on and oppression.”
“Major, we’re being occupied by the enemy. We’re already there…”
“And you’ll stay there if you don’t help me.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about what’s happening here. There’s a lot you need to see. You, Halitov, and the other man there, you’re conditioned, is that correct?”
As he finished the question, something quaked in my thoughts, the barest tremor at first, than a full-on reverberation as the quantum bond between particles revealed itself once more. Paul’s drug was wearing off. I breathed a sigh. If Poe became a problem, at least Halitov and I would be better equipped to handle him.
“Are you all right, Major?” Poe asked.
“Sorry.”
“Are you conditioned?”
“That’s classified.”
“That birthmark on your cheek…you have epineuropathy. We’ve heard rumors about a few like you who got conditioned and became more powerful than any other soldiers.”
I forced a grin. “Just rumors.”
“We also heard that the Seventeen System Guard Corps is being replaced by the Wardens.”
“Now that’ll probably happen.”
He closed his eyes, took in a long breath. “Do you think the Wardens will send help?”
I could lie to him, but he struck me as a man who could face the truth with his head held high. “Both sides have spread their forces too thinly. The Alliances can’t afford to send reinforcements here.”
“I wasn’t asking about them.”
“I know. But if they can barely hold this world, do you think the Wardens can?”
“Then no one’s coming,” he said gravely. “They’ve left us to the wolves. Two hundred million people, spread across five subterranean colonies, forced to live out our lives under the guns from above and the garrisons holding our capitols.”
“I’ve been a POW. And I’ve fought on my own world against Alliance Marines. I know what it’s like to have them come into your home.”
“And you know what it’s like to drive them out.”
“Yes, but as part of a strike force, not a ragtag miners’ rebellion. Did the Alliances wipe out the Seventeen’s command post here?”
