Duty, Honor, Planet dhp-1

by Rick Partlow

  He leaned his head back against the folded blanket they’d used for a pillow and tried not to think. Thinking hurt too much at the moment. Maybe that was why he’d let his hormones do the steering with Valerie. Oh, to be sure, the sex had been anything but unpleasant. What was that old saying? “There’s good sex and then there’s great sex, but there is no bad sex.” This had been better than good, but not quite great. There had to be much more emotional attachment for great sex.

  Curiously enough, he hadn’t felt the guilt he’d anticipated: he’d initially thought he might feel like he was cheating on Shannon’s memory. Instead, there’d remained an emptiness that no amount of frantic coupling could fill, either with guilt or satisfaction. There was none of the wracking self-doubt and debilitating guilt he’d felt after Inferno, just a curious, cold detachment from the deaths of Shannon and the others.

  It was beginning to worry him.

  “Hi,” Valerie whispered, eyes blinking up at him groggily. “You still awake?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, giving her a reassuring smile.

  “Thinking about your friends?” she asked him, propping herself up on one elbow.

  “I don’t think,” he replied slowly and quietly, “that I ever got to know them well enough to call them friends. And now…” A vision of Shannon passed before his eyes unbidden. “I never will.”

  “That woman, Lieutenant Stark,” Valerie questioned gently, seemingly reading his thoughts. “Were you two involved?”

  “We might have been, if we’d had more time,” Jason told her honestly.

  “She seemed like a very strong person.” Valerie rested her head on his chest, teasing the hair there with her fingers. “I’m sorry for you.”

  “I’m sorry about Glen,” he told her, trying to sound sincere.

  “I know you probably didn’t think much of him, but he was out of his element.” She shook her head. “Glen just couldn’t understand that you can disagree with someone politically but still respect them personally. Too much of Dad rubbed off on him. But he was a good man.”

  “Did you love him?” Jason asked her, surprised that he actually cared what the answer would be.

  She hesitated for a long moment, and he wasn’t certain she would reply, but finally he could feel her shrug against him.

  “I don’t know. He loved me. Sometimes, I thought I loved what he could be, what he had the potential to become. In the beginning, when we were both in college, it was fun to talk about forever and all the things we’d do. Lately, though, it seemed like I was growing up and he wasn’t. I cared about him, but…” She sighed softly. “I’m not sure I’ve ever really loved anyone.” She chuckled. “Maybe I was ruined for all other men by having Daddy to compare them to.”

  “Senator O’Keefe is an impressive speaker,” Jason allowed, trying to take to heart her advice about respecting political enemies. “It must have been interesting growing up around him.”

  “Daddy always gave me everything I could possibly want. Not just material things, either—he was always there for me when I needed someone to talk to, or a hug or a smile. I think he wanted to make up for Mom not being there.”

  “Were he and your mother separated?”

  “Mom died when I was very young,” she told him. “I don’t remember very much about her. She was killed in an explosion in the Czech Republic.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That was a long time ago.” She looked up at him, her face more worried than nostalgic. “What about now? What are we going to do?”

  He rested his head back against the cave wall, considering the question. Staying right where they were certainly had its temptations, if only they could find a source of water. Food wouldn’t be a problem: the Edge Mountains were full of wildlife, most of which was edible by humans. He chuckled inwardly at the thought of them living like Paleolithic hunters, spending their days scavenging for food and water and their nights coupling by the fire. There was only one problem with that.

  “We can’t stay here forever,” he told her. “Even if we could find a way to get water and food, we’re only a couple months from winter, and I imagine it gets pretty damned cold in these mountains. Plus…” He shrugged, trying to sound more hopeful than he was. “Well, if the Mac got away, somehow, relief could be here in a couple months. We need to have access to an orbital comunit, or we could be sitting out here for months longer than we need to.”

  “What if the ship was destroyed?” she asked him, voice betraying the pessimism he shared.

  “When she doesn’t arrive at our next, scheduled stop, they’ll contact the Fleet, and somebody will come check it out. It’ll just take a while.”

  “How long?” Val wanted to know.

  “Maybe as long as six to eight months,” Jason admitted. “Maybe more, maybe less, depending on ship readiness.”

  “So where do we go?” she asked him. “Maybe Davenport, or one of the other, smaller cities, further south?”

  McKay shook his head emphatically. “The cities are probably all occupied, by now, or else wiped out by orbital bombardment. No, we need to find something the Invaders wouldn’t have bothered with.” He looked her in the eye. “Maybe it’s time to look up some old friends.”

  * * *

  “What the hell’s going on?” Vinnie muttered, lowering his binoculars.

  The Sergeant’s words were swallowed up by the early-evening wind that scoured the sandstone plateau, but had Captain Shao Chi Trang heard them he would likely have echoed their sentiment. Unlike Sergeant Mahoney, he didn’t require binoculars: he’d been loaned a Marine battle helmet and was using its electronic ocular both as a magnifying scope and a recording device. The headgear’s integral sight was linked with a tiny data crystal, allowing them to play back whatever he saw for the others when they returned.

  There hadn’t been too much to see until now. They’d ridden their dirtbikes into the desert for more than twenty hours before attempting to transmit a message to the cruiser MacArthur, a message they’d both suspected had gone pointlessly into the ether: if the Fleet ship was still intact, it was probably light-years away by now.

  After quickly vacating the transmission position, they’d traversed a wide, curving arc around the edge of the Wastes, avoiding the farmsteads and coming up, finally, on the isolated plateau that was the site of Aphrodite’s only spaceport. That was when things got interesting.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected to see. Perhaps he’d thought the place would have been destroyed. After all, the laser-launch facility doubled as a planetary defense system, and it would make a logical target for any invader. As it turned out, however, the Invaders had another use for the device.

  The port was a sprawling, spread-out facility, with three separate sections clustered around the blockish control center. The large, paved landing pad was built for the use of orbital shuttles. The one that the O’Keefe party had arrived on was still sitting on the plastcrete, seemingly intact. Beside it was something big and white that had to be over fifty meters tall and more than half as wide. Trang assumed it to be a heavy-lift shuttle of some kind, although he had never seen its like before. An onion-shaped craft, it rested on nearly two dozen landing struts mounted around a curved heat shield, the cant of the numerous thrust nozzles ringing the ablative estrutcheon indicating that the ship took off and landed vertically.

  The second element of the port was the electromagnetic levitation cargo train rail that ran in a loop around the landing pad to the keystone of Aphrodite’s space transportation system: the laser-launch platform. Fed by underground cables from the fusion plant outlying Kennedy, the huge free-electron laser was built mostly underground, its beam emitter emplaced at the center of a broad, ceramic platform. A conveyer track ran up to the platform from the maglev train’s loading dock, allowing iridium and uranium from the mines to the southeast and crude oil from the wells deep in the Wastes to be shipped in simple, easily-replaceable laser-launch capsules, wheeled directly onto t
he platform and launched into orbit for the waiting cargo ships.

  That was the way it had worked for the Republic’s transportation multicorps prior to the invasion, and, to Trang’s and Vinnie’s surprise, the system still seemed to be in motion. In the hour they had been observing from their vantage point nearly two kilometers away, the maglev trains had been running nonstop, disgorging one bulbous laser-launch pod after another before heading back to the mines or the wells. Even as they watched, one of the rough metal pods rode up the track and settled in on the beam emitter. Intake fans on a skirt around the bell-shaped ignition chamber at the capsule’s base whirred noisily, sucking in air for a few seconds before the launch laser fired.

  The laser was infrared, its beam invisible to the human eye, but Trang and Vinnie could see the sparking ionization of the atmosphere in a glowing line beneath the launch pod as it rose slowly off the platform. The high-energy pulses superheated the air sucked into the capsule’s ignition chamber and propelled the ten-ton vehicle with ever-increasing speed until it was hurtling skyward nearly faster than the eye could follow.

  Trang could almost believe that things were back to normal—except for the dozens of Invader troops guarding the port facilities and the four Hopper battle machines patrolling the perimeter. Other Invader troops drove Port Authority loading equipment, ferrying what looked like electronics and computer equipment on pallets from the maglev train dock, up a cargo ramp into the belly of the onion-shaped shuttle.

  “They’re looting the planet,” the mercenary Captain declared, resisting a temptation to shake his head in amazement, knowing it would jog the ocular’s picture. “They must be loading the ore and the oil onto their ships in orbit.”

  “Jeez,” Vinnie snorted, sitting back on his haunches. “You mean this whole thing’s been just one, big armed robbery?”

  “Apparently.” Trang pulled the Marine helmet off, deciding that he—and its camera—had seen enough. He turned to the Sergeant, shrugging expressively. “Although I must confess it makes little sense to me, either. I think, however, that we should return and report this.”

  “Lieutenant Stark wanted us to scout out Kennedy,” Vinnie reminded him, unscrewing the cap from his canteen and taking a long swig.

  “We know enough already,” Trang argued. “We can’t take the risk of getting captured in the city and losing this footage. I guarantee you, my friend,” he said, smiling coldly at Mahoney, “your Lieutenant will want to see this.”

  Chapter Nine

  “It’s better to be a live jackal than a dead lion—for jackals, not men.”

  —Sidney Hooks

  Shannon sat alone in the shelter’s darkened control room in front of a small, flat-screen monitor, watching the playback of Captain Trang’s surveillance recording for the twentieth time. Nothing had changed in the crystalline matrix: it still projected the same images she and the rest of the group had seen earlier that day, and they were still just as vexing.

  “Why the hell,” she asked herself out loud, “would a race that has star travel bother to invade a two-bit colony just to loot computers, fissionable ore and oil?”

  “Is that really the question?” Shannon spun around in her seat at the unexpected voice and saw Nathan Tanaka stepping into the room, dressed more casually than she had seen him since they’d arrived onplanet: a plain, white T-shirt and loose, black pants.

  “What?” She shook her head in confusion, disconcerted at his sudden appearance.

  “Should you really be asking the why of it, Lieutenant?” he elaborated, sitting on the edge of the console, glancing down at the infrared images displayed there.

  “Why not?” She shrugged. “Figuring out why they’re here could help us figure out the best way to resist them.”

  “Undoubtedly,” the bodyguard admitted. “But I propose to you that the question of why is not an answerable one at this point.” He waved a hand expansively. “Perhaps they are exiles, on the run from some higher authority and desperate for resupply. Or maybe the abundance of resources we have found on our colonies is the exception rather than the rule, and they’re green—or should I say blue,” he amended, “with envy. We could debate different theories forever. Even if we were able to capture one of the individual troopers, I am not sure it would be helpful. They seem to me to be something on the order of a biological automaton, incapable of independent action.”

  “So what would you suggest we do, Mr. Tanaka?” She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her breasts.

  “That is the question to ask, Lieutenant,” he said, “though I am not the one to answer it. As the commanding officer, you must decide what we are to do.”

  “I guess,” she sighed, “that’s what I’ve been trying to avoid.”

  “I would suggest that what you have been trying to avoid is admitting to yourself that you already know what you must do, and that it may result in many or all of our deaths.”

  She glanced at him sharply, his angular face oddly half-lit by the glow of the monitor, his eyes lost in darkness. That was exactly her concern, and it was something of a shock to her that he had discerned it so easily.

  “We have to attack the spaceport,” she almost whispered. “We don’t know why they want the supplies, but we know they want them, and we know they’re the enemy. We have to deny it to them.”

  “That is the decision of a leader,” Tanaka assured her, putting a hand on her arm. It was a simple gesture, without intention, but the warmth of his fingers seemed electric against the skin of her arm and she pulled away instinctively.

  Tanaka withdrew his hand, his eyes showing an unaccustomed confusion. Shannon shook the feeling off, rising from her seat abruptly.

  “I’d better get some sleep.” She hit the control to shut off the screen, and the lack of its light plunged the room into darkness, only the faint glow of the ghostlights on the baseboards allowing them to see at all. Curiously, though the bodyguard hadn’t moved, he seemed closer somehow in the darkness. “I’ll brief everyone in the morning,” she promised, moving away from him, back toward the hallway to the sleeping quarters. Halfway there, she hesitated and eyed him curiously. “How did you know I’d be in here?”

  “It is where I would have been,” he answered simply. A smile stretched across her face, and she tried to fight back a blush.

  “Good night, Mr. Tanaka,” she said. “And thanks.”

  She moved down the hallway without waiting for a reply, quickly out of sight around the corner. Tanaka’s eyes followed her, staring at the empty corridor long after she’d gone. Then, tentatively and carefully, his lip twitched upward into a smile. He allowed himself to savor the unfamiliar expression, and the unfamiliar emotion that accompanied it, for a moment before shaking away the feeling and stepping purposefully out of the room.

  * * *

  “Who knows laser-launch systems?” Shannon Stark asked, scanning the faces of the group collected around the frozen monitor image of the spaceport.

  “What about them?” Gunny Lambert interjected from his perch on the arm of the couch. “I mean, I guess I know the newsholo spiel: the laser heats the air in the capsule’s ignition chamber and propels it into orbit.”

  “Actually,” Tom Crossman corrected him, surprising Shannon, “the air that the launch capsule sucks in only gets it to the upper atmosphere; it has to carry a small fuel supply to reach orbit.”

  “I’m talking about operations,” Stark clarified. “We need to find a way to shut it down, permanently, and hopefully destroy the other port facilities in the process. Any ideas on what we should target?”

  “We could hit a launch capsule at take-off,” Vinnie offered. “Knock out the ignition chamber and the debris might smash the laser’s optics.”

  Tom shook his head. “They’re fail-safed: all the fragile shit’s underground.”

  Shannon cocked an eyebrow at Crossman. “You seem to be the resident expert. Tell us what you know.”

  “Well,” the technician said,
“my dad was an engineer—he helped build the system on Mars colony. I’m no expert, but I still remember a lot of the stuff he told me.” He levered himself off the couch and went up to the monitor screen and poked a finger at the image of the launch platform. “Like I said, all the laser’s focussing equipment’s down below, protected by a good ten meters of dirt and rock. Power feed’s down there, too, probably.”

  “Couldn’t we pop a missile down the emitter?” PFC Bobby Comstock, the APC driver, wanted to know. “That’d take out the mirrors and power, wouldn’t it?”

  Crossman rolled his eyes. “Earth to Jarhead—didn’t we just track that target? All that shit is shielded. Only thing a missile down the spout would hit is half-meter thick transplas ocular, and that’s all they’d have to replace to get it running again.”

  “Well, if you’re so Goddamned smart,” Bobby drawled irritably, “then how th’ hell do we knock it out?”

  “There’s maintenance tunnels running from the control center.” Crossman bonked the screen with his knuckle over the blockish building at the center of the port. “We’re gonna have to go through them to get access to the laser’s guts: maybe a shoulder-fired missile or some kind of bomb we could rig up. That’s the only way to take the thing out bad enough that they can’t fix it.”

  “And that’s what we’ll have to do,” Shannon said, “if we want to prevent them from looting this colony and using that laser to knock out any rescue ships that might come.”

  “That’s an awful lot of open space,” Lambert commented, wagging a finger at the port. “They’ve gotta have motion detectors and thermal scanners set up.”

  “You’ll need a diversion of some kind,” Trang noted. “Something to draw their forces away.”

  “We could take the scout,” PFC Jimmy Jimenez, the thin, shaven-headed scout car driver suggested, “and go after that big rocket.” He pointed at the onion-shaped heavy-lift launch vehicle over at the landing pad. “That’d get their attention, damn straight.”