by Shuvom Ghose
"Hoo-ah!"
Juan raised his hand. "Sir? What about Himenez?"
"We are not going to survive Inspector General Himenez," I said. "We are going to defeat him. Everything in the world is eaten by something. Cats eat mice, dogs eat cats, lions eat dogs, and even vultures eat lions if they’re wounded enough. We have to figure out what eats inspector generals and then we're going to feed Himenez to it."
"Hoo-ah!"
"And the brain slugs?" Ann-Marie asked. "They've probably penetrated all of Immortal Squad by now."
"They are the real enemy. Everything we do from here on out is to make them extinct. We've got to get one infected person under a brain scanner and then we'll have the proof we need to kill the rest. Really kill them. It seems like the idea passes through resurrection. So we have to put the Immortals down for good."
That sobered everyone up.
"And the prisoner situation?" Zazlu asked after a few seconds of silence, frowning.
I answered to the group. "As you know, not all Hell-Spiders are our enemy. The one trapped here on base has been particularly helpful to us. We're not going to let him be tortured. We're going to let him free and pin the blame on someone else. Soon."
I had watched Dakota writing furiously on her notepad, getting more and more excited as I revealed each secret. Now I turned to her directly and said, "And of course, everything I just said is off the record."
Her jaw dropped. "Come on! That's not even remotely fair!"
"We're going to solve all of these problems and no one is going to know we were even involved. That's the Infinity way."
"But you just gave me four Pulitzer Prize level- I mean, I HAVE to-"
"Sorry, Dakota. Top secret." She slammed her notepad down with such a pout that I had to chuckle. "Meeting dismissed," I said. "You'll get assignments as we have them."
Zazlu and Butcher came up to me as the privates dispersed.
"So, how was that?" I asked. "Sufficiently Ridley-like?"
"He would have been proud," Zaz answered. "So, how exactly are we going to do all that?"
I resisted the overpowering urge to yell "I don't know!" and instead said, "I have a few ideas." Which wasn't a total lie.
"I can't wait to feed Himenez to something," Juan said, passing us. "Like the thunder bees!"
"Figure of speech, Juan," I sighed. "No blood on that mission."
Zazlu looked disappointed too. "Oh. So we will just take it to his boss?"
I smiled. "Everyone has a boss. Even him."
"Uh, sir?" Butcher asked, looking down at her phone. "Omega's back from patrolling the valley. And they got three skulls."
I couldn't look, so I sent Zaz to the cafeteria to watch them being hung.
"Anyone we know?" I asked as he came out.
He nodded. "Not Red-Stripe. But three of his good hunters. We ate with them twice."
"Damn it," I hissed. "We have to-"
The sound of knives-on-knives invaded my head. "Lieutenant Forrest, we must talk." He wasn't asking.
Red-Stripe, how am I hearing you? Has Three-Spot recovered enough to-
"Three-Spot is dying. Your clan has frozen and starved him, and when he asks for food you give him poison. He eats because he has no choice, then vomits and is fed only more poison."
We are trying to-
"While under a peace treaty, members of your clan have killed three of mine early last night. I have come down from the north with twenty hunters. We will enter your base to balance the scales shortly. Prepare yourself."
"NO!" I screamed, and the three of us started running towards the perimeter fence.
I don't know why, but I just thought that being near the fence would make it easier for him to hear me. Luckily, I was right.
Red-Stripe, do not enter the Cleared Zone! I thought as we reached the fence near the main gate. I looked up at the machine gun turrets that had been installed after Three-Spot had snuck in at night. It was broad daylight now; if they tried to cross that barren field in front of the gate they would get murdered. I sent that image to him.
"We have other means of entry," he said into my head. "The hunters guarding your walls are predicable, easy to read. We will move when they do not look. I can easily bring twice this number into your village and kill half of you before the alarm sounds."
I looked at Zaz and Butcher. They were just as stunned.
"You could have done that at any time?" Ann-Marie asked.
Each word Red-Stripe said was like a butcher sharpening his knife. "Any time. The peace treaty you made with Three-Spot was your only protection. Now you have betrayed it and him. So it becomes void. Prepare yourselves."
"Wait, wait, wait!" I said, literally going down onto one knee in the dirt. "There has to be another way to balance the scales! We could kill another Thought Eater for you! Or the brain slugs!"
"There are no more Eaters. And even our children know to stay away from the slugs, unlike you. Nothing will make up for the friends or the time we have lost."
"Time? What do you mean?" Butcher asked.
"The blitzkrieg against the northern clan was going well. They were fleeing before us, disorganized, broken. Almost ready to turn on their leaders. But we paused when we heard of the first two deaths against the treaty and of Three-Spot's sickness. Now the northern leaders have reached their fortress, and ten times my hunters could not reach them. As long as their leaders live, the people are afraid to rebel and join our side."
"We'll do it!" I said. "We'll kill the leaders of the northern clan!"
"There are a hundred hunters in his personal bodyguard alone. And his fortress walls are ten spiders high, impossible to climb."
"Sir..." Butcher was warning me.
I waved her off. "Does it have an open roof, like your village?"
"Yes. If this is a ruse, Lieutenant Forrest, the consequences will be dire."
"It isn't! I can have an answer for you in three minutes!"
I turned to Zazlu. "Go to the Hangar! Run! Figure out if Jinx can fly an Apache!"
It turned out he could, and he was awesome at it. We asked Flores for the codes to go on a one hour mission but we fueled the attack helicopter for a six hour round trip. We broke every rule Himenez had made, we burned Jinx as an asset, but when we came in low over the trees and crested the wall of the northern clan's capital, me in the Apache's front gunner seat and Jinx in the rear pilot's seat, it was all worth it.
The northern clan leader and his group of bodyguard thugs stared up at us in one packed, befuddled mass and we started dropping death on them like rain. Every missile Jinx fired seemed to toss five Hell-Spiders into the air, or at least parts of them. The chain gun under my command was like the finger of God, cutting spiders in half and responding instantly to my commands. I remembered everything Red-Stripe had told us about how this leader treated his subjects, letting them starve while he and his cronies grew fat off their work, and I happily took revenge on their behalf. And then some.
Jinx only fired when there was a clear shot to a group of hunters and I used the chain gun to pick off the runners, always avoiding gray and green shells. The women and children were innocent in this, Red-Stripe had said, and we left them alone.
While the blue blood still spurted from hundreds of spiders bodies, we landed in the center of the massacre. I took out a shovel and loaded parts of spiders into the cargo net hugging the back of the helicopter until it was full. As I was stepping back into the open cockpit, it didn't feel right to leave without saying something, so I turned to the gray spiders huddling fearfully in the mouths of the nearest caves.
"You are free!" I yelled. "You need fear these bullies no more! If you need any friends to help you, just look to the south! The south!"
They just looked back at me silently, so I got back in the cockpit and we took off.
As we lifted over the high rock wall around the village, I could hear Jinx breathing heavily into his mike.
"That. Was. Awesome," he panted. "My
hands are shaking. That's what I always dreamed of doing, ever since I wanted to be an Army pilot as a kid!"
"Well, you're welcome," I replied, as Jinx pointed us towards the white-topped mountains on the southern horizon. But I was already worrying about what was beyond them. "But this will probably be our last mission together. I can't imagine Himenez will let this stand. You'll probably be grounded. You may even get shipped back to Earth."
After a second, he answered, "Maybe. The auto-pilots are replacing us everywhere anyway. Not just on this planet, everywhere. I'm just glad I got to be a part of something like this, before it all ended. Thanks for that, Lieutenant Forrest."
"Thank you, Jinx. You're an honorary part of Infinity Squad now, if you ever need it. You were recording with the gun camera, right?"
"From when we popped over the wall to when we landed. You want me to erase it?"
"Not this time," I said. "This tape we want Oakley to see."
The BlackShirt waiting to arrest us did a double take when he saw the amount of spider parts crammed into the cargo net.
"How many spiders is that?" he asked, lowering his tazer slightly.
I hopped from the cockpit as the rotors slowed. "Well, we killed a hundred of them. But we could only carry 200 pounds back to base."
They skipped the tazers this time, but the jail cell, the chair and the handcuffs were the same as before. As was Himenez's appearance, perfectly put together as always. I made a vow to find a way to put a mustard stain on his tie before this was over.
He entered, sat at the chair before me in a relaxed fashion and shook his head.
"You know, Lieutenant Forrest, I figured you were smarter than this. Theft of an army helicopter. Falsifying flight plans. Corrupting another officer. Improper prosecution of the war. You'll lose your command at the very least. And I will have to recommend at least 3 years of hard labor based on all the charges."
I laughed. "Have you seen the video? We killed one hundred spiders in ninety seconds. How is that not efficient?"
"I have seen that video. I have also seen this one." He turned his datapad around to me and hit play. It was security camera footage of Zazlu, Butcher and I near the front fence. The sound was muddy, hard to hear until I yelled "No! No! No!" and went down on one knee. "There has to be another way to balance the scales!" you could hear me say before it got too quiet again. Himenez shut the recording off and looked at me.
I was sweating.
"It is possible to find the most amazing evidence of even the best hidden crimes," he said, "if one is willing to look through enough security camera footage. Who were you talking to, Lieutenant Forrest?"
"I... the..."
His eyes were on fire, his gaze unshakeable. "You did not get this Hell-Spider target from TacOps or our satellite images. You have a source feeding you information about Hell-Spider locations. What is it? Who is it?"
I know the trick is to go with it, to stretch the accusation to an illogical extreme and make it sound ridiculous. But my heart was beating too fast, my outward appearance too nervous, to make that believable just then.
"We... we get our orders from Oakley and Captain Morse, same as everyone."
"That is a lie." He played the audio recording of the trip back from the brain slug cave again, where I stopped talking in the middle of a sentence before two minutes of silence. "You were listening to someone, right then. Someone who ordered you to toss Lieutenant Hector out of the helicopter."
He bared his teeth at me. "There are conspiracies going on at this base. Plots within plots and conflicting agendas. And I will figure out who is behind them. Tell me your source, now, or I will have every member of your squad arrested and kept without food, water, and sleep until one of them does."
I closed my eyes, swallowed.
"It's... it's the Benefactors."
He drew back. "What?"
"The Benefactors... they've broken the code to our tactical implants and they can talk to us whenever they like," I said, stammering. "They just keep talking and you have no choice but to listen. They ordered us to kill Hector. They told us about the spider village. But they said they'd kill us all if we told anyone!"
His eyes narrowed. "What motive would the Benefactors have for that?"
I shook my head. "I don't know! But just show them the tape of that mission and see what they say! I bet they order us to stop using the attack helicopters."
Himenez leaned back in thought. "I may just do that."
"But you can't let on that you know! They've got Oakley too! They're too powerful to go after!"
His eyes narrowed. "We'll see about that."
General Oakley burst into the room, followed by two BlackShirts. "What's the meaning of this? Why is this Lieutenant under arrest?"
Himenez looked up at the General, appraising him, looking very hard at him. "He has committed crimes. He filed false reports. He attacked a target three hours from his stated plan."
"And killed one hundred Hell-Spiders in one mission!" Oakley barked back. "He was doing what I ordered. I told Lieutenant Forrest to step it up, and he did. He's a fuck-up, but I need this fuck-up's results right now." He turned to the BlackShirts. "Uncuff him."
"General, I must strongly disagree," Himenez said, setting his mouth in a thin line. "I am still in the middle of my investigation." The cuffs fell off me and the bureaucrat got more tense. "This will go into my report."
I saw Oakley flinch for a second, but then he said, "And I'll attach the video of his actions to my report, and we'll see how the higher powers want this war prosecuted! Have you seen the satellite images of where he attacked today? I've got TacOps counting the heat signatures now. There are thousands of spiders up there to kill!"
Oh fuck.
"And we're going to keep sending those Apaches up there until we get them all!"
Double fuck.
Himenez stood up. "General, you've read my recommended tactics. We need to be methodical, using the clones to grind across the sectors non-stop until-"
"And we're still going to do that! We're installing your extra tanks, aren't we? We'll have the capacity for 500 resurrections on-planet in two more days. But in the mean time, I've still got a war to fight."
"Very well," Himenez said, walking to the door. He glanced at me as he left. "I have a new investigation to start at the moment."
Oakley watched the door close behind the bureaucrat and snorted, "I'm getting tired of that fucking number pusher thinking he owns the place. I bet he's never gotten his boots dirty." Then he looked at me. "And if you tell anyone I said that, Lieutenant, I will have you arrested and stripped of command."
"Yes sir! And I agree sir, crunching numbers is no substitute for battlefield decisions, snap judgments being the bread and butter of comm-"
"Shut up, Lieutenant. Next time, file proper flight plans with TacOps so everyone knows where you're going or I'll give your squad to the Immortals and make you a janitor."
I rubbed my wrists. "Sir, I would, but..." I leaned forward. "I think there's something going on."
"What do you mean?"
"Talking to that bureaucrat, I think... something's gotten into his head. I didn't want him knowing about our target because I think something or someone is controlling him from a distance. I think he's going to start asking very strange questions soon. He's going to start babbling about Benefactors or mind control. He may try to make us do things which would tear this command apart."
"Keep your conspiracies to yourself. I won't have that kind of talk on my base. Now get the fuck out of here."
I knew I hadn't convinced him, not by a long shot. But I had planted the seed, and that was enough.
I had set the clash of the titans in motion.
I met back up with Zazlu and Butcher in our barracks. All told, it had been eight hours since I had last seen them.
"You're still here. I guess that means Red-Stripe has accepted our balancing of the scales?"
"He sent his scouts out to check abo
ut three hours ago, when you first radioed back," Ann-Marie said, now letting the skin on her face and neck show to the world. "He had scouts hidden like snipers close to that city. He's learning from us fast."
"Or his kind has been doing this type of thing for so long it's instinctual," I replied. "Anything else?"
Zazlu was frowning. "Two things you should see."
The first was a room under construction. Storage space and offices had been cleared out and now workers were laying all sorts of piping and wires through the floor. The pipes seemed to be preparing for each room to have over a hundred sinks spaced eight feet apart in them.
"Oakley mentioned this," I said, peeking through the open door. "Himenez wants to increase the number of simultaneous resurrections we can do."
"There's three more like it being built on base," Ann-Marie said. She mentioned the room numbers and I pictured it. The base buildings were set up like a letter 'H', and each new resurrection room would be at one corner of the letter, as far apart as possible from the others.
"Three more like this," she continued, "the same size, means around four hundred clones waiting at any time."
"They're stripping the lifeboat to build this," Zazlu said. "But a second lifeboat is expected in orbit in a few days."
"That's enough to give Himenez his rolling army of clones," I sighed. "God knows how many deaths we'll all go through then. We'll all be craving strawberry ice-cream and walks on the beach."
"You guys will," Butcher snorted. "My clone stock doesn't-" Her eyes got big. "Oh GOD! Am I going to become a dumb blonde? Oh fuck!"
"Butcher, don't worry. I'm not going to let you die seven times. Trust me."
"What were this chick's SAT scores? Did her mom drop her on her head?"
I sighed and turned to Zaz. "What's the second thing you wanted to show me?"
We stood in the back of the cafeteria, watching. The Immortals all sat at one long table, whispering, smiling at each other and looking around at the rest of us like we were prey. That was sort of normal. But they also had half the Omegas sitting with them, which usually didn't happen between two competitive squads. And every now and then, one of the Omegas would reach back and scratch a little red bump on the back of his neck.
