by Jake Elwood
“I thought it was me, actually,” Bridger said. “I've been feeling paranoid ever since we left the freighter.” He looked around. “Anybody could be a spy for the DA.”
That's ridiculous. The thought sprang immediately into Alice's mind, but it died on her lips. Things that had seemed perfectly clear before the war were suddenly not clear at all. Things like the unity of the colonies in the Green Zone. They'd always been like a family, sometimes boisterous, sometimes bickering among themselves, but always ready to defend one of their own. Now Tazenda and Neorome had been cut out of the herd, isolated. And the other colonies, terrified of the invaders, were letting it happen.
The Dawn Alliance had done something Alice would have sworn was impossible. They'd fragmented the Free Planets.
In this new reality, what did it mean to be a loyal citizen? When your government signed a treaty with the invaders, where did your duty lie?
If your loyalty was to your own colony, you could harden your heart to what was happening on Tazenda and Neorome. It seemed unthinkable to Alice, but she'd seen exactly that attitude even among members of her own crew.
What did the war look like to the locals? Some of the people around her were spacers or travelers from all over the Green Zone. Most of them, however, were probably from Haultain. Most of them would have spent their whole lives in one colony, never going farther than this station. They might see the people of Tazenda and Neorome as foreigners, people from far away who should have signed a treaty with the Dawn Alliance if they didn't want to be invaded.
To such people, Alice and her companions might look like dangerous criminals. They were planning to provoke the Dawn Alliance, after all, and that could only make life harder for the people of Haultain.
And that was just the colonists. A third of the people in view wore Dawn Alliance uniforms, either military gear or the burgundy smocks of civilian staff. They would surely turn her in without hesitation. She could be arrested just for sitting with Garth Ham.
Someone shouted far down the concourse, the words unintelligible. Alice twisted in her seat to look. Pedestrians in the distance were turning their heads, then edging back against the windows. Alice shifted in her chair, getting her feet beneath her in case she needed to move quickly.
“What is it?” Bridger said.
“I don't know.”
There were more shouts, then a scream. She heard a metallic clatter that might have been a chair, kicked bouncing across the floor tiles. And then a woman came into view. She was dressed like a colonist, in dark trousers with a vivid blouse that flapped around her as she sprinted. She dodged around tables, vaulted a planter, and slapped the back of a chair in passing, tipping it over behind her.
A handful of soldiers pursued her, men and women in Dawn Alliance military uniforms, made bulky and androgynous by light body armor. Two of them held rifles. The rest carried drawn pistols, and Alice got ready to hit the floor if anyone started shooting.
The woman dashed past her, then turned. She fled into a narrow storefront. Her pursuers thundered in, three or four seconds behind her.
The explosion came as the last man stepped over the threshold. The blast blew him backward, and his rifle went clattering across the tiles. He landed on his back, arms splayed wide.
He didn't move.
A woman at the next table started screaming. A man swore, a hand pressed to his face. Blood trickled between his fingers. Broken glass littered the floor, the tabletop. Alice set her cup down, worried that it contained glass as well. She scanned herself quickly, found no injuries, and checked her companions. Then she looked back at the storefront.
No one emerged from the shop.
She shuddered. How many people just died? According to the tattered remains of the sign in front, it was a tailor shop. There might not have been customers inside.
In fact, she realized, the five soldiers might have been the only serious casualties. The bombing had to have been planned. Even the fleeing woman might have survived, triggering the explosion as she ducked out the back door.
A hand closed on her shoulder and shook her. She looked up, startled. Bridger was speaking. She could see his lips moving, but she couldn't make out his voice. His head jerked to the side, his meaning clear.
Let's get out of here.
She started to rise, then froze as a middle-aged woman dropped into the chair across from her. The woman spoke, her voice a murmur that seemed to come from a long way off. She made a “sit down” gesture with her hands. Alice didn't move, half out of her chair and paralyzed with indecision.
“Alice. Alice, can you hear me?” Bridger's voice seemed to get louder with every word, and Alice looked at him. She sank back into her chair.
“They'll grab people they see hurrying away.” The woman looked motherly and harmless, with graying curls framing a soft round face. Her voice was diamond-hard, though. “We're better off staying right here.”
Alice shook her head, trying to clear the shock from her mind. The woman looked vaguely familiar. “You were at the next table.”
The woman nodded.
“And I talked to you a couple hours ago,” Bridger said. “You're a spacer.”
She nodded again. “Junot Destry. I'm on the Morning Mist.”
The low warble of a siren sounded in the distance. Several tiny electric carts appeared in the distance, veering around planters and clusters of pedestrians as they raced toward the scene of the bombing. Each cart held a couple of Dawn Alliance soldiers. The smallest ambulance Janice had ever seen followed them, a bright-red cart with a single gurney on the back.
Junot leaned forward, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the sirens. “Believe it or not, this might be the safest place on the station to have a discreet conversation.” She gestured at the chaos around them. “Everyone's distracted.”
Alice nodded, conceding the point. “Fine. So what is it we need to talk about?”
“Him,” Junot said, and nodded toward Garth Ham.
There was a moment of tense silence.
“You've got a Neorome accent,” Junot said to Ham. “I grew up on the outskirts of Hampstead, and I can always spot an accent from home.”
Alice, Bridger, and Ham exchanged glances.
“You can't stay here,” Junot said. “I can get you places on the First Bee of Spring. We'll leave right away.”
“When I talked to you before,” Bridger objected, “you said you didn't need any crew.”
“We don't need any crew,” Junot said. “But you need to get off the station, and we can squeeze you in.” She looked from one face to another. “Well?”
Alice said, “What will your captain say?”
“She'll bitch about it, but then she'll say yes.”
“What if she doesn't?” said Bridger.
“She will,” Junot said, chuckling. “She knows I'll divorce her if she doesn't.”
Bridger and Ham looked at Alice. Alice shrugged. “I was getting tired of this place anyway.” She looked at the soldiers milling in front of the tailor shop. “It's too noisy.” She stood up and looked at Junot. “Let's go.”
Chapter 6
“You'll cooperate. The men under your command will cooperate. Is that clear?”
Tom and the officers around him shuffled uncomfortably and avoided each other's eyes. No one spoke.
“I'm giving you an order.” Captain Washington, ranking officer among the prisoners, enunciated each word with meticulous care. His face was a mass of bruises from his beating two days before, and his mouth was badly swollen. “Just so there's no misunderstanding.”
A muted chorus of “Aye aye's” rose from the other officers. They sounded about as happy as Tom felt.
“I know you don’t want to help the enemy,” Washington said. “We have to accept the reality of the situation, though. I expect you all to obey your orders.” He sighed, pressing a hand to his ribs as he leaned back in his chair. “That's all. Dismissed.”
The cluster of officer
s dispersed. A lieutenant named Hoskins fell in beside Tom. “You'll be with me on Worksite Charlie today.”
“Great,” said Tom. “Where's that?”
“No idea,” Hoskins said cheerfully. “The important thing, though, is Shannon says there's edible nuts on the jungle floor in that area.”
It was only their third day in Camp One, and already Tom and the others were obsessed with food. They were fed after a fashion, with a daily ration of meal replacement powder that might have been adequate for half as many men. Every prisoner in the camp was constantly hungry, and scrounging for food, according to the old hands, was going to become a major part of their daily routine.
Hundreds of enlisted prisoners now filled most of the huts in the compound. Tom had spoken to a handful of crew from the Kestrel. They'd been treated about the same as the officers.
The camp contained only male prisoners. No one knew where the women had been taken. Tom presumed there was a Camp Two somewhere nearby. The jungle surrounding the camp could have hidden just about anything. He fretted over the women from the Kestrel, just as he fretted over the men in Camp One. Since there was nothing he could do, he did his best to shove the worry to the back of his mind. It was actually worse than the constant hunger.
“Any idea what kind of work we'll be doing?” he asked.
Hoskins shrugged. “Not a clue. I guess we'll find out soon enough.”
As if summoned by his words, soldiers began to pour through the gate between compounds. Dawn Alliance officers bawled orders, and Tom and Hoskins began the laborious process of gathering the men under their command and lining them up near the gate to the jungle.
Most of Tom's group were strangers. There were a few former shipmates among them, including O'Reilly, who'd been his unofficial first officer. Most of the Kestrel survivors had ended up in other groups. “Platoons” was the name the officers were starting to use for the loosely organized cadres of prisoners. Tom's platoon held twenty-six men, and they were slow to gather, making the most of the early-morning chaos and the fact that Tom mostly didn't know their faces.
“All right, you've made your point,” Hoskins yelled from nearby. “You don't want to knuckle under, and you don't want to work for the enemy. I'm real impressed with your fortitude. Now quit pissing about and get into line.”
To Tom's surprise it seemed to work, sheepish men beginning to form themselves into a double line in front of Hoskins. He turned to his share of the milling crowd and hollered, “What he said! Fall in! You there, with the white hair. I recognize you! You're in my platoon. Now get in line.”
A handful of captains moved through the crowd. They had no platoons of their own, and they confronted men one at a time, brow-beating the rebellious prisoners until the last few men reluctantly lined up.
“You know the consequences if you go too far,” Hoskins said, a bit more softly. “Take a good look at the men on either side of you. Those are the men who'll bleed if you antagonize these shit rats. Those are the men who'll die if you try to escape, or fight back.” His voice softened. “I plan to see the whole lot of you off this god-forsaken rock and back in the war. And dead men are no bloody use to anybody. So don't get yourself killed, and don't get the rest of us killed either. All right?”
There was nothing Tom could say to match that. His platoon had heard every word, so he turned to face the fence.
A UW captain spoke briefly with a Dawn Alliance officer, then turned to the gathered prisoners. “Thrush! Hoskins! Palmerston! You're with me.” He turned to the Dawn Alliance officer and said, “Let's go.”
The Dawn Alliance officer led them out through the exterior gate, a captain named Goldfarb following. Hoskins led his platoon out next, and Tom followed, checking to make sure his own platoon was still with him.
Only eight or nine DA soldiers accompanied them. It seemed like an inadequate number for almost eighty men, and Tom thought about the tactical possibilities as he walked. How could he discreetly pass enough instructions to organize a simultaneous attack?
The problem, of course, wasn't how to overwhelm this handful of guards. It was what to do next. If they could take over the entire camp, kill every soldier on the planet, it would do no good. The Dawn Alliance could slaughter them all, and they could do it by doing nothing at all. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to eat. Their captors could simply leave them to starve.
There has to be a way off this planet. I'll find it. I'll bide my time for now, but somehow, some way, I'm escaping.
The ground outside the gate was a tangled jumble of weeds and low brush. Tree stumps stuck up almost knee high, some of them wide enough that he could have used them for a bed. The thought of a bed was appealing; Gamor's gravity made even a short walk an exhausting chore.
Plenty of bare earth showed between the stumps, but no dust rose around their feet. The moisture worried Tom. The sky once again was completely overcast, and it seemed clear that this place had to get a lot of rain. He wasn't looking forward to finding out just how bad it might be.
From a distance the jungle looked like a dark, unbroken wall. As he drew closer, though, Tom saw that a pathway of sorts had been crudely hacked through the trees. The stumps here were waist-high, the fallen trees shoved to either side to make a gap five or six meters wide. Fresh growth had sprung up in the opening, but Tom could see by the blackened state of the stumps that fire had been used to clear away the brush after the trees came down. The soil beneath his feet was darker now, a mix of dirt and ash.
The work site was a couple of kilometers from Camp One. It didn't look like much. A couple of dozen trees had been felled, making a clearing hundreds of meters across. A big chunk of the clearing was actually clear, the ground smooth except for stumps, no vegetation showing except grass and weeds.
The rest of the clearing was a jumbled obstacle course, a tangle of trunks and branches heaped on each other. The job of the prisoners, apparently, was to clean up the mess.
A crude lean-to against the trunk of a fallen tree contained a dozen or so plastic cases full of tools. Prisoners dragged the cases into the open, then waited as Dawn Alliance soldiers unlocked them and opened the lids. Inside were laser cutters, electric excavation machines, shovels and mattocks.
Chaos ruled for a time, the DA officers struggling to explain what they wanted, the prisoners deliberately misunderstanding. Finally one officer fired his pistol into the dirt quite close to the feet of a smirking spacer. The gun swung up, the barrel pointing directly between the man's eyes. His smirk disappeared.
“If you are truly too stupid to understand me, then you are not much use. But if I shoot you as an example to the others, then you will serve a purpose.” The muzzle of the gun didn't waver as he looked around at the other prisoners. “How many of you will I have to shoot before I persuade you to take me seriously?”
“That's not going to be necessary.” Lieutenant Hoskins, smiling as if this were a simple misunderstanding, hurried forward. A couple of soldiers lifted rifles, taking aim at the middle of his chest. He ignored them, lifting his hands in a placatory gesture. “No shooting will be necessary. Hideyo here understands the error of his ways.” Hoskins stood beside the frightened spacer. “There won't be any more delays. You'll see.”
“No there won't,” the officer said, lowering the pistol. “Or you'll see.”
Hoskins turned, bawling orders to the men around him. In very short order he had a dozen men lined up with mattocks, waiting for instructions.
Tom pushed his way closer, listened to the officer's next instructions, and got his own platoon busy. There were six laser cutters, and he assigned two men to each. The rest of the platoon would pick up the wood scraps generated by the men with the cutters, and haul it into the jungle.
The cutters were big clumsy tools with a backpack battery and a curving loop of metal. The laser was set in one end of the loop. A pull of the trigger would generate a beam of light a meter and a half long that terminated against the far end of the metal lo
op. If a man held each end of the loop, they could make quite precise cuts that were as long as the beam and as deep as the curve in the loop.
The men worked fairly enthusiastically for a while, with the memory of the near shooting still fresh in their minds. The men with the cutters stripped enormous branches from the fallen trees, then cut the branches into chunks. The others carried cut branches to the edge of the clearing.
The soldiers kept a fairly close eye on the men carrying scraps. Still, Tom thought a nimble man might dart into the jungle before a soldier could get a shot. With a little luck he might even make it into the trees undetected.
The problem, of course, was that there was nowhere to go.
Before long the initial enthusiasm wore off. Hideyo's brush with death faded in the men's memories and they remembered that their labor was for the benefit of their enemy. The pace of the work decreased, and Tom couldn't bring himself to tell anyone to hurry up.
The soldiers let it slide. The platoon settled into a slow, steady pace, stripping branch after branch from an enormous trunk. When it became clear the men with the laser cutters could outpace the collection crew, Tom had a couple of men put their cutter back into the case and join the others hauling branches.
Behind him, a line of men with mattocks attacked a low rise in the ground, hacking away chunks of turf. Men with spades and wheelbarrows worked behind them, hauling the chunks away, heaping them in a shallow depression on the far side of the clearing. It seemed bizarre to use human muscle for such trivial tasks, and he wondered if the point of it all was to humiliate and exhaust the prisoners.
At least we have laser cutters, he thought. How much worse would this job be if we had to use metal hand saws?
The enlisted personnel did most of the work, but Tom tried to help where he could. When he walked over to check on the heaps of wood scraps at the edge of the clearing he always carried an armful of wood with him – until he realized there would always be more work to do. He wasn't helping his platoon. He was only helping the Dawn Alliance.
