by Marko Kloos
They walked across the big square in front of the Pallas embassy. The transport pod traffic crossing the square halted to let them pass. To their left, the edge of the square was delineated by a beautiful arch, seven bright white pillars curving at the top thirty meters above street level to come together in slender points and form six tall archways. The first time she had been deployed to Gretia for occupation duty, someone had explained to her that there was one archway for each planet of the Gaia system, and that the entire arch was supposed to celebrate the successful colonization of this world and the other five. Beyond the arch, the wide roadway led out of the government quarter and across a vast green park that stretched out for a full kilometer and bordered Principal Square in the middle of Sandvik on its other end. Far in the distance, halfway across the expanse of the park, Idina could see the electric-blue plasma shimmer of the security field that created a wide buffer of empty space for the Sandvik Green Zone.
If we need to put up walls between us and them to protect us from each other, we probably shouldn’t be here, she thought. But none of us wanted to be here in the first place. That is something they brought onto themselves. She glanced at the arch to her left as they marched past, a lofty symbol of a system-wide unity that no longer existed.
In the center of the government quarter, the Council Hall loomed over the smaller structures that surrounded it. To Idina’s Palladian sensibilities, it seemed excessive and ostentatious, but she could not deny that it was an imposing and important-looking building. It was a hundred meters on each side, with slender spires at each corner that were fifty meters tall. The exterior was clad in white stone that looked brilliant in the rays of the morning sun. In the middle of the structure, a transparent pyramid rose almost to the height of the corner spires, graceful titanium latticework with immense slabs of Alon in between. The Council Hall had been the seat of Gretian political power before the end of the war. The Alliance had dissolved the government and negated the building’s original purpose, and now it housed the headquarters of the Alliance High Commission and the parts of the Gretian civil system that had been allowed to operate under the supervision of the occupation forces.
They crossed the square in front of the Council Hall and headed for the entrance. Out on the sunlit plaza, Alliance officers and Gretian civil servants were congregating in small groups, but Idina could see that the Gretians were mostly keeping to themselves. A quartet of Gretian police officers caught her eye as they came down the steps of the Council Hall, and she felt herself hoping for a brief moment that one of them would have captain’s stars and wear her silver-white hair in a tight braid. But as they got closer, the Gretian officers exchanged respectful nods with her, and none of them were familiar faces from her JSP patrols with Dahl’s contingent.
In the atrium of the Council Hall, she always felt out of place. It wasn’t just that most of the Alliance troops here were staff or flag officers—majors and colonels and generals. The building was designed as a showpiece of government, and every floor of it served as a gallery to observe the legislative chamber in its center, a huge open space located directly underneath the translucent pyramid in the middle of the roof. Gretian architecture was sparse, economical, and elegant, and this place was clearly built to erase the scale of the individual and showcase the dynamics of the group working on common goals. She imagined it had worked as intended when the legislative floor was busy, but now that the big chamber was empty and quiet, it felt more like a tomb to her, a silent memorial to a way of life that no longer existed.
The offices of the Alliance High Commission were on the top floor of the Council Hall, in the rooms previously occupied by the highest tier of the Gretian government. Idina and her section stepped off the skylift platform and walked into the wide North Gallery that was home to the Palladian delegation. When they got to the ready room for the security detachment, a familiar Palladian color sergeant came down the gallery floor toward them.
“Colors Chaudhary,” he called out when he was in talking range.
“Colors Norgay,” she said. “I was about to report in with your detail.”
“Change in plans today, I’m afraid,” he said. Norgay was the leader of the Palladian High Commissioner’s permanent bodyguard detail, a four-trooper detachment that always accompanied the High Commissioner wherever he went on Gretia. Idina’s JSP troopers were there to augment the security detail, but only as backup. The bodyguard detail were brigade military police specialists who were trained for the personal protection job, and they did nothing else all day.
“Nobody’s updated my schedule,” she replied. “I was about to settle in for a day at the office with the section here. Where are we going?”
“The principal’s staying right here with me,” Norgay said. “But I am going to have to loan you out today. The new deputy high commissioner just got in. And he wants to do an in-person visit to Camp Unity today.” He lowered his voice a little. “By surface transport.”
“What?” Idina shook her head. “I take it you explained the current security situation to him.”
“We did. Twenty minutes via gyrofoil, low risk. Or four hours on surface roads, medium-to-high risk. He chose the surface route.”
“But why?” she asked.
Colors Norgay smirked. “It’s his first time on Gretia. He says he wants to get a personal impression of the situation on the ground.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“Diplomatic corps,” he said. “I checked his background. Never wore a uniform in his life.”
“Fabulous.” Idina sighed. “So we’re doing a road trip today. Fine.”
“It gets better,” Norgay said. “The armored assets are mostly tied up today. The armor pool has one transport available. He still wants to go.”
“He wants to make a single-vehicle run through a hot security zone.”
Norgay nodded.
“Well, fuck.” Idina looked back at her section. “He’s got his detail with him?”
“He’s got two on duty right now. Colors Sirhan and Sergeant Kapoor.”
“We won’t all fit into one transport. I’ll take half my section along and leave the other half on call for you here.”
“You sure you want to do that, Chaudhary?”
“I’m pretty sure that I don’t,” she replied. “But that’s all the bodies we’ll be able to squeeze into the armor. I’m not going to send ahead half a section to play ambush detector in a soft-skinned ride. Did you ask about air support? I’d feel better if we had a combat gyrofoil keeping an eye on things from above.”
Norgay shook his head.
“I suggested it, but he turned it down. Says that he’s not going to tie up an air asset if he’s not going to be riding in it.”
Idina checked the time and sighed again.
“All right. He’s the boss. He gets to play it however he wants. Did you request the armor already?”
“Affirmative. They’ll be out front at 0900.”
“Please let his detail know that we won’t be able to send an advance command, and that we won’t have overhead coverage except for drones. Maybe they can talk the deputy high commissioner out of it and convince him to take the gyrofoil instead.”
“I’ll tell them, Colors Chaudhary. But I wouldn’t count on it. The DHC seemed pretty set on this.”
“Aren’t they always.” She nodded her thanks and watched the color sergeant walk off to convey the information to the other security detail. Then she turned to look at her section.
“Corporal Rai, you stay here as the ready reserve for the high commissioner’s detail. I’m going out with the DHC on his field trip. Let me take along Arjun, Raya, and Condry. And Khanna, you’re coming along, too. Told you I’d keep you close on your first day.”
“Yes, Color Sergeant.” Khanna looked like he wasn’t quite sure of himself, and she didn’t blame him. He’d barely set foot on Gretia, the first foreign planet he’d ever been on in his life, and he was already having t
o adjust to being in the center of planetary high command, about to do a combat patrol. It was enough to give anyone mental whiplash, which was why she wanted to have him nearby, to assess his resiliency under the unfamiliar stress of a real-world deployment.
“You heard Colors Norgay. Ground transport will be here at 0900. Do your last-minute checks and hit the head, whether you think you need it or not. There won’t be any stops along the way for a few hours,” she told the other troopers. They acknowledged and set off down the gallery toward the skylift.
“If he has never served, you would think he’d take the advice of people who have been here for a while,” Private Khanna said next to Idina.
“You haven’t been around bureaucrats a lot, have you, Khanna?”
“No, ma’am.”
“They’re some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. Most of them could sell seawater to an Oceanian. But when it comes to military life, most of them are clueless toddlers.”
She sighed and gestured for him to follow her down the gallery.
“And our job today, Private Khanna, is to keep the deputy high commissioner from burning his hand on the stove.”
CHAPTER 3
DUNSTAN
The new stripe on his rank insignia still looked like it didn’t quite belong there. Dunstan had been a lieutenant commander since the end of the war, and he was used to seeing two silver stripes with a thinner gold stripe between them on his rank sleeves. Now there were three silver stripes of equal width, denoting that the wearer of the uniform was a commander of the Rhodian Navy.
A commander without a command, he thought as he straightened out the front of his service uniform. Technically speaking, he was still the master of RNS Minotaur, but his ship was on the way to the reserve yard, destined to be scrapped and recycled. The heavy Gretian gun cruiser they had engaged several weeks ago had broken Minotaur’s back, and to the navy, she was too old and too full of holes to be worth repairing, even though she had served faithfully through the war with distinction. But in the end, she had brought her crew home safely one last time and taken a few chunks out of the enemy ship in the process. Dunstan knew there were worse ways to end a military career. Still, now that he no longer had a crew under him, the command star on his uniform that marked him as a ship’s captain felt a little fraudulent.
His wife was standing at the large living room window when he walked out of the bedroom to get his morning coffee. Seeing her in front of the big glass pane gave him a brief pinch of anxiety. In normal times, their living quarters were a privilege of rank and seniority, a lovely three-bedroom suite in the top half of the arcology, with a marvelous view of the mountains. But after the nuclear attack on Caledonia-4 two weeks ago, Dunstan was newly aware of the fact that his family’s home only had a ten-centimeter thick sheet of hardened glass between it and the rest of the world, and that an evacuation in case of disaster meant a long way to the ground level and the shelters below.
He walked into the kitchen nook and took a mug from the rack to place it under the beverage dispenser. The coffee was steaming hot and fragrant, and just the smell of it made him want to step into an Action Information Center and look at a tactical plot. He took his beverage and went to join Mairi in the living room.
“You can’t see the smoke plume anymore,” she said when he walked up next to her. In front of them, the northern highlands stretched out into the distance, toward the central mountain spine of Rhodia that bisected the continent.
“You mean it was visible all the way over here?” he asked.
Mairi nodded and vaguely indicated a spot to their left.
“We could see it rising above the mountains,” she said. “It was a clear day. Can you imagine? Eight hundred kilometers away, and we could see the cloud from the explosion. The smoke from all the fires. It was the strangest sight. Like someone tore a wound into the planet, and it was just bleeding out into space.”
“What did you tell the girls?”
“They knew before I did. They were in school. Their teacher turned on the network feed when the news came across all the comtabs.”
He wrapped his arm around her, and she leaned her head against him.
“You look good,” she said to his reflection on the window. “Commander.”
“I haven’t worn this uniform in a while,” he said. “It feels a little loose around the middle. I’ll have to take it in to get fitted again. I thought people were supposed to put on weight in middle age.”
“Normal people,” Mairi said. “With desk jobs and low-impact hobbies. Not people like you.”
“People like me,” he repeated.
“People who don’t know how to sit still. It’s been three days, and you’re itching to head out again.”
“I just want to know what I’ll be doing next. I brought home a wrecked frigate. With the shortage of hulls we have right now, they may just decide to give me command of a supply depot for the next year and a half.”
“You’d be home a lot more,” Mairi replied. “Don’t hold it against me, but I hope you do get a desk job. Even if I know that it would drive you a little crazy.”
“The navy will put me where they need me. If they decide that’s shore duty, then that’s what it will be.”
“But it’s not what you want.”
“No,” he conceded. “It’s not.”
Dunstan took a sip of his coffee, and they let the next few moments pass in silence.
“I hate the navy,” Mairi said. “I know it’s heresy to say that as an officer’s wife, but I do. I hate that we only get a few days with you. They’re treating you like hardware. Rearm, refuel, and back into space.”
Dunstan sighed.
“We don’t get to choose the times we serve in. You know that.”
“I know. But I thought I was done with all of that when the war ended. Watching the network news every evening, hoping to get news and wishing I don’t. Having my heart jump in my chest every time a message comes in on my comtab. But most of all, I hate the navy for having such a hold on you that you’d rather go out there and chase down pirates than come home to your family every night.”
He turned and walked back to the kitchen counter, where he put down his coffee and checked the front of his uniform to make sure he hadn’t dripped any on it. Mairi watched him, arms crossed in front of her chest.
“I’m sorry I’m putting you through all this again,” he said. “I thought we were done with this, too. I figured I’d have a few quiet years before retirement. But these people are looking to get us all into a shooting war. If I don’t do what I can to stop them, I won’t be able to live with myself if there’s another mushroom cloud.”
He nodded at the window.
“Especially if the next nuke lands eight kilometers from my family instead of eight hundred. It’s not the navy that has a hold on me.”
She smiled and shook her head. Then she crossed the space between them and kissed him.
“That last sentence was horseshit. But it was nicely packaged horseshit.”
She disengaged and smoothed out the front of his uniform, then gave him an appraising look.
“Everything looks sharp and straight. Go and be Commander Park. Just promise me you won’t mope too much if they do give you a shore assignment. And I promise I won’t sulk if they give you a new ship and send you out again.”
“Now see, that last sentence was horseshit as well,” Dunstan said and leaned in to kiss her.
His flight across the central mountain spine of the planet was emptier than usual, and half the passengers on the atmospheric shuttle were service members in uniform. Rhodia had been at PLADEC-1 for a full week after the attack before stepping down the military alert level a notch, but it still felt uncomfortably like wartime again, skyports full of uniformed people wearing grim expressions, and a general sense of anxiety in every public space.
When the shuttle descended into the skyport on top of the Caledonia-2 arcology, Dunstan tried to get a glimpse
of the attack site through the observation windows on the portside. It was just far enough away, and the day was just hazy enough for the damaged arcology to be just a vague pyramidal outline against the volcanic rock of the Kelpie Peninsula. The fires were out, of course, but he knew that recovery crews and engineering teams were still combing through the thousand-meter tall building even weeks later. Rumor had it that the arcology wasn’t going to be repaired, that the radiation from the nuke had rendered it too dirty. There were calls to leave the structure standing as a memorial, but the idea seemed ghoulish to Dunstan. Nobody needed a thousand-meter commemorative marker of the attack, a giant gravestone for forty thousand dead that would remind everyone of the trauma anew whenever they were within line of sight. He wouldn’t need any external prompts to remember that day, and he doubted that anyone else would either. Mushroom clouds and burning cities were not something people could witness and then let the images fade from memory, overwritten by the trivialities of normal life.
The shuttle descended into the semicircle of the spaceport on top of Caledonia-2, and his line of sight to the gutted arcology on the horizon broke. Dunstan focused on his breath for a few moments to put his mind back on the task at hand, his impending meeting with the navy’s operations chief.
“Commander Park, reporting as ordered, ma’am,” Dunstan said.
“Do come in, Commander,” Admiral Holmes said from her desk. “Take a seat, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dunstan stepped into the office and sat down in one of the empty chairs in front of the admiral’s desk. He looked around at the decorations on the walls. Every flag officer had an ego wall, but Rear Admiral Holmes’s version of it was refreshingly modest, just a neat row of ship crests from previous commands and a few mementos from her time as a warship captain. The list of ships told him that she had seen combat during the war—a frigate, a light cruiser, then a battlecruiser, the ship class that was widely considered the crown jewel of command assignments.
“Would you care for some tea, Commander? We have a lovely strong Palladian blend if that is your sort of thing.”
