by Marko Kloos
The deputy high commissioner was short even for a Palladian, and he had the slight build of a desk warrior. The light scout vest they had scrounged up for him and managed to fasten over his civilian suit looked out of place on him and made him appear like a kid playing soldier with his father’s work equipment. He came down the steps to the waiting Badger, flanked by his full-time security escorts. The DHC didn’t acknowledge Idina as he walked past her vantage point at the top of the stairs.
Never mind me, she thought sourly as she watched him descend the staircase. I’m just here to take a bullet for you if I must. The top-down authoritarianism of Gretian society had steered them headlong into a war with the rest of the system, but in her time here, she had found that the relationship between soldiers and civilians was a lot less schizophrenic on Gretia. On Pallas and Rhodia and the other system planets, people understood the need for armed protection on an abstract level, but many instinctively seemed to loathe the people who committed concrete and necessary violence on their behalf, thought of them as unsavory and less worthy somehow. On Gretia, they respected their servants in uniform, even if that needle swung over to uncomfortable levels of reverence sometimes. She’d had those discussions with Captain Dahl during months of nightly patrols, and they had concluded that while the perfect society was cobbled together with the best aspects of all the planets, societies didn’t evolve in that way, and that it was futile to try to make Gretians do things the Rhodian way and vice versa.
And yet here we are, trying it anyway, she thought. Maybe all interplanetary diplomacy should be handled by two old soldiers from the opposing sides doing joint patrols in dangerous places.
She fastened the chin strap on her helmet with a sigh and followed the deputy high commissioner and his bodyguards down to the waiting armored transport.
The commander and driver of the Badger left their vehicle for the mission briefing, and Idina walked over to them with Colors Norgay while the other bodyguard chaperoned the VIP into the armored box of the Badger’s mission module.
“It’s not the worst time for that run, if we have to make it at all,” the Badger commander said when they had gone over the route and the contingency plans. “We have the usual rabble outside the main gate. Holding signs and chanting slogans. Once we’re through the angry folks at the gate, we can punch it and head for the southern peripheral road. From that point, I don’t want to get off the throttle unless I have to.”
“What do we have for crowd control?” Color Sergeant Sirhan asked.
“Forty mil nonlethal. Stink bombs, and a full cassette of shit balls for the hard cases.”
Sirhan and the commander exchanged a grin. “Shit balls” was the highly unofficial nickname for a particularly awful “soft force” option, a gel-capped grenade filled with a sticky slime that stank like rancid vomit and itched for days once it contacted the skin. On paper, it was better than getting shot, but Idina had been on the receiving end of a shit ball for education purposes during her occupation training, and on the whole she’d almost rather take her chance with a bullet wound instead.
“What’s the lethal load out?” she asked the commander.
“Uh, the usual. Six thousand rounds for the tri-barrel, three each of hi-ex and armor-piercing. Plus whatever you are bringing along.”
“Just rifles,” she said. “And a really foul mood.”
The mission module of the Badger was set up for eight passengers, two rows of four seats facing each other, each seat suspended from the sidewall of the hull in an elaborate anti-shock system. Idina strapped herself into the position that was directly across from the deputy high commissioner, and she watched him as he fumbled with the restraints until his chief bodyguard leaned over and fastened the padded straps properly. Her own section was already buckled in and ready to roll, weapons neatly stowed in the brackets between the seats. On a normal patrol, there would be some banter in the troop compartment to cut down on the tension, but with the high-ranking guest on board, everyone was uncharacteristically subdued.
The tail ramp closed, and the sudden lack of natural light made the compartment feel more claustrophobic than it already was. The battle lights inside came on after a moment, increasing their luminescence and color temperature to match the outside lighting conditions so the troops’ eyes wouldn’t need to adjust if they had to leave the vehicle quickly.
“Passengers secured and ready for movement,” Colors Norgay said into his headset.
“Moving out,” the vehicle commander announced from his station in the front of the Badger.
The armored transport started rolling on a nearly silent drivetrain. In front of Idina, the deputy high commissioner tried to appear blasé as if the whole thing were just routine for him, but the way his eyes darted around the interior of the compartment when he thought nobody was looking at him told her that he wasn’t used to riding in war machines at all. He looked like he was in his late forties, lean like most Palladians but lacking the hard edges of military training. The high commissioners and their deputies were expressly and intentionally civilian. The Alliance leadership recognized that soldiers were good at breaking things, but that they had little expertise in rebuilding a functioning civil society from the rubble of a defeated planet. The people they sent from the diplomatic corps of the Alliance worlds were experts in law, civil engineering, economics, government, and a hundred other subjects that went mostly over Idina’s head, so she was grateful for the fact that she didn’t have to help figure out all those things for the new Gretia. But whenever she interacted with these academics and career civil servants, it was always clear that their minds were in different worlds even if they came from the same planet.
The Badger made its way across the square and onto the central avenue that bisected the government quarter. The way out led down the avenue and toward the main security lock that was the only entry and exit point for the Green Zone. Idina connected to the Badger’s external optical arrays and brought up a screen to see what was going on outside. They passed underneath the commemorative archway at the edge of the government quarter, and she changed the view angle of her screen to look up at the tops of the arches coming together thirty meters above. The deputy high commissioner looked at her screen as she panned the view upward, and she enlarged the projection so he could get a good view.
“First time on Gretia, sir?” she asked. He shook his head.
“I was stationed here at the embassy once,” he said. “Back when I was just out of training. Long before the war started. Haven’t been back here in twenty years.”
She acknowledged his reply with a nod.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’m on my second consecutive tour now. The brigade rotates regiments in for occupation duty twice a year.”
“Your second one in a row. How many in total?”
She had to think about her reply for a second.
“Five, I believe. Maybe six.”
“You must know the place pretty well by now,” he said.
“I thought I did,” she replied. “But everything’s gone upside down here in the last six months.”
“You’ve been on the ground here. Tell me about that insurgent group. Odin’s Wolves.”
“I’m just a color sergeant, sir. I’m sure you have way better intel on them than I do.”
The deputy high commissioner smiled curtly.
“Humor me. I know the official reports. I’d be interested to hear your impressions from the field.”
Idina shrugged. “They came out of nowhere six months ago. No testing the waters, no slow escalation. The first time we ran into them, I lost my whole section. One moment we’re doing a routine peacetime patrol, the next moment we’re getting rail-gun fire and a coordinated ambush.”
“You were there at the first attack?”
She nodded. “I was the platoon leader. I was the one who blundered into it.”
“I’m not a military man, Color Sergeant. But I read the report. An
d I understand that nobody could have anticipated that sort of ambush. Not when there hadn’t been a shot fired in five years.”
“They had better gear than we did,” Idina said. “Stealth suits and a rail-gun mount. And they didn’t think twice about turning that gun into slag when they were done with us. That means they had the hardware to spare.”
“Who do you think these people are?”
Idina glanced at her fellow troopers. Everyone in the hold was listening to their conversation and trying not to be obvious about it.
“They were wearing special operations gear. They had the training to use it. And they damn sure knew their ambush tactics and their explosives. If I had to guess? Blackguard commandos. Or some of their hard-case marine raiders. I’m quite sure these people have tangled with the brigade before. But that’s the obvious answer, isn’t it?”
“But why now? Why wait five years to start an insurgency? You’re a soldier. If the Gretians had won the war and occupied Pallas, would you have waited that long to fight back?”
“No,” she said without hesitation. “That’s not the Pallas way. When they invaded, we didn’t give them a minute to catch their breath. We attacked until we had kicked them off. And we would have fought to the last soldier. Not hidden ourselves away to bide our time. But they aren’t Palladians. They don’t think like we do.”
The Badger slowed down to pass through the security lock at the main gate. The inbound lock was a tunnel of sensor arches and blast panels that scanned every incoming vehicle, and Idina saw a short line of transport pods waiting their turn to enter the tunnel from the other direction. The outbound portion of the lock was a short ramp that was separated from the inbound lane by another layer of reinforced blast panels. Nearby, the security field that bisected the park glowed a foreboding electric blue. It was an ugly setup that looked intrusive and out of place in the sunlit serenity of the environment.
“Passing out of the Green Zone,” the vehicle commander said. “Going live on point defense and weapons.”
The road out of the Green Zone cut through the middle of the park and ran for another half kilometer straight to Principal Square. The protests that had slacked off in size and intensity over the hot summer had exploded a few weeks ago when the Alliance had blocked all traffic onto and off the planet in the wake of the nuclear strike on Rhodia. It had been a reflexive reaction borne of fear and anger, and high command had lifted the total lockdown a few days later because it had greatly inflamed public opinion without yielding any security benefits. But the action had been a strategic error because it had given all the arguing factions on Gretia a common target for their discontent. Now the lockdown had been softened into a security and customs blockade, but the protests hadn’t slacked.
When they approached the square, Idina flipped the screen projection in front of her around so the deputy high commissioner could see the mass of people nearby. The square was huge, a hundred meters on each side, but there were enough protesters out today to make it look a little crowded.
“There’s the situation on the ground you wanted to see, sir,” she said, careful to keep the irritation she felt out of her voice. You could have seen that in a much safer way from five hundred meters up in the air.
The protesters near the road to the government quarter were usually the loudest and most aggressive, and that didn’t change today. They had seen the single Badger rolling across the open ground of the park up the road toward them for a few minutes now, and they’d had time to prepare a welcome. They blocked the road across both directions of traffic just before it led out into the plaza, shouting slogans and waving signs that refreshed their messages periodically, cycling through a preset repertoire. The visual translating software turned the slogans from Gretian into Palladian, but even with the AI’s bias toward softening coarse language and erring on the side of politeness, Idina understood many of the crude invectives perfectly well.
“Riot shield up,” the Badger’s commander said. In front of the armored vehicle, two panels extended from the hull to form a V shape in front of the nose, then flashed blue as the commander activated the repulsor field. It was a much larger version of the riot shields the JSP troopers carried to repel crowds, and with its greater size and the thirty tons of the Badger behind it, it was much more effective. Idina could tell that the protesters were experienced with the vehicle-mounted zappers because they instantly started to move aside to form an alley for the Badger to pass through the crowd. It had only taken a few demonstrations in the beginning to educate them on the physics involved. It didn’t matter how many people linked arms and tried to block a roadway because anyone who let the riot plow get close enough would get stunned and then shoved aside by the shape of the panels more or less gently depending on the speed of the vehicle. Today, their driver extended the protesters the courtesy of slowing down to a brisk jogging speed to give them ample time to clear the path. Beyond the initial ring of demonstrators, the crowd was thinner, and the driver accelerated a little once they were through the roadblock and on the square.
The riot plow kept the crowds from blocking their way, and the electrified skin of the Badger in crowd-control mode kept them from jumping onto the hull, but they could still show their defiance in other ways. As the armored vehicle moved across the square toward Sandvik’s main north-south thoroughfare, things started to hit the hull, first a trickle and then a steady hail of objects able to be thrown that the Gretian protesters had brought with them just for the occasion. Next to Idina, Private Khanna looked a little concerned at the sound of rocks and drink containers hitting the outer hull.
“They usually hit each other about as often as they hit the ride,” Idina said to him. “But I guess everyone needs to find a way to let off steam.”
“They’re lucky the PDS can tell the difference between a rock and a grenade,” Color Sergeant Sirhan grumbled.
“Can you imagine?” Private Condry said. “One of them tossing a rock, and pow. Half a megawatt to the hand.”
Some of the other troopers chuckled, and Idina shot them a stern look.
“Not funny. That would be terrible for our image.”
“Doesn’t sound like they have the greatest opinion of us anyway, Color Sergeant,” Condry replied. The near-constant thudding of objects pelting their armor seemed to underscore his point.
“They’re going to calm down at some point,” Idina said. “And then we’ll still be here, and we’ll still need their cooperation. This is just a few thousand out of ninety million. If they all start actively hating us, we won’t be able to keep a lid on this city, let alone the planet. Not if we start vaporizing hands for throwing a rock.”
“Yes, Color Sergeant,” Condry replied with a chastened expression.
The deputy high commissioner smiled at Idina.
“You said that like a diplomat.”
Now it was her turn to chuckle.
“I don’t have the temperament for a diplomat. The last time I had an argument with the locals, I had to let my kukri do the translating.”
Next to the VIP, his main protectors kept a close eye on their own screens to monitor the crowd. None of the protesters dared to come closer than five meters to the Badger, which told Idina they knew what happened when someone touched the electrified outer layer of the armor. On the roof of the vehicle, the remote weapon station swiveled from left to right and back in a continuous slow sweep. Finally, they were through the ring of the most dedicated protesters, and the fusillade of objects glancing off the hull gradually lessened, then stopped altogether. They drove across the square, and the driver sped up once they were on the southern avenue and on the way out of the center of the city.
Private Khanna looked over at her.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he said.
“We haven’t even gotten close to the dangerous part yet, Khanna,” she replied.
“We have airborne coverage,” the Badger commander told them a few minutes later. They were moving through the c
ity at double the speed of the regular traffic now, passing pods to the left and right.
“That’s good,” Idina said. “Let’s see what’s up there.”
She connected to the tactical network and queried the asset. A thousand meters overhead, one of the military surveillance drones had broken out of its regular patrol pattern above the city and changed course to follow them from above. It didn’t give Idina the warm and friendly feelings that an armed gyrofoil with a backup squad would have, but it was better than nothing, and it made her feel just a little less exposed out here in a single and very obvious military vehicle.
“All right, we have one of the long-range patrol drones tracking us,” she told her section. “It’ll scan ahead of us for a few kilometers, so we should see trouble coming. But keep your own eyes on your screens. That drone isn’t all-seeing.”
If we get blown up, at least command will have high-resolution footage of the event, she thought.
On the outskirts of Sandvik, away from the high-rise buildings of the center, the city seemed to spread out and flatten before them, bustling commercial districts giving way to residential neighborhoods interspersed with cultural centers, wide plazas ringed with museums and concert halls. Every few blocks, there was open space or greenery or both, parks and promenades that broke up the neighborhood clusters. Even after three tours on this planet, it was still strange to Idina to see so much flat ground here. On Pallas, every square meter of level rock had to be claimed from the mountains the hard way, with mining lasers and explosives and backbreaking labor. Here the flat ground was just there, the default state of the surface, ready to be molded into shape or cultivated with trivial effort.
Overhead, the drone tracked their progress through the city, scanning the road ahead for any signs of danger. She watched the imagery closely. However good the AI in the drone’s computer brain was, it would never be able to fully replace an experienced soldier’s instincts.
“Bridge coming up,” she told her section.
