by Marko Kloos
CHAPTER 14
IDINA
The QRF’s big combat gyrofoil descended above the bridge and roared to its southern end, gun turrets turning and scanning for targets. The access ramp on the south side was clear of traffic now. Every civilian with a bit of sense had taken manual control of their pod when the shooting had started and cleared the area at a high rate of speed. The northern end of the bridge was pandemonium, a smoking mess of destroyed transport pods and mangled bodies. Some people were trying to free others from wrecked pods. Others were in headlong flight, abandoning their own pods and running away from the scene as quickly as they could.
“How are they doing?” Idina asked Private Arjun, who was still tending to Private Raya and the injured Gretian civilian.
“They’ll live, but we need to get this man off the bridge. There’s only so much I can do with these medpacks.”
On the south side of the bridge, the gyrofoil lowered itself to the ground. The big tail hatch opened, and several heavily armored QRF troopers rushed down the ramp and started to run up the bridge toward her position. She walked out to meet them.
“I have two injured over there for medical evac,” she said. “And the DHC is in the Badger and waiting for exfil. You want to get him out of here and back to the Green Zone before they spring another fucking surprise on us.”
“Medical is on the way with several birds,” the lead QRF trooper said. “The combat flight has to stay on station for fire support.”
“Then at least get the VIP out of the damn armor and into your bird,” she said. “He’s safer there than on the middle of the bridge.”
The QRF team lead nodded and signaled his men, and they ran up to the Badger and lowered the tail ramp. A few moments later, they had the deputy high commissioner and his security detail between them, covering him from possible incoming fire with their armored bodies from all directions. They made their way down the bridge to the southern end and ushered the VIP into the back of the combat gyrofoil.
“Cover me with the remote mount,” Idina said to the Badger commander. “I’m going to see what I can do on the other side. Arjun, stay with the wounded. Khanna, Condry, with me.”
Her two remaining section members left their guard positions and joined her as she walked down the bridge toward the northern end. She could see the anxious expression on Khanna’s face as he looked at the carnage in front of them. Pallas Brigade soldiers were the toughest young men and women in all the worlds of the system, but he had just received his kukri not too long ago, and she knew that he had never seen the carnage of battle, never witnessed what a large-caliber automatic gun could do to unprotected human bodies.
“Khanna,” she said, and he looked at her.
“Don’t dwell on the dead,” she told him. “Help the living. And scratch the rest from your memory.”
He nodded. “Yes, Colors.”
“Go and get all the medpacks you can grab out of the armor.”
“Yes, Colors.” He turned and ran back to the Badger.
The first pod she reached was jammed up against the divider barrier between the travel lanes. She took one look and knew there was nothing anyone with a medpack could do. The explosive grenade had hit the passenger compartment head-on through the canopy bubble and exploded within, and it was hard to tell how many people had been inside. Not every pod in line had been hit directly, but most of them had been sprayed with shrapnel from the ones that had, and the few undamaged pods were jammed in with the disabled and shattered ones. The next pod she reached had a wounded civilian inside who was slumped in his seat. She pulled the emergency release of the pod’s door and yanked it open.
“Help me with this one,” she told Private Condry.
Together, they pulled the man out of the pod and lowered him to the ground, where Idina bent over him to check his vitals. He had a pulse, and she couldn’t see any obvious major wounds, so she left him for the medical teams and went to the next pod. Private Khanna came running up from the direction of the Badger, multiple medpacks in his arms.
“We’re going to check these pods one by one,” she ordered. “If they’re too far gone, don’t waste your time. Get out the ones who look like they can be patched up.”
On the north side of the bridge, some brave civilians had started to check the pods there for wounded people as well. She took two of the medpacks from Khanna’s arms.
“Bring the rest to those people down there, they will need some of them. I’ll go down the line with Condry.”
Khanna nodded, his face pale underneath his helmet, and ran off to do as she had ordered. Idina looked over at the residence tower where the insurgent firing position had been set up. Even with a whole platoon of QRF troops, it would take a while to clear every room in that building, and there was no guarantee that there wasn’t a second hidden gun about to cut loose and add to the carnage. Whoever was behind Odin’s Wolves had shown the ambush skills to target rescue crews before. The second bomb at the demonstration three months ago had taken out many more people than the first one, which had only been set off to lure the rescue pods and gyrofoils to the scene.
If I had set this ambush, that’s what I would have done, she thought.
It was tactically unsound to stay on the bridge in full view of the building. But until the rescue crews and the rest of the security forces got here, her little half section of soldiers were the only Alliance presence among dozens of dead and wounded civilians, and she was not going to run back to her armored box and hide in it to leave them out in the open alone.
Some of the pods she checked were empty, their occupants having fled down the bridge on foot when the shooting had started. Idina felt profound relief whenever she checked a pod’s interior and saw nothing inside except for hastily scattered relics of everyday commutes—dropped comtabs and spilled food or beverage containers. She worked her way down the line mechanically, without allowing herself to rush just to get through the unpleasant task. One of the pods she checked had a hatch that would not open even after she pulled the emergency release, so she had to force her way into the vehicle by using her kukri to cut into one of the numerous shrapnel holes in the pod’s skin and expand it with her blade. The civilian inside was lying on the floor of the cabin, in front of the passenger seats. It took her the better part of a minute to cut away enough Alon to be able to wedge her way through the opening she had made. When she finally got into the pod and checked his vitals, he didn’t have a pulse. She rolled him over to see that a piece of shrapnel had torn deeply into the side of his head right above his ear.
Overhead, another Alliance gyrofoil appeared. It circled the bridge twice as if to ascertain the situation. Then it descended and landed on the embankment on the north side of the bridge, close to the burning wreckage of the Gretian police gyrofoil. Idina heard the sound of emergency signals coming from the direction of the city now, rescue and medical pods making their way to the bridge on the surface roads.
“The JSP put all the companies on alert,” the Badger commander sent. “And they’re sending a full battalion from Unity.”
“Tell them to hurry up,” Idina replied. “We’ve got our asses hanging in the breeze here.”
“ETA for the medical birds is two minutes.”
When she reached the next pod, she met Private Condry, who had worked his way up the line from the other side. There were two passengers in the cabin, a man who was obviously dead and a woman who was still alive and conscious. When they pulled her out of the broken pod, she groaned and mumbled some words that Idina’s translator software couldn’t parse.
“Why would they do this?” Condry asked when they were putting medical gel dressings on the woman’s wounds. “Why would they kill their own people? It makes no sense.”
She looked around at the chaos surrounding them. The air smelled like burned composites and gun propellant. The sound of the emergency signals got louder with every passing moment. Soon, the bridge and its approaches would be swarmed with emer
gency personnel and Alliance soldiers. She was sure that the ambush hadn’t quite gone as planned, but it had achieved its goal nonetheless. This part of the city would be paralyzed for a while, and all of the Alliance’s military resources in it would be tied up while they secured the area and looked for insurgents that were most likely already long gone, if they had been here for the ambush at all. Gun mounts could be remotely controlled, after all. In the countryside, a data link would be quickly detected and pinpointed to a source. In the electronic clutter of a modern city where everything and everyone was connected to the Mnemosyne, it was impossible to detect in time and very difficult to identify after the fact, buried as it was in the many data streams from a hundred thousand connected devices nearby.
“This is the point,” she said. “The chaos. They want us to know that we’re not safe anywhere on this planet. And they want their own people to know that, too. Show everyone that we can’t keep control.”
“QRF team found the gun,” the Badger commander sent. “Twenty-five mil. Cooled and suppressed. Ammo cassette empty. No shooters on site.”
“Fantastic,” Idina replied.
They win again, she thought. They lose one gun mount. But they get weeks and months of instability and fear in return. We can’t keep this up.
For the first time since she had set foot on Gretia, the thought crossed her mind that the occupation was a hopeless task, that the Gretians were every bit as unwilling to be conquered as the Palladians had been.
The team had left in the morning, but by the time the military gyrofoil put down on the landing pad in the Green Zone to get Idina and her half section back to the base, the sun was setting beyond the Sandvik skyline, giving the city a vivid background of orange and red.
When the engines had stopped and the doors and ramps were open, Idina unbuckled her harness and got out of her seat. She checked her weapon to make sure it was safe. Next to her, privates Condry and Khanna did the same. Khanna had a familiar look in his eyes, the unfocused long-distance stare common to soldiers who had just seen more violent things than their brain was prepared to process.
“That was a rough first day, Khanna,” she said.
He looked at her and nodded.
“Do you ever get used to it?” he said. “Seeing the bodies, I mean.”
She shook her head curtly.
“You don’t want to get used to it,” she replied. “And stay away from people who say they are. They’re either full of shit, or they have a circuit crossed in their heads.”
They walked down the ramp and onto the landing pad. Idina felt a tiredness that seemed to have seeped all the way into her bones. She had scoffed at the medical assessment a few weeks back that had made her commanding officer want to send her back to Pallas, but as she planted her boots back on solid ground, it felt like this planet’s gravity had increased by a good 10 percent since they had left this morning.
The Green Zone was noisy and busy this evening. As Idina led her half section back to the Palladian embassy, they passed armored vehicles seemingly on every corner. A whole platoon of armor was deployed in a line right in front of the commemorative arch, positioned to block each of the archways. Overhead, several gyrofoils kept an eye on things from above. It was an immense show of force, but she knew that it was security theater, intended to make the high commissioner and all the government civilians feel safer. No insurgent with half a brain in his skull would attack the fortified Green Zone head-on, especially not after putting it on full alert with the earlier ambush. The armor would be gone in another day or two once the panic had settled, and the gyrofoils would waste a lot of time and power circling overhead.
“What now, Color Sergeant?” Khanna asked her when they walked up to the security lock at the main entrance of the embassy.
“Now you turn your weapon in at the armory with the rest of us. Did they assign you a room yet?”
“Yes, Colors.”
“Then you’ll go there right after, stow your gear, and come down to the mess hall to get some food. And then you’re going to hit the rack for at least eight solid hours. You’ve been on your feet for too long today.”
“Yes, Colors,” Khanna said. She knew that he would follow her orders right up until the food part, but that he wouldn’t be able to go to sleep just yet, not after what he’d seen and done today. She was willing to bet her kukri that if she walked into the enlisted lounge in a few hours, he’d be in there with the rest of the section, seeking comfort in company, trying to process the events. And if he slept at all tonight, she knew his dreams wouldn’t be pleasant.
They filed through the security lock and headed downstairs to the armory, where they unloaded their weapons and handed them in for safe storage. When her troopers placed their disposable ammunition blocks on the armorer’s counter, she saw that all of them were still fully loaded and sealed. Between all of them, they hadn’t fired a single round today.
Taking a shower in her quarters and putting on a clean uniform did a little bit to restore her, but her stomach reminded Idina that she hadn’t eaten anything since the sparse breakfast before her run. She put her kukri belt back on and went downstairs to the mess hall.
Tonight’s food selection was limited, but she was pleased to find spicy stew, and the kitchen had set up a big thermal keg of hot water and several rows of metal mugs next to it. The mugs held fermented millet, and when combined with hot water, they made a hot beverage that was slightly sour and moderately intoxicating. She took a bowl of stew and filled one of the mugs with hot water, then looked around for a place to sit and eat while her drink was brewing. The mess was still busy, most tables occupied with new soldiers she didn’t know, reinforcements from Camp Unity that had arrived today in the wake of the emergency. Idina spotted some troopers from her section at a table in the back of the room, and she made her way toward it. Almost every table seemed to have several screen projections hovering above it, and troopers were loudly discussing what they were seeing while eating their dinners. The atmosphere in the room had an angry note that she hadn’t noticed when she had walked in, distracted by her hunger and the menu at the counter.
“What’s going on?” she asked her section as she put her food on the table and sat down.
“These fucking people,” Corporal Rai said. He reached over to the screen that was floating slightly to his right above Private Condry’s meal tray, brought it over until it was between them, and turned it a little so she could see what was going on.
“We’re on the system news,” he said. “Well, you are. You and the team that was on the bridge today.”
“Eight civilians dead and fifteen wounded,” she said. “Of course that would make the system news.”
“Just watch,” he said. “Restart from time marker zero zero,” he told the screen, and it flickered and scrubbed back through the footage it had shown so far. It was a wide-angle view of the bridge, shot from a distance, and it had the slightly unstable quality of a comtab recording that was taken at magnification. From the angle and aspect, Idina guessed that it was taken from one of the windows of the residence tower where the insurgents had set up the gun. Their Badger was visible in the center of the bridge, but something about it didn’t look right. It was standing sideways and blocking most of the road, so she knew it was after the explosive ambush had detonated and disabled the Badger, but there was no smoke coming from the vehicle or the hole in the roadway.
“Watch,” Rai said again and pointed.
“What the fuck,” Idina said. On the screen, the weapons mount of the Badger was not turned toward the recording device, as it should have been for most of their stay on the bridge. Instead, it was aimed toward the north side of the bridge, where the civilian pods were lined up in the traffic jam. As she watched, the gun mount fired a single shot, then another. Down by the north end of the bridge, pods started shattering one by one.
“That’s not right,” she said, anger welling up inside her. “We didn’t fire a shot from that mount.
And sure as hells not at the civvies. What is this shit?”
“It popped up on the ’Syne about an hour and a half ago. Looks like someone tweaked it to make it look like we’re the ones who killed all those civvies.”
“Fuck,” she said. “Is this on all the networks right now? Are they spreading this garbage?”
Corporal Rai shook his head.
“They’re all showing the real thing. This is just floating out on the ’Syne. But it’s generating a shitload of chatter.”
“Of course it fucking is,” she grumbled.
“Who’s going to believe that shit?” Condry said. “Everyone’s showing what really happened. All they have to do is watch the networks. It doesn’t matter.”
Idina watched with growing fury as the Badger on the screen kept firing at the line of pods at the end of the bridge. The AI tweaks were flawless. Everything looked right to her. If she hadn’t been there and known better, she would have thought this was reality. The gun recoiled correctly, and the puffs of propellant smoke from the muzzle dispersed realistically. Even the little shockwave from each shot’s muzzle concussion was visible briefly after the weapon fired.
“Most of them won’t believe it, Condry,” she said. “But some of them will. The ones that are already thinking that way. They’ll believe it because they want to believe it.”
She pinched the screen to make it disappear. The hot water in her metal mug hadn’t steeped for long enough to make the fermented millet brew very strong, but she brought the drinking tube to her lips and took a long sip anyway. She looked at Condry.
“And it does matter. Even if only one in five hundred of these people think we committed that massacre, that’s a hundred thousand on this planet. And if only one in five hundred of those are dumb or angry enough to join the insurgency?”
She let her spoon drop back into her stew and frowned.
