by Isaac Hooke
Rade shook his head. “I wish he hadn’t joined the same discipline and rating as myself and Tahoe. I enrolled in the Teams because I wanted to prove to myself I was the best… that I could handle the grueling training. If I could pass, I knew I could do anything. But Alejandro, he chose to be a MOTH for me. Me, damn it. He didn’t want to leave me. He’d always been there for me, like a brother, taking me under his arms when I was an orphan, new to the street. I think he felt it was his duty to watch over me, as a way to make up for failing to save his real brothers, who had been gunned down in the barrio. When we began our training, I figured he’d just drop out, like others who signed up for the wrong reasons—you didn’t join for someone else, you signed up for yourself. But Alejandro, he stuck with it, and graduated. For me. What a fucking amazing man.”
Rade was silent for several moments. “Normally, graduates are assigned to different Teams, and split up. But for some reason, the Brass decided to keep us together. I was overjoyed at the time, but in hindsight, it would have been so much better if he hadn’t. There were just so many ways fate conspired to kill him. He shouldn’t have been a MOTH. He shouldn’t have been on my Team. He shouldn’t have been released from sickbay so early, the day he fell…”
Rade sighed heavily. “Though he died, I don’t regret the choice I made. If I hadn’t joined the navy, and the Teams, I wouldn’t have found my life’s calling. I wouldn’t have made all these incredible friends. Nor met you. Yes, Alejandro would have lived, but his death wasn’t my fault. He made the choices that led him to my side. He didn’t have to follow me across the border. He didn’t have to join the Teams. He felt he had to watch over me, but I didn’t need watching over. I could’ve taken care of myself. So, while I love him, I won’t let myself wallow in the throes of self-pity.”
Shaw didn’t answer for the next minute. But then, gazing straight ahead, not looking at him, she said: “That matches up to how I remember him from Bootcamp, too. He always seemed loyal and devoted to you, to a fault. And to be honest, when you, him and Tahoe left for MOTH training, I thought he was going to fail, too. He didn’t seem the MOTH type. But I guess he hardened himself, digging deep, finding the heart he needed to get by.”
Rade smiled sadly. “Heart helped. But, so did hate. Because you see, he, like most of us, had decided early on that there was no way we were going to quit. That we would rather die. And that meant enduring whatever the instructors asked of us, no matter what. Near the end, he hated the instructors’ guts so badly that he finished the tasks they inflicted only to tell them fuck you. ‘Two thousand pushups for being an idiot, you maggot!’ ‘Five hundred pull-ups for being too smart, you crusty fecal worm!’ ‘Yes sir!’ he would say, and then he’d finish those two thousand pushups or pull-ups, even if it took him all night.”
“All night?” Shaw asked in disbelief.
Rade nodded. “You don’t know how exhausting MOTH training could get. After a day of brutal training, being told to do five hundred pushups is enough of a challenge, let alone two thousand.”
“I know I’ve told you this before, but I’ll tell you again, I’m sure glad I never chose to be a MOTH,” Shaw said.
“It wasn’t open to women back then, anyway,” Rade said.
“Just as well,” she told him.
“So how about you, what would have happened to you if you hadn’t joined?” Rade pressed.
It was Shaw’s turn to sigh. She looked at him, and smiled, before gazing into the distance once more. “If I hadn’t joined, I probably would’ve moved back to France to avoid the draft. I’d be working on my parents’ vineyard. A winemaker.”
“A winemaker,” Rade said. “Would have been a good job.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” she said.
“Remind me to buy one of your parents’ vintages sometime,” he said.
“Sure,” she said. “If I was a winemaker… I would have never got to go into space. Still, I have to admit, I wish I’d get to visit other space ports more often. I joined to see the stars, after all and while I admit the Earth sure looks wonderful from orbit, I yearn to visit other worlds and colonies.”
“I’m sure you’ll get around to it eventually,” Rade said. “Next time you’re rotated onto another vessel, it might be an interstellar cruiser, rather than part of the Earth Defense force.”
“I suppose,” she said.
“If not, when we retire, we’ll just have to buy our own ship,” he joked.
She gave him what seemed a forced smile.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Well, you brought up being rotated onto another vessel,” she said. “That’s going to happen fairly quickly, given what happened to the Saratoga.”
“Sorry, I forgot,” he told her. “Didn’t mean to make light of the issue.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Oh, Rade. I had so many friends aboard. And I don’t know what happened to them. Don’t know how many made it to the escape pods. Hopefully they all did.”
Rade didn’t want to tell her that reaching the escape pods wasn’t a guarantee of survival. He could still see the burned corpse lying there in the cabin of the pod whose glass portal had shattered during reentry.
“Hopefully,” Rade said instead.
“I thought by traveling aboard a starship, I wouldn’t have to face the horrors of war like you,” she said. “That it would all be remote. Distant. I had a taste of what it was like to get up close and personal with the enemy when I fought at your side in the First Alien War, and decided back then that it wasn’t for me. But I’m not insulated from it aboard a starship, I realize that now. You can never get away from it.”
“There’s always a chance that a starship can go down,” he agreed.
“Yes,” she said. “This time, I had time to reach the escape pods. But next time, I might not have that luxury. A lucky Sino Korean shot could detonate the reactor core, or breach a deck close to the bridge. Or who knows, some powerful alien plasma beam could cut the ship in half. The Nemesis have incredibly deadly weapons. At least in space. Some of the other ships in the fleet reported gamma ray casualties. We were spared. Or so we thought, until they attacked us with their equivalents of conventional weapons.”
“Your ship was cut in half?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But riddled with enough holes that the captain had no choice but to issue the call to abandon ship. Did you know, he stayed aboard while the rest of us left? I begged him to leave, but he told me, ‘the captain goes down with his ship.’ I think he couldn’t bare the shame of losing the vessel.”
“It would be tough,” Rade said. “Knowing all those crew members who served underneath you no longer had a vessel to serve aboard. Assuming they survived. It’s hard enough to lose one man who serves beneath you… I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose an entire ship.”
“Imagine the most terrible thing that could happen to you,” she said. “And multiply it by ten. That’s the answer Captain Averell gave me when I asked him a similar question once.”
“I didn’t know you were that close to the captain,” Rade said.
“I was part of the bridge crew, and served in the third watch directly under him,” Shaw said. “I’d occasionally take the night crew, and a few times, he’d often wander down, unable to sleep. That’s when he was the most open, and we’d have our talks. Mind you, he talked not just with me, but the other members of the crew, too. He liked to get to know who served under him. Sort of like you, I imagine.”
“Sounds like he was a good man,” Rade said.
Their conversation fizzled out after that, and they merely gazed at the rolling landscape below.
About four hours into the journey, a city appeared on the horizon. Rade recognized the characteristic skyline of Beijing with its mixture of tall and short skyscrapers, with the elliptical Beijing Tower and the sprawling, n-shaped CNG Headquarters standing out from the others.
Even though his comm node was dialed low, he still receive
d military-band GPS updates from satellites overhead, and his map confirmed his position.
The shuttle remained moderately low, and passed not far from the tops of the skyscrapers. It seemed headed toward the center of town.
Ahead, near the city center, was a large park surrounded by ornamental lakes and tall, sprawling trees. At the center of this park was a large, pyramidal structure. Rade recognized it immediately as the center of the Sino Korean government: the Pyramid Palace, where the Paramount Leader held his seat of power. From here, President Guoping Qiu ruled not just the country, but the colonies of the great Sino Korean space empire with an iron fist. He ate, slept and governed from this building, rarely leaving.
The pyramid had several landing pads lining the upper third of the structure: flat, rectangular-shaped protrusions where other flyers and aircraft resided. The shuttle headed directly for one of these.
“This isn’t what I think it is, is it?” Shaw sent.
“Oh yes,” Rade replied. “The Pyramid Palace.”
“Wonderful,” Shaw commented. “Now we’re surrounded by a whole city of bad guys. At least in the jungle we had places to hide.”
“Shaw, I’ve fought enough battles in cities to tell you there’s more than enough places to hide,” Rade said. “It’s not for no reason that people call cities urban jungles.”
“Yeah, okay,” Shaw said. “Look at those sentry robots standing guard. And those are the ones we can see. I’ll bet you fifty digicoins we’ll be apprehended or killed within thirty seconds of the shuttle landing.”
Rade zoomed in and saw the combat robots standing guard on the four points of the landing pad. They carried laser rifles in hand, strapped to their shoulders. On their heads were small turrets containing mini rockets. According to the specs he had on the units, there were two types of rockets loaded into the turrets: the first contained explosives, while the second deployed nets meant to capture targets.
“You’re on,” Rade said. “Though if we’re killed, how do you expect me to pay up?”
“Good point,” Shaw said.
The shuttle slowly descended, until it had landed on the center of the pad.
Things were about to get interesting…
23
The yellow landing pad filled the view beyond the grille below Rade. He gazed out past the outer periphery of the shuttle’s underside, but couldn’t see very far from the current angle, certainly not enough to discern the four combat robots he’d spotted on the corners of the pad during the descent.
The fuselage vibrated above Rade as the rear ramp of the shuttle opened. It settled into place on the surface below, sounding much like the peal of some clocktower announcing one o’clock. He felt stronger vibrations shortly thereafter, coming at steady intervals, coinciding with loud clangs that echoed from the ramp. He couldn’t see past the ramp of course, but he had to assume it was Nicolas being escorted down by the SK mechs.
The vibrations ceased, but he continued to hear clangs as the robots led Nicolas away from the shuttle.
It just so happened that Rade had blueprints of the palace available inside his embedded database, courtesy of Tan Xin Zao, so he pulled them up on his HUD, filling out his overhead map. According to the map, a hatch on the far side of the landing pad led inside the Pyramid Palace, where a refueling bay awaited. Beyond it was a hallway that eventually led to the prison and interrogation facilities.
“Here,” Rade said, transmitting the data he had to Shaw.
“You have blueprints of the entire Sino Korean royal palace?” she asked incredulously.
“As a special operator, I’m privy to top secret data most military personnel don’t have,” he replied. “Before the mission, I received maps of all the major government installations and military bases across the country. This particular map came courtesy of a mole the United Systems has at the heart of the SK empire.” He decided not to reveal how his team had captured that particular mole. That would be tantamount to bragging. “Probably shouldn’t be giving this to you, but I want you to have it in case we’re separated. Of course, the accuracy of these blueprints has yet to be determined.”
“We get to be the guinea pigs, you’re saying?” she pressed.
“Uh huh,” he told her.
The clanging sounds continued, slowly decreasing in volume. They became deeper in pitch suddenly; no doubt Nicolas and his escorts had passed into the hangar bay connected to the landing pad.
The sound continued to diminish, but then more clangs came, emerging from the direction of the hangar, and moving rapidly toward the shuttle.
Have we been spotted? he wondered.
“Looks like I’m about to win a bet,” Shaw sent grimly.
Rade slid his upper body out from underneath the metal grille that held him in place below the shuttle, and lowered himself until his helmet was nearly touching the ground, which allowed him a better view beyond the outer periphery of the shuttle. Next to the ramp, he spotted several helper robots making their way forward, carrying thick fuel lines.
“It’s the refuel bots,” Rade said.
“They’re not going to sweep the underside of the shuttle for stowaways?” Shaw said. “That seems incompetent.”
“The United Systems would never let a shuttle land without a full sweep,” Rade agreed. “But apparently the SKs do things a bit differently.”
“Apparently so,” Shaw agreed.
But then Rade spotted a small sweeper robot arriving from the direction of the hangar a moment later, and he pulled himself back up.
“Got a sweeper,” Rade sent her. “Coming in on your side. Switch with me!”
He tucked in his legs and rolled into a ball so that Shaw could crawl past the tight space he’d freed up. She did so, sliding by him, staying between the cramped grille and the fuselage. He edged forward at the same time, until he occupied her former spot. Then he extended his legs once more, while she crawled backward until she resided in his previous location.
Just in time, too, because the sweeper robot was examining the undersides of the carriage. As before, Rade’s environment blending suit prevented the robot from noticing him.
Meanwhile, the helper robots attached the fuel lines to the shuttle.
The sweeper continued forward, and passed right by Rade and Shaw without raising an alarm.
“What do we do when it gets to the other side?” Shaw asked.
The search robot reached the front of the craft; at the same time, Rade slowly lowered himself out from between the grille and fuselage, until his boots touched the ground. He crouched, beckoning toward Shaw, she lowered herself to the ground behind him.
The robot passed by the front section of the shuttle, its cameras having a full view of the undercarriage from front to back; Rade had aligned himself perfectly in front of Shaw so that she was shielded from the robot’s vision.
As the robot switched its scan to the opposite side of the shuttle, Rade and Shaw rotated, so that she continued to be shielded by his environmental blending jumpsuit, and they backed away, toward the thick fuel lines that led away from the vessel.
Rade paused there, with the fuel lines covering Shaw from behind, while he protected her from the front, and waited for the robot to finish its scan. When it reached the back of the shuttle, Rade had already repositioned to protect Shaw from that angle, but the sweeper apparently was satisfied that there were no stowaways, because it was already heading back to the hangar bay.
Slumping in relief, Rade turned his attention to that bay; he couldn’t relax just yet. He stood up slightly, gazing past the stacked refueling tubes, which reached waist high, and spotted the two robots standing guard on both corners of this side of the landing pad. Another two robots awaited on the opposite side, currently hidden behind the shuttle. He wasn’t sure if there were other robots out there, stealth models with environmental blending, thermal masking, and LIDAR blurring to the max, but he supposed it didn’t matter, just as long as Shaw was shielded from view at all
times.
“Advance toward the hangar,” Rade told her. “Stay low. I’m going to protect your back.”
She moved at a low crouch, keeping the top of the two tubes above her head at all times. Rade stayed behind her so that when the pair left the shuttle behind, and she moved in full view of the combat robots on that side, his jumpsuit was there to shield her.
They continued forward. At the halfway point, motion drew his gaze to the stacked fuel lines; as the fuel pumped through it, the top one bobbed up and down, leaning precariously to one side and threatening to topple over.
It fell right as Rade watched, so that the two fuel lines were no longer stacked and instead resided side by side, halving their profile.
Shaw dropped to a low crawl so that she could hide behind the reduced fuel line profile, and Rade was forced to match her. He prayed he hadn’t reacted too slowly.
He risked a glance toward the two combat robots on this side, but both seemed uninterested. They continued to scan the landing pad and the open space beyond it as if they hadn’t spotted him.
He kept advancing with Shaw at a low crawl, staying next to those fuel lines, until they reached the hangar bay. Then they diverted to crawl behind a toolshed. When they were both behind it, they stood up and returned to their previous crouching posture. Rade leaned past the edge of the bay, and confirmed that there were no other combat robots standing guard. There were two other shuttles in the bay, both offline. Robot technicians performed repairs on one of them, but otherwise the hangar was quiet.
Rade and Shaw continued toward the far side at a crouch, moving from cover to cover, which included storage closets, parts pallets, gear shelves, and fuel tanks.
At the far side awaited a sealed hatch.
“Stay behind me,” Rade said as he approached. “In case there’s a camera.”
He approached the hatch, and attempted to access the remote interface. It was encrypted. He had a Sino-Korean hacking kit installed for these very things. He wasn’t a hacker per se, definitely not on par with Bender or TJ, but the kit was relatively easy to use, and had all the latest exploits found in various Sino Korean equipment. He had refreshed it before the mission, so hopefully it could find something to break through the door interface.
