by C H Gideon
And those vehicles had come from the Jemmin fleet.
“Maintain focus, people,” Colonel Li said with firm resolve threaded through every syllable. “It’s time we earned our pay.”
The speakers went quiet, and the small red light beneath them darkened to indicate the address was complete.
“All right, people,” Podsy called over the shift-wide channel while moving his forklift to a more central spot, “gather ‘round.”
Second and Third Shifts did as bidden, but Podsy couldn’t immediately locate Second Shift’s deck boss.
“Where’s Chief Batista?” Podsy asked.
A pair of Second Shifters shrugged. “Haven’t seen him in forever, Chief.”
Podsy shook his head. “Define ‘forever,’ please.”
“Eight minutes?” The Second Shifter didn’t sound confident.
Podsy set his jaw. The standard break-time allowed was ten minutes, which meant that every smartass liked to use some variant of the “eight-minute rule” when covering for their fellows’ absences.
“Fine,” Podsy allowed before gesturing to the line of partially-prepped drop-cans behind him, “you can tell him when he comes back that we’re re-packing half of these cans. One and Two need to have all of their LRMs removed, and we need to pull the Hawkeye MRMs too...”
“You can’t override a load order,” interrupted one of Second Shift’s Wrenches. “Those have to be confirmed by the colonel and Chief Rimmer.”
“I’m not telling anyone to stop working or to remove anything just yet,” Podsy said firmly. “I’m saying to stop loading the LRMs and Hawkeyes since Jemmin countermeasures will make them useless, and prep all eight pallets of jammer drones. We can pull the unwanted ordnance back out of the cans as soon as we get confirmation from command. Third Shift, go,” he commanded, and his people did while the Second Shifters looked on with mixed approval and reluctance. “Second Shift,” he continued, “you can keep working on cans Five and Seven because their inventories won’t need any modifications…go. That’s an order,” he snapped when they failed to jump, “and until Chief Batista comes back, I’m boss of the deck. Move!”
Most of the Second Shifters did as bidden, but a pair of stalwarts looked ready for a confrontation. They were older crew, ossified in their tendencies and disliking of anything that upset their formerly-established routines—routines which apparently included covering for naps taken by the shift boss.
Just as Podsy opened his mouth to argue with the rebellious crew, the main door swished open and Chief Rimmer moved onto the deck.
“Where’s Batista?” he demanded after sighting Podsy and making a bee-line for his forklift.
“I’ll go find him, sir,” one of the Second Shifters said hurriedly.
“I didn’t tell you to find him,” Rimmer snarled as he rounded on the crewman, “I asked where he was, and now I want to know what he’s doing.”
The Second Shifter hesitated. “Napping in the Hawkeye bunks, sir.”
“Wake his sorry ass up,” Rimmer scowled before resuming his trek to Podsy’s forklift. “Chief Podsednik, a word.”
The disobedient Second Shifters smirked triumphantly as Rimmer approached, and Podsy was legitimately concerned that the boss of the deck might have some sort of problem with his orders to re-pack the cans.
“Yes, sir?” Podsy wheeled the forklift over to cut down on Rimmer’s trek.
“We need to re-pack these cans,” Rimmer explained. “If Jemmin forces are down there, the Hawkeyes and longer-range missiles are de-prioritized. We need to send down all of our jammer drones and a couple extra packs of exo-suits since detached infantry patrols are in the book for potential Jemmin encounters.”
The flabbergasted looks on the rebellious Second Shifters’ faces was priceless, but Podsy kept his expression neutral as he nodded. “Yes, sir, I was just coordinating that effort.”
Rimmer’s brow rose in surprise before he looked over at the stationary Second Shifters. “Is that true?”
“Yes, sir,” replied one of the Second Shifters promptly, while the others nodded in agreement.
“Then why in the name of our Lord and savior, Mister Murphy, are you still standing here?” Rimmer barked.
Podsy quickly interjected, “They were reminding me that Cans Five and Seven didn’t need modification.”
Rimmer glared at the trio of Second Shifters. “Then get back to it. Now.”
The trio scattered, and Rimmer gave Podsy a brief look of approval. “You’re quick on your feet. I’ll have the official orders revised in three minutes. Do you need First Shift’s help to get this done on schedule?”
Podsy shook his head confidently. “We’ll make the window, sir.”
“Good.” Rimmer nodded before his eyes locked onto the person of Chief Jose Batista, Second Shift’s deck boss. “I’ll have Chief Batista and his people stick around afterward to clean up, while you and Third Shift take their bunk schedule.”
Podsy wanted to object, but he knew the extra duty shift that Batista’s people were about to serve was less a reward for Third Shift than a punishment for Second. So he gave the only sane response, “Thank you, sir.”
Rimmer set off for what was likely to be a lengthy upbraiding for his napping shift boss, but Podsednik’s mind was already back on the task at hand.
He needed to get those cans ready. Captain Xi Bao and everyone with her would need them.
2
Frozen Hell
“Good of you to join us, Elvira,” Colonel Lee Jenkins greeted after all four companies were assembled at the rendezvous point. “I heard you had a little excitement on the way down?”
“Just keeping my people on their toes, sir,” Xi replied with faint irritation.
“It’s where we need to be,” Jenkins acknowledged. “2nd Company will take point, 1st Company will take center with the infantry, and 3rd Company will break out at nine o’clock to the line of march two clicks. We’ll arrive at Alpha Site in two hours. Roll out.”
“2nd Company, on point,” Xi acknowledged before leading her mechs to the front of the column. 2nd Company was consolidated from the remains of both 2nd and 4th Companies, with Xi in charge. Elvira was also one of the mechs in 4th Platoon of 2nd Company. She never knew from one battle to the next who would survive the engagement to become the next company. The entire battalion was a mish-mash of equipment and people forced into a formal structure that wasn’t a perfect fit.
Round peg, meet square hole.
“3rd Company, nine o’clock, two clicks,” replied Lieutenant Winters, a newcomer to the battalion who had transferred over from Terra Han’s PDF after eight years in their mechanized infantry.
Only Jenkins, Styles, Xi, Winters, and Koch were aware that this mission was more than simple protection duty. Only Styles and Xi shared Jenkins’ knowledge that this was, in fact, a highly-secretive diplomatic meeting between the Terran Republic and an unknown species. Only a few people up the Fleet ladder even knew about the diplomatic nature of this mission. It seemed that Director Durgan had been much more circumspect in presenting this mission to the Terran government than Jenkins had initially suspected.
So when Jenkins said his next statement, he knew that only his hand-picked group would understand its full meaning.
“I just received confirmation that the Vorr are pulling out,” he said as his column assumed formation. “Jemmin forces are inbound and will assume the Vorr position within the hour.”
The brief delay before Xi replied told him she understood loud and clear. “Looks like sushi’s off the menu. Damn.”
Jenkins chuckled at her dark humor. The Vorr were an aquatic species which, as part of their customary greeting ritual, offered bits of their bodies for consumption as a gesture of goodwill and openness. He would have been required to partake in this ritual had formal introductions taken place, and Jenkins wasn’t ashamed to admit he was glad he would no longer have to.
“Jemmin or Vorr, who cares?” Lieutenant
Winters asked enthusiastically. “We’re here to prove Armor can do the job that others can’t.”
“Love the spirit, Generally,” Jenkins approved, both of Winters’ expressed sentiment and his ability to react in real-time. This was it. Jenkins had spent months prepping the crews for a situation like this, and now they needed to prove their worth. “Roll out.”
Shiva’s Wrath was cold. Incredibly cold. With a mean surface temperature of seventy degrees below zero Celsius, and an icy mantle ten kilometers thick with an ocean six times that deep beneath, it was a literal ball of ice. Its ultra-thin atmosphere was, surprisingly, breathable with only minimal concentration and humidification, so every vehicle had been equipped with the necessary gear to make it usable. Even the infantrymen were equipped with respirator units that did the job of protecting their lungs from the bitter cold and eventual desiccation that would come from breathing the worldlet’s dry, unmodified air.
But to Xi, it wasn’t the bitter cold, the mantle of ice, or even the breathable atmosphere which boggled her mind. Even the blue-green gas giant looming above the horizon wasn’t enough to unnerve her.
What unnerved her, far more than she had expected, was the near-complete lack of weather on the planet.
During the early mission briefings, she had built the image of a blizzard-bound world in her mind’s eye. Thick cloud banks, swirling snowstorms, drifts of white powder so deep she could lose her mech down one. All of these images had filled her apparently over-active imagination until, mid-way through the briefing, she had learned none of them would be featured on Shiva’s Wrath. She had consciously accepted that updated information immediately without a single doubt.
But now, walking her mech across the smooth, icy landscape, she was thoroughly stunned by the lack of weather on the bleak, frozen planetoid.
Polymer hitting metal clattered behind her, and Xi turned to see Sarah Samuels bend down to retrieve one of her many video drones. Not much larger than a human hand, she seemed to have hundreds of the tiny things stowed throughout Elvira. As she moved into Xi’s cockpit, the blond woman apologized, “I’m sorry about that, Captain.”
“As long as this neural linkage is working,” Xi replied tersely, “you’re free to roam this mech just like the colonel said.”
“You don’t like me very much, do you?” the reporter asked with a bemused smirk.
“And why ever would I like you?”
“Because even the greatest deeds are meaningless without their proper recognition,” Samuels replied all too easily. She had played this game. A lot. She was a predator who hunted information, and judging by the other woman’s casual demeanor, Xi knew she needed to stay on her toes. “I heard you might know more than most about that,” the reporter mused as she fidgeted with the camera now situated across her enviro-suited lap. “Recognition for one’s deeds, that is?”
Xi was wrong-footed by that particular turn in the conversation. Is she talking about Durgan’s Folly? she wondered in alarm. Is this bitch that good?
Xi shook her head. “We aren’t in this for the glory, lady. The only way society works is if people like you are protected while you do…whatever it is you do,” she said with an intentional hint of derision. “Sometimes that means people like me have to come to hellholes like this and stare down Nietzsche’s abyss just to ensure everyone’s ability to sip their lattes, argue with each other on the data nets, and I guess occasionally do something productive to keep the wheels of civilization from grinding to a halt.”
“That sounds like an awful lot of disdain,” Samuels observed neutrally. “Why risk your life to protect people you dislike so much?”
“First off, I don’t dislike people,” Xi replied as Elvira navigated a five-meter-wide fissure in the ice, carefully extending her legs and rotating the mech across the divide. The planet’s surface was covered with such crevasses, crisscrossing hither and thither at seemingly random angles as the gravitational interplay between Shiva’s Wrath and its parent gas giant constantly compressed and stretched the world’s surface. “I dislike stupid people sucking off others while simultaneously judging them and, even worse, I hate bad ideas.”
“Is that why you came to call a prison cell ‘home’ by the tender age of fourteen?” Samuels asked. “Not many people, even on the relatively authoritarian world of Terra Han, find themselves in max-sec before they’ve finished puberty.”
“Puberty? At Fourteen?” Xi snorted. “Have you looked at me, lady? I had more curves at thirteen than an extreme drift-racing track.”
Samuels laughed. “Fair enough. But that doesn’t explain how you ended up behind bars.”
“I thought you were here to document the battalion,” Xi said irritably.
“I am,” Samuels agreed, “but this battalion isn’t made of machines and weapons. It’s made of men and women, many of whom, like you, willingly chose to join military service instead of serving out their criminal sentences. As something of a scion for your unit, I thought an individual character bio of Captain Xi Bao, data criminal and information-thief-turned-mech-Jock, would be a good place to start my documentary.”
Xi gritted her teeth. “I’m a data criminal, sure, but I never stole anything.”
“That’s not the way Terra Han’s judiciary saw it,” Samuels challenged. “They gave you a thirty-year sentence, one which would probably take you beyond your natural childbearing years, for stealing and broadcasting sensitive information across the data nets.”
“That information wasn’t stolen,” she growled, “but yes, I did broadcast it.”
“How can you say it wasn’t stolen?” Samuels asked, and only then did Xi recognize the combative tone in the woman’s voice. She had been so gradual in her lead-up to it that Xi hadn’t even noticed, but now it was clear: she was being grilled.
Xi took a steadying breath. “The information I broadcast was government-collected statistical data on behavior patterns and their associations with multiple individual traits. Some of those traits were genetic, some had to do with individual social experiences, and some had to do with hormonal interplay with certain neural structures in the brain. The reason I didn’t steal it…no, the reason I couldn’t have stolen it, is simple: it was government-funded research, conducted using tax money. It belonged to us, not them, and the simple fact that they threw me in jail for shedding light on that information was all the proof one needs to know that my world’s government does indeed view itself apart from the citizenry. That was the main point of my broadcasting the data.”
“You stoked a lot of hatred with that data release,” Samuels said sympathetically, though the sentiment was not directed at Xi. “Racial and sexual discrimination, ethnic violence, even several suicides were directly linked to your data release.”
Xi shrugged with forced indifference as the last of 2nd Company traversed the icy chasm, though some required the aid of Gym Cricket, a multi-purpose non-combat mech that could create thirty-meter-long bridges in seconds. “I didn’t cause any of that violence or hatred, and no sense in retrying the case. The government found me guilty. I served my time there before serving here. My sentence has been commuted and record expunged. If you’re looking for some kind of daytime drama to create, go find it somewhere else. If you want to keep talking to me, then let’s talk about 2nd Company and what we’re facing right here on Shiva.” Xi turned back to her console.
“Maybe you didn’t cause the violence,” Samuels allowed, “but you certainly fueled it.” The reporter completely ignored Xi’s attempt to end the conversation. The two women waited in uncomfortable silence. The reporter knew that the tension would grow.
“I’m not responsible for their hatred,” Xi replied matter-of-factly, “and I’m not responsible for a society that self-destructs by choosing to coddle and shield itself from some of the harsher truths of the human condition. Some truths are nice to hear, others not so much. But instead of suppressing the flow of information which makes us feel bad, why don’t we push it out there
as hard and as fast as possible so we can collectively figure out how to deal with it? You’re a reporter.” she snapped, making angry eye contact with the blonde woman. “You, of all people, should know the answer.”
Samuels’ expression remained impassive, and she stayed silent for a moment while her hand-sized hover-drone recorded every second of the conversation.
Xi shook her head in disappointment. “Do you know what Thomas Jefferson said about an informed populace?”
“Tell me what he said.” Samuels’ eyes flashed with a peculiar, intense look.
“He said ‘a well-informed populace can be trusted with its own government,’” Xi replied, having long-since burned those words into her brain. “But those words weren’t what he was really saying. They were a negative image of his true message, which was this: an uninformed populace absolutely cannot be trusted with its own government. I was informing the public with my data release, whether they were going to like what I showed them or not. I’m not the enemy here. The real enemies in my criminal case are the institutions which think they get to decide what information is or isn’t fit for public consumption. I broke the law, and I knew I’d be punished for it, but I did it anyway in part because I thought that the information I was putting out there was important and needed to be understood. Not because I agreed with what it suggested or represented, or because I thought it would lead to a particular outcome, but because I always, always,” she repeated emphatically, “think that more information is better than less. My government threw me in jail because they disagreed, and I can’t really blame them for dropping the hammer on me since I disrupted their plans.” She shrugged. “The real problem in my case, Ms. Samuels, is the media that failed—and continues to fail—the people who depend upon it to present all of the facts so that we, the people, can make up our minds. You and your ilk waited for me, some random, fourteen-year-old girl, to throw myself on the proverbial grenade before you swooped in and spun the facts to suit your preconceived narratives.”
