by Rick Partlow
“Of course not,” I said, frowning in disapproval. “That would be unprofessional and against regulations.” I shrugged. “And the Skipper told me so in no uncertain terms when I asked him if he could arrange it. Plus, we aren’t going to be here that long and Vicky’s out on a field exercise like two hundred klicks out of Tartarus.”
“Speaking of that shithole,” Scotty said, nodding back at the viewscreen.
And there it was. A city designed for the military by the military and just as plain and ugly and unimaginative as that sounded. Everything was laid out in grids, every building squared off and squeezed together for maximum efficiency, none more than a few stories tall because it was easier and cheaper to build broad than high. And this being the military, everything was a muted earth tone, with not so much as a hint of color and the whole fucking place made me want to blow my brains out.
Just from our side of the planet I could count two dozen other shuttles and flyers buzzing around the city, either bypassing it to reach the spaceport at its edge or cutting through to take some admiral or general to one of those all-important face-to-face meetings without which flag officers and their staffs couldn’t feel important. Like this one.
Whatever we were here for, I couldn’t imagine it was something that couldn’t have been handled remotely, even if it was top secret. And how top secret could it be when they were about to tell every junior officer and NCO in our battalion?
When we touched down and the belly ramp began to lower, a chorus of curses echoed through the shuttle, not all of them from the NCOs. No one missed Tartarus, and somehow, every time I came here, it seemed to be summer. Maybe it just always seemed like summer here and I was off on my estimate of the seasons. Seatbelts came off and everyone filed out as quickly as possible, climbing onto the vans to get back into air conditioning and out of the afternoon heat. Well, I thought it was afternoon. I’d gotten turned around on landing and forgot which way was east and west down here.
Since we were officers and senior NCOs, we didn’t get crammed into the backs of cargo trucks the way I would have expected. Instead, passenger vans waited for us and the seats were actually padded. I suppose my look of wonder must have been too obvious, because Top cackled her amusement from the seat across the aisle to my right.
“Don’t get used to it, Lieutenant,” she warned me. “Air-conditioned vans are for captains and first sergeants.”
If anyone knew, it would be Top. First Sergeant Ellen Campbell had been a Marine longer than there’d been a Commonwealth and she was possibly the oldest woman I’d ever met, though she didn’t look it. Her face had an ageless look, like the mask of an idol carved out of ancient wood, and she kept her brown hair cut short, the sides of her head shaved bare to expose her interface jacks.
“Hey, Top,” I asked her, long-held curiosity finally getting the better of my trepidation, “why did you choose Armored infantry over Force Recon?”
Covington raised an eyebrow, as if impressed I’d had the balls to ask Top about her past, but he didn’t object, just leaned back to watch the show.
“Boy, we didn’t have battlesuits when I joined the Marines!” She didn’t seem angry about it, more amused. “We were all straight-leg Marines shooting bullets with gunpowder behind them. You do that shit long enough, you’d welcome some heavy armor between you and the enemy your own self!”
“You didn’t mind the jacks?” I shrugged. “I mean, I didn’t have any choice, not with the problems I used to have just being outdoors with no walls around me, but if I’d been given the option, sometimes I think I would have said no to the whole putting shit into my brain part.”
I was talking a lot. I stopped, wondering why that was. Maybe the shrink had been right, maybe being honest with myself. I felt looser now than I had, like a knot had untied in my guts.
“You live as long as I have, junior,” Top mused, “you just want to try something different, even if it means them digging into your head. You’ll find out. You can’t be any one thing forever.”
“I’m starting to figure that out, Top.”
The van took us through the center of Tartarus, parts of the base I’d rarely visited as a lowly trainee at NCO school or OCS. We pulled up at a huge office building, the Brigade Headquarters for the 187th Marine Expeditionary Force, a place I’d only been once before. The van didn’t stop out front, waved through a covered entrance by an armed Force Recon Marine guard and down a ramp into an underground parking garage.
The driver, a junior NCO so silent he might as well have been an automated navigation system, guided us down a curving drive several stories below ground, finally stopping at a bank of elevators with no other vehicles around us.
“Anyone getting a real secret squirrel vibe about all this?” Cano said from the seat behind me. “What do you all think we’re actually doing here?”
As if in answer, the driver touched a control and the van’s side doors sprang open with the hum of servomotors, inviting us all to get the hell out without the NCO having to say a word. The elevator cars were huge, made for freight, I thought, and plenty big enough for the whole lot of us to squeeze into, though if we hadn’t already been Drop Troopers and used to tight spaces, it might have inspired claustrophobia in some. The Skipper was at the front with the other company commanders and I wondered if one of them knew which floor to request or if the thing started up on its own when we were all on board. Either way, it moved once the doors slid shut, heading not up, as I’d expected, but down further into the sub-levels of the building.
“We heading into the planetary core or something?” Scotty murmured. He’d been fairly silent once we’d gotten into close quarters with Top, because she scared the shit out of him, but she was several rows away from us.
“I imagine a lot of the planning centers on the base are built pretty far underground,” I told him. “I mean, it’s the military base for the whole Commonwealth. They had to build shelters that could withstand nukes, even asteroid strikes.”
“Hell, a fucking asteroid strike could only improve this place.”
The car stopped and the doors finally hissed aside. I’d expected us to be in some hallway, some office suite like a thousand others I’d seen on a dozen different planets. Instead, it had deposited us at the rear of a large conference room, bigger than a normal situation room like I’d seen at company and battalion level, but not quite an auditorium. There were enough chairs for every officer and senior NCO not just in our battalion but in the whole brigade, and they were all there.
We were the last, I thought. Even Colonel Voss was here, seated near the front next to the Battalion Sgt. Major who Scotty hated so much. And sitting on the stage, front and center of the half-circle of seats arrayed around it, was a man I’d heard of, and seen recordings of but never encountered face-to-face, our brigade commander, General Terrence McCauley. He was short, almost ridiculously short in a day when such things could be adjusted genetically before birth, and his upper body was massive, his arms long enough I thought his knuckles might hang down past his knees if he let his arms sag. His uniform was neat and well-kept, but it didn’t have quite the razor-sharp edge to it I would have expected from a general and I wondered if that meant he was sloppy or just insanely busy doing actual work and didn’t have the time to worry about such piddly details.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, standing. His voice was rough and gravelly and his face was a collection of sandstone rocks glued into a loose formation. “I believe Fourth Battalion makes this little group complete, so we can get started.”
They must, I thought, have scheduled the meeting around our arrival time, since we were the last. That was cutting it close. Our Battalion Sgt. Major guided us to a collection of luxuriously-upholstered chairs over to the right side of the stage and we filed in by company and sat, not a one of us making a sound, eager to hear what McCauley had to say.
“I know you’ve all come a long way,” McCauley began, “and you’re probably wo
ndering why we’ve hauled you all the way back from where you were deployed at the front for a face-to-face briefing on Inferno. This operation I’m about to brief you on is the largest in the history of the Commonwealth military, and contrary to what you might think, the Tahni military does have a capable intelligence corps, and they do intercept our communications now and again. And this cannot leak. It’s too big and too damn many things can go wrong between planning and execution.”
He paced across the stage, hands clenching into fists like he didn’t know what to do with them. Finally, he touched a control on his ‘link and a hologram sprang to life overhead, a three-dimensional representation of a system I’d never visited but had heard so much about.
“This is our goal. We are going to retake Silvanus.”
17
“72 Herculis,” McCauley said, slipping into a didactic cadence, like my instructors at OCS, as he pointed at the representation of the star system in the projection, “is approximately forty-seven light-years from Earth, as close to the Sun in luminosity and mass as any of our colony systems. It has six planets as well as a major asteroid belt rich in minerals and water-ice. The second world from 72 Herculis, Silvanus, is one of our most heavily-populated worlds with over a million inhabitants spread over three major cities and a few smaller settlements. There are also thousands of civilians scattered throughout the asteroid belt and on the one semi-habitable moon of the fourth planet, a gas giant a bit smaller than Saturn.”
“This system is a treasure trove of mineral and biological diversity, and due to its utility as a supply base and its distance from Earth and the core colonies, the Tahni have not given up on 72 Herculis or Silvanus the way they have some of the other human colonies they occupied. Their Imperial Navy has three destroyers and at least a dozen squadrons of corvettes spread out between Silvanus and Valius, the habitable moon, and through the asteroid belt between them.”
“We estimate they have ten squadrons of dual-environment fighters on the planet, and a ground force of at least brigade strength, integrated infantry and High Guard armor. They do not want to lose this system and this nut will be a tough one to crack. But.”
He smiled thinly.
“There had to be a ‘but’ in there somewhere, or we wouldn’t have bothered with all this secrecy, would we? The but is an open secret of course, the propaganda horn we’ve been blowing since the beginning of the war. We still have forces in the system who haven’t been evacuated and haven’t been caught. The ‘valiant resistance fighters of Silvanus’ you keep hearing about in every special news documentary, the Marines and local militia who never gave up.” He scanned the crowd and I thought he was looking me in the eye directly. “I know some of you must have wondered whether they were real or just a useful fiction the spooks and politicians dreamed up to boost morale. Well, not only are they real, but we’ve been keeping them supplied all throughout the war, as best we can. Scout Service drone ships jumping in during raids by the Attack Command missile cutters and launching stealth pods that coast in on Hohmann transfer orbits and drop on chutes. A lot are destroyed, but some get through.”
Silvanus expanded to fill the projection.
“Because of the existence of a viable resistance, the Tahni have been forced to treat the civilians with more care than on other worlds they’ve occupied. If they were too harsh, they would just make the civilians so desperate that they would run and join the resistance. The Tahni have kept them well-fed and allowed them to live in their homes as long as they continue to operate the mines and farms for them.”
Another smile, this one warmer.
“Now, another commander might have resorted to reprisals against the people who work for the Tahni, might have tried to make the civilians more afraid of the resistance than they were of starving. But Colonel Daniel Oz did the opposite. He encouraged the civilians to keep on working…as long as they pass along food and, more importantly, intelligence to the military. Oz has sabotaged the Tahni effort quite effectively and they’ve spent much effort that might otherwise have gone toward extending their influence to other systems in the region to trying to catch him and his Marines and militia. He’s been operating on his own for quite a while, but we’ve finally been able to promise him some backup.”
Another tap on his ‘link and the image zoomed into Silvanus, down to the capital city, the name of which I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. Given how unoriginal and hackneyed most colony world city names were, I bet it was something like “Silvanus City” or maybe “Friendship Village.” The original city was mostly intact but the Tahni military presence was a cancer that had metastasized through it, barracks, hangars, storage bays, and other air-defense installations surrounding the city and creeping into its streets, a rot we would have to excise.
“The Tahni have extensive anti-aircraft batteries and deflector dishes set up all around their bases, in the capital of Cairdeas as well as Aristaeus and Aegipan further west on the northern continent, and that’s not counting the ground defense lasers we built for them before the war. Trying to take the planet back in any sort of conventional way would either require us to pound it into rubble from orbit or simply throw troops and shuttles at it by the thousands and accept the horrible losses it would take.
“Thankfully, Colonel Oz gives us a third option. His troops are going to take down the laser installations and do what they can to sabotage the anti-aircraft batteries. They won’t be able to get them all, and they won’t be able to do anything about the deflector dishes. Taking out those will be our job, and we’re going to have to wade through the enemy ground troops to do it. But before we get the chance, we’re going to have to make it through their outsystem defenses.”
He hesitated, as if he were considering the best way to put what he had to say next.
“The 72 Herculis system is considered key to rebuilding the Commonwealth after the war. And for that reason, combined with the human civilians still being used as labor in those areas, we will not be able to simply bombard the asteroid mines, the gas scoops or the refineries on Valius. We’re going to have to send in Drop Troops to take them back.”
I winced. Around me, I heard rumblings of dissent at that, and not just from the platoon leaders.
“I know,” McCauley acknowledged, raising a hand as if in an admission of guilt. “We’re going to take casualties doing it that way, before we even get a chance to hit the planet. But this is the big one, ladies and gentlemen, the one we’ve been working toward. This is the last one, the last colony they hold aside from some tiny outposts that won’t take a single company to retake. If we can push them off Silvanus, out of the system, they’ll be back in their pre-war boundaries.”
“Sir.”
I didn’t recognize the woman who’d raised her hand, but she was one of the other company commanders in the battalion.
“Yes, Captain Colton?”
“Sir, do you think this will be the end of the war, then?”
McCauley sucked in a deep breath, eyes clouding over in thought, though I wasn’t sure he was deliberating how best to answer the question, or whether he should even attempt to.
“I have no firm information to back this up, so you’ll have to take it as just my opinion and not policy, but I would say no. It’s tempting to think we could just hit reset and take things back to the way they were before the war, then ask for another cease-fire and we could all go home to whatever we did before. But there’s been too much death, too much cost. I don’t think it would be politically expedient for the Commonwealth government to go back to the voters and say, ‘we spent trillions of dollars prosecuting this war and all we’ve accomplished is to set everything up for the next one.’ Because we have to know there’d be a next one. Fool me once and all that.”
He clasped his hands behind his back and faced the center of the crowd around him, squared off like he was on a parade ground.
“No, this doesn’t mean the end of the war, but it does mean a new phase of it. I
f we can do this, if we can pry their filthy, alien fingers off the last of our colonies, then we’ve stopped taking back what’s ours…and stopped having to play with kid gloves. They know it, too. The Tahni aren’t stupid. That’s why they’re holding on so tight here, trying to keep the last hostages they have.”
McCauley tapped at his ‘link and I felt mine vibrate at my side, heard the same staccato hum from across the room.
“I’ve just sent the op order for this mission to each of you. You are not to discuss this even amongst yourselves until your troop ships are back in Transition space. Is everyone clear on this?”
A chorus of affirmation echoed through the room and it seemed to satisfy him.
“Then get back to your ships and your people.” He swept his hand across us like he was a priest delivering a blessing. “Get them ready, get yourselves ready. The time has come to take back what’s ours.”
The platoon stared at me expectantly, and I wondered if the eager, puppy-dog look on Carson’s face was close to my expression when McCauley had delivered the briefing to us. It had been hard keeping everything from them until the Iwo had Transitioned, but McCauley had been very clear on the matter and, if he hadn’t, Captain Covington had reinforced it during the shuttle flight back up and I’d made sure Scotty knew he was serious.
He was sitting at the back of the compartment, arms crossed over his chest, a cat-ate-the-canary look on his face as if he was reveling in their frustration.
“Okay, you may or may not have heard rumors about this,” I said, “because even though we were all ordered to keep it quiet, you all know how effective that can be.” A few chuckles. The only thing that could escape the gravity of a black hole was rumors, because nothing could stop them from getting out. “The target is 72 Herculis, which, for those of you who don’t know, is the system Silvanus is in. We’re taking it back from the Tahni and it’s going to be a hard, dirty, bloody fight, I’m not going to lie to you.”