by Rick Partlow
Which was a good way to talk yourself into it, I guess. Not that I blamed a bunch of civilians for not putting up a fight, but…well, the resistance on Brigantia and Demeter had been civilians.
“Things seemed to go okay,” he went on, memory haunting his sallow, gaunt face, “until a couple months ago. We’d been rationing our food, but eventually, everyone could see there just wouldn’t be enough of it to last, so they elected me to go talk to the Tahni commander. He was one of them guys out there in the big metal suits.” Something finally lit up behind those eyes. “Did you get him?”
“They’re all dead,” I confirmed. Unless some had run away, but I didn’t go into that because he seemed gratified with the idea.
“Well, I went to the son of a bitch. Can’t even pronounce his name right. It was something like Clint? Vrint? And I told him and asked if we could have some of their food, but he told me their food was sacred to them and to give it to humans was, well, as close as the translator could tell, sacrilege. And I got mad and told him if he wanted us to run the plant for them, he was going to have to feed us.”
Nakamura sniffled, mouth working for a moment, but nothing coming out.
“So, this Vrint guy tells me that his technicians had figured out it only took twenty of us to operate the plant, and he’d looked up our records and found the best workers. And then he took the rest of us, the ones who weren’t good enough for him, and he had them executed. And then he came and told me there should be enough food for all of us now.”
The man was sobbing and all I could feel was a cold ball of rage in my gut. Just when I started to feel bad about slaughtering Tahni, like I’d turned into a killer and wasn’t good for anything else, the Tahni would go and do something that just made me happy to keep pulling the trigger.
“Cam, we have a big fucking problem,” Scotty told me, an insect buzz in my ear. I’d turned the volume down too low.
“What’s wrong, Scotty?”
Nakamura wasn’t paying attention anymore, still crying softly, one of the other workers folding him into a hug, but Kreis’ eyes narrowed.
“I got a hold of the dropship,” Scotty said. “The reason the bombardment let up was that the destroyer came back and a whole bunch of insystem patrol boats are coming with it. The cruiser had to withdraw to go deal with them, and without the cruisers to shield them, the carriers and the troop ships are pulling out. They told us to get to the backup LZ and prepare for dustoff.”
“What?” I blurted, my face going slack. “What about the S&R crew? We can’t just leave the Recon troops behind!”
“They ain’t coming, boss,” he said, sadness dragging down the words. “And we ain’t got time to wait for them. The dropship is picking us up in a half-hour, hell or high water. They said it’s an order.”
“Shit.” I felt as if I was going to collapse in on myself, imagining being one of those Marines, buried under dirt and rock, living off an on-board oxygen supply that wouldn’t last more than another couple of hours, and no one coming to save me. Suffocating to death.
But what was the alternative?
“Sgt. Kreis,” I said to the Third squad leader, the words an exhausted hiss, all the energy going out of me. “Escort the civilians outside and tell Gunny Hayes to take charge of them. Then get your Marines back in their Vigilantes and prepare to dust off.” I looked around. “Where’s Majid and Fourth squad?”
“Still checking out the upstairs rooms,” he said. “We know we got all the civilians but he didn’t want to leave before he checked them all out.”
I sighed and touched a control on my ‘link.
“Majid,” I called, “you need to get your squad down here ASAP.”
“Sir!” the man replied, breathless, as if I’d interrupted him during a workout. “We got one of them! We got one of them alive!”
“Got one of who?” I demanded, frowning.
“One of the Tahni, sir! He was hiding in a closet up here, little bitch!”
Oh, great. What the hell was I gonna do with a Tahni prisoner? They were notorious for being uncooperative and suicidal…on the other hand, this guy hadn’t offed himself or thrown himself at our guns, as they’d been known to do.
“Is he one of the rear-guard soldiers, like the ones we took out down here?” I wondered. “Or a High Guard trooper?” Because considering how I felt about the High Guard troops here, I might just have him save us the trouble and put a round through the Tahni’s head.
“Neither one, boss,” Majid said. “I recognize his uniform insignia from the identification guide. He’s flight crew. A pilot for one of those cargo shuttles down at the port.”
My mouth had been open to give an order and I closed it. A pilot.
“Majid,” I said, slowly and carefully, knowing full well what I was about to do, “get him down here. Detail me two people to guard him and get the rest out of here and back into their suits.”
I switched frequencies, my mind working a million kilometers an hour.
“Scotty,” I said, “I’ve got an idea. But you’re not going to like it.”
22
“This is a horrible fucking idea,” Scotty said, his words ringing in my ear for all the fact he was a dozen kilometers away. “You’re going to get court-martialed, you know that, right?”
“Sitting in a brig for a while doesn’t sound too bad to me right now,” I assured him, the words distracted, distant.
My entire concentration was on digging. The Vigilante wasn’t built for delicate precision, but it was all I had and, more importantly, it was all the Recon Marines had. I slammed my left hand into the dirt, pitching another rock away, and finally revealing the motionless form of Gunnery Sgt. Antonio Carver, Palmer’s platoon sergeant. The man was unconscious, but not from blood loss or because he’d been concussed. His helmet’s automated medical systems had put him out to prevent shock, because he had multiple broken bones at the least, maybe internal bleeding.
But he was alive, and so were the other nine we’d been able to dig out, the ones with their IFFs still showing life signs. I didn’t know how long they had, but I knew how long they’d live without someone to get them off this moon.
“You see the dropship yet?” I asked Scotty.
I hadn’t noticed it pass overhead, but then, I’d been busy and the backup LZ was quite a ways off. The spaceport, though, that was closer, much closer.
“It’s landing now,” he told me. “I’ve been telling the pilot what you’re doing, begging the guy to give you a little more time, but he says there are Tahni patrol boats inbound and they don’t have any sort of cover. He says he has orders to dust off immediately and he’s going to follow them. You and Fourth squad are on your own.”
“Roger that.” It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but it was what I’d expected. “Get those civilians on board and get out of here.” I hesitated. “And Scotty, if you see Vicky before I do, tell her I said I love her.”
“Goddammit, Cam.”
“Sir, I got the last one,” Kreis told me.
After seeing him for the last couple hours out of his suit, it was strange to look his way and see the grinning skull of a Vigilante. He was gently tugging a Force Recon trooper out of a freshly-dug hole by the casualty-evac handle on the back of the woman’s harness. She was limp and unconscious, just like the others, every one of them in a medical coma thanks to the drugs administered by their helmets. They looked dead, but the IFF transponders assured me they were still alive. Most of them weren’t and it bothered the hell out of me to leave their bodies here. Marines didn’t leave people behind, alive or dead.
“Get them up,” I instructed. There were nine WIA and only seven of us, since I’d sent two of them along to the spaceport with the prisoner. “Kreis, you and I are carrying two of them. The rest of you pick one and be gentle. We still have to get them to the Iwo, and God knows how long that’s going to take.”
And I just dragged eight of my Marines into this. I hoped I wasn’t dragging them do
wn with me, but I knew in my heart that not a one of them would have voted to leave the Recon troops behind.
It was tricky finding a way to pick up two of the wounded, and I was worried I was doing more damage by draping them over the shoulder of my suit, but nothing would do more damage than staying here and dying, so I did it anyway. They were weightless to the byomer muscles of my Vigilante, limp rag dolls like the ones the little girls in Tijuana used to make from scraps of discarded material, and I gritted my teeth against the wrongness of it.
I led them out of the canyon, dreading the possibility of another quake while we were stuck in its confines, one that would finish them off and trap us for good. But the titans of Valius had gone back to sleep after unleashing their wrath on us so capriciously just hours earlier, and the only thing that disturbed our journey was the fear they’d left behind them.
Instead of following the dirt track back into the valley, we took it along the hillside, curving away from the refinery and out toward the seashore. This wasn’t the shore I remembered from my youth, when my parents had taken us to the beach once a year to camp, no warm sand and sunny skies to be had. Ice-encrusted rocks lined the shore, and only the constant crashing of the violent surf kept the entire seaside from being a solid crust of ice. A freezing fog drifted out over the inland sea, frosting my battlesuit where it touched it, and God knows how cold it was inside the Recon troops’ light body armor. We had to get them out of there fast or this was all going to be for nothing.
I picked up the pace, cognizant of the risk of compounding their injuries with each pounding step, each jolt, but not knowing what else to do. We cleared a steep, ice-shrouded cliff and finally, there was the beach…and the spaceport. Where there’d once been bare sand was fusion-form pavement, a landing pad for cargo shuttles and landers, and at the inland end of it a train station with a line of freight cars sitting beneath cargo cranes, ready to load containers of processed chemicals onto shuttles.
I didn’t care about the train, didn’t give a shit about the cargo, I just wanted more than anything to get on the damned shuttle. It was spherical, resting on heavy landing struts, its plasma engines shielded from the rest of the body by a ring of oval reaction mass tanks loaded down with pellets of metallic hydrogen. It was ugly and utilitarian, but if it had been a woman, I would have married it. The main freight ramp was down at the base of the landing gear, a steep climb up into the cargo hold.
Harsh work lights glowed inside the hold and, as I topped the ramp, I saw Corporal Steele and Private Richrath still in their field jackets, training their pulse carbines on the Tahni prisoner. He was sullen and withdrawn, his body language human enough that I almost forgot he was an alien, from a distance. The Tahni were frighteningly close to us, so close most xenobiologists thought they had to be related somehow, far back, though no one had any idea how that was possible.
I believed it. If they’d been just a bit more alien, a bit more different, we’d never have gone to war at all. They had to be enough like us to want what we had. And maybe enough like us for me to make this work.
“Gently,” I warned the others as I set down the two Recon Marines I’d been carrying, setting them down as carefully as I could with the oversized muscles of the Vigilante doing the work.
I shut down the armor and cracked the chestplate, clambering out with practiced ease, grabbing my pulse carbine from the ditch kit because I didn’t want to face the Tahni pilot without it.
“Kreis,” I said, shouting the word instead of transmitting it because the squad leader was getting out of his suit on the other side of the cargo hold. “Have your squad start carrying them upstairs.”
The shuttle was a hollow ball on the inside, most of it dedicated to the empty cargo hold, but a skeletal metal staircase ran along the inside of the hollow sphere, spiraling around it to the cockpit and crew stations at the top of the shuttle. It would take a while to haul the wounded all the way up there, but we’d have to do it if we wanted them strapped in.
“Yes, sir,” Kreis said, not commenting on how hard a job it was going to be.
I scrolled through the menus on my ‘link as I stepped up to the Tahni prisoner. We all had the translator program built into our issue datalinks, but I sure as hell had never thought I’d use it.
“What’s your name?” I asked the pilot. The translator belted the words out in the Tahni language, the words sounding tinny from the small, external speaker.
The Tahni glanced up sharply, as if he hadn’t expected us to try to talk to him. I thought, for a second, he would try to give me the silent treatment, but he grunted something that sounded almost human, like when you’re too far away to hear what someone is saying and just hear the general patterns of speech. Too damned human.
“My name is Kah-Luwhen,” the translator said, and I had to read the transcription off the screen before I was sure what I’d heard. “What do you want of me? Why have you not just killed me?”
“You’re a pilot,” I told him. “I want you to fly this ship out of here.”
“Why would I help you?” he asked. The inflection of the translator was flat, no intonation, but my head inserted disbelief tinged with outrage. “You are the enemy. I am a soldier of the Imperium. It is my duty to kill you.”
“It’s your duty to die fighting us,” I reminded him. Behind us, Third squad was carrying the wounded up the stairs, their boots clomping heavily on the metal grating. “Why didn’t you? You hid. You surrendered. You want to live more than you want to fight. If you fly us out of here, you’ll live. You have my word.”
“What good is your word, human?” Scorn this time, if only inside my head. “What are you to me?”
“I am,” I told him, “a warrior who has killed so many of your soldiers I’ve lost count. I’ve killed them with my battlesuit and with a rifle and with my bare hands.” Well, using my carbine as a club anyway. “If I wanted you dead, I would kill you myself and not wait. I need you alive, and because I need you to do something that isn’t your duty to do, I’ll offer you your life in exchange. My people don’t kill prisoners of war.”
That was a lie, but we generally didn’t kill them once we’d taken them on board our troop ships, so it was mostly true, and I hoped he couldn’t read human faces well enough to tell the difference. I certainly couldn’t figure out what was going on under those ridged brows, behind those beady, black eyes.
“I will do it,” the pilot said.
I wanted to exhale in relief, but I knew it was premature. He could be lying, could be intent on destroying the ship with us in it. But I nodded, turned the translator program off.
“Corporal,” I said to Steele, “take him up to the cockpit and get him strapped in. Let him get the ship powered up.” I wanted to tell him to shoot the Tahni if he did anything suspicious, but how the hell would they know? How would I know? I wasn’t any sort of pilot, even when the instruments weren’t built for aliens and marked in a non-human language. “I’ll be right up.”
For all the good that would do.
There was one Recon Marine left on the floor of the cargo hold and Kreis was tromping back down the stairs, looking winded. I didn’t blame him. It had been a hell of a day.
“Help me with this one,” I told him, sliding my hands under the armpits of the Marine. Kreis sucked in a breath and grabbed the man’s legs.
I grunted with effort. They were a whole lot less weightless without the artificial muscles of the battlesuit, total deadweight and I was huffing and puffing as badly as Kreis by the time we reached the crew stations, just one level down from the cockpit. The other Recon wounded were already strapped into acceleration couches and the other members of Third squad were circulating among them, checking their straps. I would have told them to check their medical readouts, but the truth was, we didn’t have any supplies to treat them with even if they’d been coding. Either the on-board diagnostics in their helmets would keep them alive, or they wouldn’t.
Kreis and I lowered the las
t of the wounded into one of the rows of seats and began strapping her down when I heard the snap-bang sound of systems coming to life, of metal warming against the cold outside.
“Finish up,” I told the squad leader, then jogged up to the cockpit.
The Tahni version of a pilot’s seat wasn’t all too different from the human one, except that there were four seats in a circular cluster, the viewscreens hanging above them, the controls built into the arms of the chairs instead of on a console. The prisoner was in the seat facing to my left, which was totally arbitrary in a round ship, and he was moving individual levers built into the ends of the arms of his chair with long, multijointed fingers. Their hands were the least human thing about them, with a pinky longer than the rest of their fingers, almost a second thumb, and an extra-joint to each of the digits, letting them curl into shapes that didn’t seem natural to my human sensibilities.
Steele and Richrath were standing to either side of the male, their carbines pointed at him as if they expected him to announce it before he blew the ship up with us on it.
“Go ahead and strap in,” I told them, waving at the three seats against the far bulkhead. “I’ll take this.”
I fell into one of the chairs in the command circle and strapped down, laying the carbine across my lap. The Tahni, Kah-Luwhen, ignored me as he’d ignored the two enlisted men who I’d left to guard him, and the whole shuttle began to vibrate at his systematic manipulation of the controls.