by Rick Partlow
“Do you have crime on your worlds?” I asked him. The translator spat what sounded like chirping nonsense at him and he looked at me blankly, what I would have taken for incomprehension in a human. “People doing bad things,” I expanded. “Things they’re forbidden to do by your laws or customs?”
“Of course,” he replied. “There would be no need for laws or customs if no one had ever behaved badly.”
“On Earth,” I told him, “we have people who break the law for profit, for gain,” I told him. “They do it to survive because they can’t find any other way, sometimes because they’re lazy or often just because they’re too smart to be living the unproductive life, just sitting around doing nothing like so many people enjoy. They lie, they cheat, they steal every day the way you would report for duty as a pilot every day, as a job, a calling.”
“Why would you allow such people to live?” he asked, and my mind supplied the horrified tone that the translator wouldn’t.
“Because there are just too many people living there to stop it. Our largest cities each hold hundreds of millions and policing them all would be impossible.”
“Hundreds of millions in a single city?” he repeated. He didn’t believe me, I could tell.
“I was one of those criminals,” I said. “I stole food, stole clothes, stole luxury items. I stole from other criminals and sold their illegal goods for a profit. I was caught because I made too many enemies and given the choice of punishment or the military. I’m telling you this so you understand I have been in this position before, where my life depended on knowing whether or not someone was lying to me, whether they were playing me for a fool. Human, Tahni, it doesn’t matter. You’re a pilot. You fly this ship where I tell you to fly it, and if you try to lie to me, try to take me somewhere I don’t want to go, try to signal your people, then I’ll kill you and take the chance I can figure out how to fly it myself.” I shrugged. “I just wanted you to know.”
“Do not worry, human,” the Tahni said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the engines. “Were I to try to deliver you to my people, they would simply kill all of us, including me. Tahni do not surrender to aliens. It is a dishonor worthy of death.” His face twisted into an expression I didn’t recognize, maybe a smile, maybe a sneer, maybe a grimace. “You may wish to prepare yourself.”
I’d been twisted around in my seat to talk to him and I barely had time to turn around and tighten my harness before the fist of God slammed me back into the totally inadequate padding of the Tahni acceleration couch. The world vibrated around me with enough ferocity I couldn’t focus my vision on the viewscreens mounted above my head, but I could see movement in them, the haze of fog and then the thicker grey of the clouds, and finally, blackness.
The agonizing press of high-g acceleration fell away and I sucked in a breath, as our boost ramped down to a single gravity. The lines on the overhead screens were clear now that physics had stopped trying to kill me, and a Tahni sensor screen was surprisingly similar to ours, although the colors were garish and the symbols impossibly complicated.
I loosened my restraints and pointed at a large icon shaped vaguely like the number nine if it had fallen over on its side.
“What’s that?” I asked Kah-Luwhen.
“One of your ships,” he said. “I am not certain, but I believe it is the kind which carries your ground troops to battle.” The Iwo. It had to be the Iwo. “It is boosting away from us at one gravity.”
“This thing has radio, right? Electromagnetic communications?”
“We do, though we prefer to use laser communication.”
“Aim your transmission antenna at that ship and adjust to this frequency.” I knew the frequency from the op order, one of those little details I didn’t think I’d ever need, but had looked up on the way to the spaceport. “And patch the communications through my station.”
I couldn’t see what he was doing with the controls and wouldn’t have understood if I did, but I watched him anyway, trying to make him believe I’d know if he was deceiving me. Hell, for all I knew, the ship in the sensor image was the Tahni destroyer and I was about to tell them I was a human on board their ship. At least it would be a quick death.
“Go ahead,” the pilot told me. “Face front and speak clearly.”
“CFS Iwo Jima, this is Lt. Alvarez, Third Platoon, Delta Company, Fourth Battalion of the 187th Marine Expeditionary Force. I am on board the Tahni shuttle at your six. I have wounded from the Recon platoon attached to our operation and I am declaring an emergency. Please respond.”
Silence. On the sensor screen, the troop ship continued to boost away from us, and I wondered how long it would take before we ran out of reaction mass trying to catch up to her, or whether she’d just Transition back to the edge of the system with the carriers. And then what? Turn around and land again and hope the Tahni didn’t try to retake the moon before the Fleet came back?
Of course, by then the wounded would have died.
“Attention unknown enemy spacecraft.” The voice was human and I nearly cheered, wanted to hug Kah-Luwhen for being the equivalent of an honest politician, the kind that once bought, stays bought. “We are sending a patrol of assault shuttles to escort you in. Stay on the course we’re transmitting and do not deviate or you will be destroyed. Do you understand?”
“Five by five, Iwo Jima,” I assured him. “We will do backflips if you want, as long as you don’t leave without us.”
“Just stay on the beam.” Whoever the guy was, he didn’t have any sort of sense of humor. “And if you are Lt. Alvarez, well…you may wish you’d stayed on Valius.”
23
The cell was three meters on a side of blank bulkhead, the only amenities a padded bunk built into one of walls and a toilet. No ‘link, no tablets, no entertainment center, no news of the outside world at all. I’d lost track of how long I’d been inside because the first thing I’d done was sleep. I’d been so exhausted mentally, emotionally and physically, I hadn’t even questioned the MPs who’d escorted me from the docking bay to the security holding cells.
Ironically, the last thing I’d seen before I stepped inside was Kah-Luwhen being shoved into a cell just down the hall.
I had been fed. I should, I realized, have kept some scrap of napkin or something to keep a record of how many meals I’d gotten, as some sort of counter of the hours, but that ship had sailed. And so had the Iwo. We’d jumped once and now we were in microgravity again and I was hooked under the restraint webbing of the bunk, wondering if I should try to go back to sleep.
Instead, I decided to dictate another letter to Vicky. True, I didn’t have a tablet or a ‘link, but I wasn’t going to send it anyway, and the whole purpose was to be honest with myself, so it was just as good pretending to dictate.
Vicky, I bet you’ll never guess where I’m sending this message from. Then again, you know where I’m from and how I wound up in the Marines, so maybe you wouldn’t be too surprised.
I suppose I fucked up, but I can’t feel too bad about it. I think if you had been in my position, you would have done the same thing. Maybe it’s better this way. With the war, they’re not going to throw me in prison or hibernation. The worst they’ll do is bust me back to corporal and stick me in a fire team in a different company and honestly, I think I’d be fine with that. The only thing I’ve gotten from being a leader is the pain of watching people who trusted me die. I became an NCO and then an officer because people kept telling me it was the right thing to do, and maybe it was, but I won’t miss it.
The only regret I have is that my platoon will have to drop on Silvanus without me. Scotty will lead them well, though. At least I hope they’ll put him in charge instead of putting the platoon in the hands of some wet-behind-the-ears Academy grad.
I know I’ve said it before, but I truly believe you’ll be a better officer than me. Hell, I can’t check the date, but I think you’re probably already with your unit now. I hope for your sake you won’t h
ave to see the things I’ve seen, won’t have to make the decisions I’ve made. You deserve better. You deserve better than me.
I know you won’t see this, but if you did, I’d tell you that I love you and I want you to be the best officer you can be and don’t worry about me. I just wish I knew what day it was…
The magnetic lock on the hatch opened with an obnoxious clunk and I sat up so quickly I nearly floated free of the web restraints. Captain Covington walked through the hatchway, magnetic ship boots clicking and clacking as they released and re-anchored with each step. He seemed taller in free-fall and probably was. Something about the space between the vertebrae expanding without standard gravity to pull them together. I don’t know, it was something like that—Vicky had explained it to me once but I’d forgotten the details.
I couldn’t jump to attention and didn’t try, but I did slide out from beneath the restraint web, holding onto it with one hand to steady myself.
“Morning, Alvarez,” Covington said, his expression neutral, deliberately so I would have bet.
“Is it, sir?” I wondered. “I’ve kind of lost track of time.”
The corner of his mouth quirked.
“I suppose you might. You’ve been in this cell fifty hours.” He stepped inside and anchored himself to the center of the deck, arms crossed over his chest. “And Col. Voss would just as likely have left you in this cell until she could arrange a court-martial for you back on Inferno if she’d been the only one making the decision.”
“Who else would, sir?” I wondered. Voss was the battalion commander and if she thought I should swing, then I was going to swing.
“Col. Arora of Force Recon.” Now he did smile, the thin, cruel smile that was usually all he allowed himself. “Apparently, he was more impressed by the fact you risked your life and your career for his people than Col. Voss was. Then there was Gunnery Sgt. Hayes and every single one of your squad leaders, who all came to me and asked for a transfer if you weren’t reinstated as their platoon leader.”
I blinked. I guess I wasn’t surprised to hear Scotty had done it. He was my friend and he took loyalty seriously. But the squad leaders…I had been pretty hard on them in training, hadn’t been shy about correcting them, though I’d tried to keep it private.
“And I still had to call in every favor I’ve ever built up with both the Voss and the fucking brigade commander to get you out of this.” The smile disappeared and he took a step closer, close enough I could almost feel the heat of his glare physically. “And don’t fucking think it’s going to happen again. You might have been able to get away with playing fast and loose with the rules as a squad leader, but you’re an officer now. You don’t just follow orders, you make sure everyone follows orders, and you represent the orders you get as if they were given by you. You do that because if you don’t, people die.”
“People were going to die,” I reminded him. “Helpless people, wounded Marines. Marines who just needed another hour.”
“If you want to follow your conscience instead of your orders,” Covington snapped, “then I hope you’re prepared to spend your next few decades in the Marines as nothing higher than a captain.”
I blinked, wondering if I’d heard the tone I thought I had, a hint of bitterness and behind it a stubbornness that not even those decades of bucking the system could kill.
“I, uh…,” I stuttered. “I didn’t think I was going to stay in after the war, sir.”
“Someone has to,” he said, shrugging. “Someone has to teach the new batch of kids when the next war comes.”
“You really think there’s going to be another war, sir?” I asked, surprised.
“Son,” he said, squeezing my shoulder, wistful sadness in those usually steel-hard grey eyes, “there’s always another war.”
“You get into trouble again,” Scotty warned me, “and you’re on your own.”
I clomped into the platoon area on borrowed ship boots and extended a hand.
“Thanks, Scotty. I appreciate what you and the others did.”
He shook it, grinning lopsidedly.
“Well, of course. I wasn’t gonna let them put some fucking shave-tail fresh out of OCS in charge of my platoon!”
“Where are the squad leaders?” I asked him, glancing around the empty room. “I have to brief them now. We don’t have much time.”
“They’re on their way,” he assured me. “I got the notification while we were doing PMCS. They had to put the suits back together.”
“Any word on the Force Recon troops we brought back?” I’d meant to ask Covington, but I’d been so gobsmacked by the news I wasn’t going to be busted and sent to another unit, it had slipped my mind.
“They all lived,” he said, shaking his head. “They were in pretty bad shape, but they’re going to be okay after a couple more days in the auto-docs.”
I blew out a breath. At least that had worked out.
“I gotta say, sir, that was reckless as shit. I would tell you that you can’t do that sort of shit but you don’t seem to listen when I say it.” He snorted. “I wish Sandoval were here, she’d be able to talk some sense into you.”
“I wish she was too, Scotty.”
I hated zero gravity. I really wanted to sit down and you couldn’t do it in zero-g. Not in any way that made a difference.
The hatch to the passage outside was hanging open from when I’d entered and I heard the buzz of voices approaching, knew who it had to be. Kreis was the first through and his eyes lit up when he saw me.
“Sir! Damn, it’s good to see you back!” He looked as if he wanted to rush up and give me a hug, but managed to restrain himself and just shook my hand. “Is everything good?”
“We’re fine,” I assured him. “All we have to worry about now is the mission.”
“What’s the op, sir?” Carson asked. She wasn’t falling all over herself with relief like Kreis, but I thought I saw satisfaction somewhere behind her bland face.
The squad leaders formed a half-circle around me with Scotty at their center.
“This one takes straight to Silvanus,” I told them, “and things there are a lot more uncertain than they were on Valius, and a lot more dangerous, too. We have limited intelligence because the situation on the ground there is so fluid. The Marines who were left on the planet have been striking at the Tahni, but they haven’t been able to contact the Fleet because of the jamming and harassment by enemy air patrols and drones, especially since we jumped into the system. So, we don’t know the realtime disposition of the Tahni forces onplanet or where they’ve massed to meet our invasion. The plan is to probe their defenses with landings in multiple areas and have more than half our forces held in reserve. Once the brass figures out where the main body of their ground troops is hiding out, they’ll deploy the main part of our Drop Troops and Recon Marines.”
I tapped a control on my ‘link and the image of a city snapped to life in the room’s holographic projector, anachronistic in its architectural lines. I wasn’t up on mid-Twentieth Century designs, but whoever had written this part of the op order apparently had been, because they’d included an aside about how the whole place had been built along the lines of 1950s Italy, which I recognized as being somewhere in Europe.
“This is Dolabella, the second-largest city on Silvanus.”
I scrolled past the main part of the city and into a collection of squared-off boxes, utilitarian and ugly in stark contrast to the quaint if kitschy beauty of the town.
“This is our target, the industrial park just outside town. We’re supposed to secure it for a staging area for the next wave of troops. It shouldn’t be too complicated, but we don’t know what sort of opposition we’re going to be facing, so anything can happen. The plan is for our platoon to drop between the town and the industrial park, run a perimeter patrol around the whole thing, check for opposition and clear it out, then stay and hold the area until relieved.”
“Do we have any air support if things go bad?
” Majid wondered.
“Maybe,” I told him. “Depends on how well our signal can penetrate the jamming. We’ll have ECM drones up trying to deactivate theirs, but you know how that kind of thing goes. We might have clear signals the whole time or it could be nothing but static. If we don’t, then we just have to handle it. As always. But our orders are to try avoid being decisively engaged.” I smiled thinly. “Which is officer talk for, we need to try to avoid getting in over our heads and needing air support.”
I waved at the image.
“Any questions?”
“Yes, sir,” Carson said. “I haven’t been a Marine that long, and I’ve been a squad leader even shorter, but I gotta say, I’ve been noticing that things always go ways the plans didn’t account for.”
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, Sgt. Carson,” I told her. “It’s a reality of war. Is that a question?”
“I guess my question is, sir, well….” She squeezed her eyes shut like she was trying to think about how to say it. “You had something happen that no one expected, and you didn’t have anyone higher than you on the ground to tell you what to do. And when you tried to do what you thought was right, what made sense, they threw you into a cell. What do they expect us to do when things happen that aren’t in the plan?”
I understood the question, but I wasn’t sure how to answer it. What did she think I was, the Skipper? Top? I was barely twenty-three now, barely a staff sergeant before I’d gone to OCS and now barely a lieutenant.
And yet, to her, I was the Old Man. That was a shock to the system. I was the representative of all the combat wisdom in the Marine Corps. And I began to understand what the Skipper had been trying to tell me about presenting orders as if they were my own.
“Carson, for right now, you let me be the one to make the decision. That’s why I’m here, because someone has to be responsible.” Which sounded better than “shit collector.” “I’ll make the decisions and try to do what’s right for the Marines, for the mission, and for you. And if anything happens to me, you still have the Gunny.” I nodded toward Scotty. “But if the time ever comes when you’re the one in the position to make those decisions, all you can do is try to do the right thing and accept the consequences that come with it.” I met each of their eyes. “If there’s nothing else, we jump in-system in an hour and we drop in three. The op order is on your ‘links. Go brief your squads and get ready to go. This is the big one. Don’t let me down.”