Shadow Play

by P. R. Adams

  What madness, war. What madness.

  Wind scoured the sand with a shuddering hiss, abruptly turning the clear, fresh air into a blinding, golden haze that carried a dull, mineral stench. O’Bannon pulled his mask up from his neck to cover the lower half of his face and lowered the protective goggles over his eyes.

  They liked to use the natural cover of the dust storms, these Moskav bastards. It wasn’t that their technology better handled the obscuring or that they knew the placement of all the defensive weapons. No. It was that the Moskav soldiers were desperate and brutal, fighting to hold every inch of their territory because it meant another day of survival for their loved ones. For some, maybe it was about a belief in the teachings of their own Great Leader.

  How many were like that, as caught up in the death cycle of blind rhetoric as the Azoren leadership?

  Not many. Most were like him, doing what they did to survive.

  All hail the Supreme Leader. All hail the suffering he causes.

  Somewhere behind him, a door groaned against the wind, then slammed. It would be someone desperately performing a pointless endeavor, going from one building to the next, allowing sand into the rooms meant to trap it, leaning into the wind just to stumble a meter or two.

  “Major O’Bannon!”

  It was Franke, his earnest lieutenant, fighting to prove his worth to the Council of Genetic Clarity, watchful gods of the pure race.

  The tall, broad-shouldered man staggered to the wall shielding O’Bannon. “Major?”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your communicator, Major.”

  O’Bannon smiled, something the lieutenant wouldn’t see with the sand and the masks. But he could see the eyes behind the bug-like protruding lenses of the major’s goggles. “Do you think they might use the same means to find us?”

  “Who is that, Major?”

  “The Moskav assassins even now charging across the desert in the hopes of planting a needle-tipped blade into our throats and hearts. Do you think they might have the ability to track our communicator locations?”

  “No, Major. They are simple brutes. They probably use their animal sense of smell.”

  “Yes, it is so.” O’Bannon knocked sand from his helmet and shook more from his jacket. He was melting inside it, but it offered armor and it looked quite becoming. “Tell me, Jan, does it disturb you to hear the ministers of Genetic Clarity call you a mongrel?”

  The other man looked away. “I am a mongrel, Major.”

  The major squeezed his lieutenant’s shoulder. “You are a man, Jan. Same as these Moskav bastards. And you would do the same as them should some black-hearted invader come for your children and wife.”

  Franke pressed one of the eyes of his mask against O’Bannon’s. A tear welled in the young man’s eye. “Careful, Major. My life is what it is, but your career is at the mercy of those with concerns of politics, not conquest alone.”

  “My career will only take me so far, Jan.”

  “You needn’t worry about someone like me to your own peril.”

  Someone ran past them, so close O’Bannon could make out the brown of a crudely sewn shirt and bulky cut pants. Pale hair whipped above a red kerchief fashioned as a bandana over nose and mouth. A heavy black backpack and dark brown satchel—those were the last details to be made out before O’Bannon’s instincts took control.

  He grabbed Franke and pulled him to the ground as the other form disappeared in the haze.

  Franke pushed away. “Major, what—”

  Then a door groaned against the wind.

  O’Bannon was sure he heard startled shouting, then the earth shook and a fire more intense even than the sun washed over them.

  Followed seconds later by another blast. And another. Then another.

  He sat up in bed with a gasp, clutching the elbow that had been the only part of him to actually suffer injury so great that the nerves still tingled as if he’d rested against a lit stovetop.

  Instead of the sands of Yelchin Desert collecting around him, there was only the tangle of blankets that should have been bunched around his throat.

  O’Bannon shivered, pulled the blankets back up, then froze when a quiet knock came from his door.

  “Major?”

  It was Franke.

  Like in the nightmare. But this was real. The hellish cold of Jotun, the cramped room that seemed inadequate for even O’Bannon’s simple and austere life.

  He threw the blankets back, pulled on slippers, and padded to the door. “Jan?”

  It sounded like slippers scraping somewhere away from the door, then soft steps coming back. “Are you awake?”

  O’Bannon opened the door, glanced around to be sure only Franke was there, then waved him in. After closing the door, the older man hurried back to the covers and draped them over his shoulder. Franke had a housecoat, gloves, and pajamas on but seemed fine with that.

  “Did I wake you, Major?”

  “The bombs in the desert woke me.”

  “You were back on Karuska?”

  “We can never leave there, can we?”

  “Too many were left behind.”

  “Yes. Buried in the sand.”

  O’Bannon shuffled to his desk and pulled out a small flask and two glasses. It was a familiar thing, done without effort or thought. His slippers whispered across the floor as he handed one glass to the lieutenant, who didn’t protest but sat on the corner of the foot of the bed while the older man filled the glass with a dark, amber liquid.

  Franke sniffed the fluid. “A new shipment from home?”

  “From the last one. The final bottle for now, so enjoy. You never know when we will see another.”

  The lieutenant nodded, took a sip, flinched slightly, then took another.

  “Strong, is it not?” O’Bannon could feel the alcohol in his sinuses when he sniffed the liquor.

  “It is. At least this has not been diminished by the war.”

  “The last thing we will have will be beer and spirits. They soften the blow of failure and loss.”

  Franke stared into his glass. “Is this nothing but failure and loss to you then?”

  “The war, or our adventure here on Jotun?”

  “Are they so different?”

  “When you hold your sweet wife and child in your arms after the war has ended, you will know the difference between a war that has been won and one that extends through generations into eternity.”

  The young man grunted, then took another sip. “What of Jotun, then?”

  “They will send us to the front again, to some blasted Moskav world, and we will find a new way to kill them and they a new way to do the same to us. And this moon? It will be a memory frozen into our hearts.”

  Franke tossed back the last of his drink, then wiped his lips on the back of his glove.

  “You’re troubled, Jan. What has you scampering about in the frozen bowels of our home away from home, hm?”

  “It is nothing. Dreams, like you had.”

  “Your hair is mussed, and you wear your nightclothes, but your eyes are bright. You never fell asleep. So, tell me, what troubles you?”

  After a second staring at the glass, Franke dug into the pocket of his housecoat. He fumbled around for a moment, then brought his hand up to his mouth and bit the tip of the glove and tugged it off his hand. On the second try, he pulled out a data tablet. He turned it over in his hand as if it were a poisonous animal to be kept preoccupied with movement so that it might not strike.

  O’Bannon held a hand out and took the tablet when it was finally offered up. He settled at his desk and connected to the tablet with his terminal. “Whose credentials?”

  “Private Drummond.”

  It was one of theirs, at least. O’Bannon fed his own credentials to the device, then accepted the approved override. Now it was his device.

  He dropped into the interface, found a folder, and opened it.

  Data unfolded. Message traffic from the look
of it.

  The major took another drink, but the warmth that settled into his gut couldn’t drive off the chill coiling within him. “When did this happen?”

  Franke pointed his glass at the terminal. “The time stamps are accurate. Drummond brought me the tablet when he went to the mess for lunch.”

  Timestamps showed that Knoel had ordered two interceptors piloted by his elite Black Lightning Commandos into the air nearly three hours prior. They had reached the crater in under thirty minutes, and after half an hour of circling it and the ruins had returned to the small airfield attached to the compound.

  O’Bannon rubbed the scar that ran along the bottom of his chin. “The captain appears incapable of believing what he’s been told.”

  “It seems to be the case.”

  “And what did the interceptor pilots report seeing after flying their special vehicles over the crater?”

  “Officially? They did not report at all. It was a training mission.”

  “And he’ll log it as such, even though he would prefer to rub this in my face.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he cannot rub it in my face if it returned nothing to refute our findings.”

  “Which is how Drummond discovered this. The mission was handled by one of the captain’s men, but when the pilots returned and went into his office, our most benevolent captain resorted to shouting and making quite the racket.”

  The major chuckled. “A master of subtlety, this one.”

  “Subtlety may be lacking, but persistence isn’t.”

  “Which means what, exactly?”

  “The pilots returned to the airfield. The interceptors have been refueled. There is more in the file. Further down.”

  There was something to the captain’s stubbornness that was almost admirable. Not quite, but it was close. O’Bannon appreciated someone determined, but those who refused to believe evidence simply because it ran counter to their accepted positions were annoying.

  “He sent them to the ruins?” It was an absurd waste of resources.

  “And in a few days, they will fly up to the satellites. They have software uploads to correct the orbit decay and to upgrade the imagery systems.”

  “So upload them from the ground.”

  “He wishes to use the cameras through the interceptors.”

  “Because he thinks the cloud cover will suddenly lessen and he can drill straight down into the crater depths?”

  “Using the infrared systems. He should be able to already.”

  O’Bannon scrolled through the data again. “And what does he expect to see, then? Something he didn’t see during the flyovers?”

  “This transmitter that the dogs missed.”

  “Of course.” O’Bannon refilled his glass, then stretched out and refilled Franke’s. “There was a time where the soldier admitted defeat and searched for different objectives. When you waste a battalion trying to take a hill and have nothing to show for your efforts but the shattered corpses of a thousand young men, you call in artillery and flatten the hill; you don’t send another battalion to fall on enemy bayonets, hoping to weigh down the rifles for a third charge.”

  Franke sipped at the dark fluid, which rippled in his shaking hands. “Do you remember what happened on Karkos?”

  “After the bombers?”

  “They sent us graduates. So fresh from boot camp that their hair had yet to grow out. Remember?”

  “I remember every recruit to have joined my unit, Jan. The eyes of the dead watch me from the growing dark in here.” O’Bannon bumped a fist off his chest. “Nothing better validates humanity than the pain suffered from loss, and no greater condemnation can be made of someone than the lack of such humanity.”

  “You do not believe this Knoel is human, do you?”

  “I tried to. I tried to believe that it wasn’t the soul born into a child by its connection with a mother. That’s nonsensical mysticism. Yet here we are with those cold, dead eyes of these monsters not formed of a man and woman’s love, not plucked from a living womb but crafted in sterile dishes and fed in glass vats.”

  “So it is the lack of parents that makes them what they are?”

  “No.” The older man breathed in the vapors of his drink. “It is the parents they do have that make them inhuman. It is the state that tells them who they must be, and it is the scientist who engineers them to map to the state’s desire. Computers feed them not the sustenance of a mother but the cold data of hate and fear.

  “These aren’t humans, Jan. Not like you and I. But they will replace us.”

  The lieutenant sighed. “Is it possible we resent the change and that it is good?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  “But you do not believe that, either.”

  “No.” O’Bannon slowly drained his glass, then set it down with a hollow thunk. “This captain, he speaks of the border changing, of the war coming to Jotun and his Black Lightning Commandos gloriously leading the Federation to victory.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “He speaks of war expanding to the Kedraalians and Gulmar. He thinks this is something to celebrate, that our leaders will go from fumbling about in a bloody war against one opponent to victory when we face three.”

  “Then you do. You believe him.”

  “What matters is that he believes this, Jan. And for someone like him, belief must come from an outside source. His sort lack imagination.”

  The younger man finished his drink and set his glass beside his commander’s, then stood. “There is another file.”

  “Hm?”

  Franke waved for O’Bannon to move, then typed a command that revealed a hidden folder on the storage device. “There.”

  The major squinted. His eyes were getting old, and he was already feeling the warmth expanding in his body. “What is it?”

  “Open it.” The young man crossed his arms over his chest anxiously.

  O’Bannon opened the folder and poked through some of the files within. It was data like what he’d seen in the other folder. “This is from Private Drummond as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hm.”

  The files revealed updates addressed to Knoel. There were troop movements using fleet resources, new spending on war materials, new weapons systems taking priority on the manufacturing front, ship reassignments. Some had been sent to the DMZ and—

  O’Bannon leaned forward. “Have you seen this, Jan?”

  “Before I brought it over, yes.”

  “Of course. You were upset. Interceptors flying to the crater and ruins could have waited, but this—”

  It wasn’t the wild fancy of a naive Black Lightning Commando officer in search of glory and significance to further his career. There were ships entering the DMZ, and not just to probe defenses and sensors. There were actual targets.

  O’Bannon swallowed. “Dear God, they wanted a war, and now it comes.”

  “This new front the captain spoke of?”

  “Yes, my friend, the new front. It is coming. And it will be here soon. And it will destroy us all.”

  10

  It seemed to Benson as if the temperature on the bridge had dropped several degrees. Her shirt was damp, and it sounded like her breathing rhythm was out of whack. Everything felt out of whack, but now that they were out of the DMZ things were improving.

  So it came down to damage control.

  She swallowed and immediately wished she had her cup from the Pandora. Printing a new one up would be easy, but she wanted the original. There wasn’t any obvious place for it on the bright and orderly bridge of the Clarion, and the others would probably find it odd to see the task force commander drinking from the scratched, old container. Sentimental value…it seemed so ridiculous now, so she told herself what she was missing was the sweet flavor that had soaked into the thing over the years.

  After what she had to do next, a little sweetness would be nice.

  “Commander Scalise, estimated time
to arrival?”

  The short woman stared at the command console that dominated her station behind the helm bay, jaw muscles working beneath whiskers in time to the gentle thrumming of the ship systems. “We should come out of deceleration approaching Riefenstahl in ten hours, eighteen minutes.”

  The gas giant was the sixth planet in the system, and their destination was one of three extremely large moons.

  “Let’s get Lieutenant Rao’s team up here and give your folks some rest.”

  Scalise blinked. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Benson could see that Scalise was still stinging; the repair work wasn’t going to be easy. It made sense to let her pass along notice of shift change. Benson used that time to drift to the helm station and convey personal praise to each of the bridge crew. They were tired but seemed proud.

  Good.

  When turnover was done, Ferrara exited quickly. He seemed the worst off of the bunch. Benson vowed to check on his cancer status when she had time.

  Rao listened patiently as Scalise went over obvious items and dragged the turnover out far longer than it needed to be. Benson made a point of watching the younger lieutenant. She was a little taller than Scalise, with a narrow face dominated by a big nose. Rao’s hair was cut short, a look that seemed aimed at de-emphasizing her unremarkable face.

  Was she facing the same sort of problems Scalise seemed to think she was?

  When Scalise finally wrapped up turnover and headed off the bridge, Benson followed. She waited until she was sure no one else was in the passageway, then caught up. “Patty?”

  Scalise turned, eyes wide. “I’m not sure it’s appropriate—”

  “Sorry. If you want to keep things completely formal, I understand. But I’d like to grab a drink in the galley and talk—”

  The shorter woman seemed close to losing her balance. She stopped, eyes darting up and down the passageway, as if she expected a literal ambush. “Commander, I think it would be best if we remained in a purely professional relationship, if you don’t mind.”

  “All right. Then if you have a moment to talk professionally?”