Spaceside

by Michael Mammay

  “Ha!” I took half a dozen running steps and leaped to test out the leg capability. I got about two meters off the ground, and when I slammed back down onto the hard floor, the suit absorbed most of the impact. “We needed this shit in the infantry.”

  “The army couldn’t afford them,” said Tanaka, who’d been standing on the far side of the room. “For the price of four of these you could outfit an entire line battalion with standard equipment.”

  “Four people in these might be able to take on a battalion,” I joked. I had to admit, getting geared up gave me a little bit of the old fire, and I liked it. I wondered if that’s why guys like Tanaka did it, why they got out of the military and took the same kind of job in the civilian world. Something about it made me feel more alive than I had in two years. I’m sure it wasn’t just me. “Most of your team ex-military?”

  “Almost exclusively,” said Tanaka. “We recruit pretty heavily in the elite units. We’ve got a good team.”

  I looked over to the big corporal. “How’d they convince you?”

  “Simple. They pay better. A lot better.”

  Tanaka jumped in. “Sure, you still put your life on the line when it comes to it, but here it’s valued. Plus most of the job is testing equipment, and we have all kinds of cool gear.” He gestured toward the equipment that filled every bit of the workshop.

  “You do have that,” I said. “What about weapons?”

  “Go ahead and leave the suit here, and we’ll show you.” He smiled the big, genuine smile of a proud parent.

  “You sure I can’t keep it on?” I asked. “This thing could come in handy.”

  “It’ll be on the ship for you.”

  A few minutes later we passed through a heavy vault door into a weapons locker. Tanaka took a high-tech pulse rifle off a rack and held it out to me. “This is the top of the line, sir. The PR-21.”

  “Yeah?” I took it from him.

  “It’s got better water resistance, longer battery life, and a tighter beam than anything you’ve ever fired,” said Tanaka. “It’s the most lethal personal weapon in the galaxy.”

  I walked past both of them, handing the rifle back before grabbing a projectile rifle out of a rack. It looked a lot like the Bikosky I favored back when I served, except with sleeker lines. “I’ll take this one.”

  “Told you he’d want the Bitch,” said Matua, using the soldier’s nickname for the Bikosky. “You owe me five marks.”

  Tanaka snorted. “Yeah, yeah. I know you’re familiar with the Bitch, sir. This has the same operating mechanism but with a few more options in projectiles. You’ve got RF and infrared seekers, and the guided bullet has an extra seven degrees of bend in it. All keyed to your helmet, of course.”

  “It’s got an infrared bullet? A heat seeker?”

  “Yes sir. It’s not super effective due to the limited range, but it comes in handy once in a while.”

  I nodded, moving over to the sidearms. I picked out a standard-issue pulse pistol. “This too.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “What’s your background, Tanaka?” I asked. It was a safer question, now that we’d had a chance to bond over weapons and gear. It wouldn’t come across like a challenge.

  “Oh, you know, sir. Army captain. Special Ops, mostly. One tour with the infantry before that.”

  “Where’d you serve?” We compared tours, figuring out that we’d been in a couple of the same places, but never at the same time. If we searched further we’d surely find mutual acquaintances, but not many, given our age and rank difference.

  “So how’s this work?” I asked, finally. “I’m sure Matua here told you that I tried to walk out last night.”

  “To get a drink,” said Tanaka, confirming my suspicions.

  “Sure. To get a drink.”

  Matua snorted.

  “You’re not a prisoner, sir,” said Tanaka.

  “No? So I can leave?” I asked.

  He glanced away for a split second.

  “That’s what I thought. Not your fault. I won’t hold it against you.” I read the relief in his face. I almost had his number. He hadn’t asked for me, I knew that. Somebody had forced me on him, so we were stuck with each other.

  No, I’d lied. I did hold it against him, a little, but letting him know that didn’t serve any purpose. Until I found a way out, I had to coexist with him and his team. If I didn’t get out, we were going into something that might be hostile, and everybody had weapons. I needed to make myself useful. Or at a minimum, make myself someone who they didn’t want to kill and dump on a distant planet.

  After a morning with the cool stuff, we spent an afternoon with the dull but necessary part of any mission: the background. Tanaka sat next to me in the center of a long, rectangular table while Matua took up a position against the wall behind me. Three briefers stood on the far side, lined up along the wall in military fashion wearing gray fatigues. Theoretically they were briefing Tanaka, but he certainly understood the basics of the mission, so they really prepared it for me. A tall, thin woman with short black hair looked at Tanaka, who nodded. She gestured to someone in the back and a holo lit up in front of us, showing a planet.

  “Sir, this is Zeta Four. It circles a one-point-one-four-intensity star at an orbital radius of approximately one hundred seventy five million kilometers, putting it in the temperate zone. It’s far enough away from its star so that it’s not tidally locked, making it ideal.” She looked at Tanaka as she spoke, but glanced at me to make sure I got it. “The planet has both liquid and frozen water, which can sustain life, and with further terraforming could be used to thicken the less-than-ideal atmosphere. Oxygen level is currently sixty-eight percent of standard.”

  I leaned over to Tanaka. “Zeta Four. That’s a deserted mining planet, isn’t it?”

  He nodded and gestured to the briefer, indicating that she’d cover that.

  “Due to the thin atmosphere, temperatures vary greatly across regions and from day to night. While the average temperature lies within the norm for human life, the amount of fluctuation makes it rather uncomfortable.”

  “So you could live there, but it wouldn’t be any fun,” I said to the briefer.

  “Exactly so, sir. The planet is about zero point nine standard size and about zero point nine standard density. Gravity measures right around point eight. Rotation lasts over twenty hours, and the dual moons have a high relative mass in comparison to the planet, causing somewhat extreme tidal effects.”

  “How bad?” I asked.

  “The coasts are nearly uninhabitable, sir.” She went through another dozen visuals and about fifteen minutes of basic facts about the continents, the terrain, and other environmental factors, before concluding. “If there are no questions, I’ll be followed by Mr. Sherzinski.”

  Tanaka glanced at me and I shook my head. “No questions,” he said.

  Sherzinski started without missing a beat. “As you mentioned, sir, Zeta Four was initially approached as a mining operation. Exploratory missions, mostly.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But they abandoned it. Why?”

  “Same reason mining companies abandon anything, sir. Money. There’s iron and a bunch of stone, but almost none of the precious metals that make a planet viable for a major operation.”

  “And with the weather, gravity, and tides, it’s not a place for residential settlements,” I said.

  “Correct, sir. Basically it’s good for nothing other than water, and for that purpose it’s not close enough to other systems to be viable for export. It does hold some small interest as a sportsman’s destination with the surf and a huge series of amazing underground caves. A few companies have small financial stakes, but nobody’s developed anything yet.”

  I made a show of not taking any notes but memorized everything. It didn’t register now, but having no idea what the future held, I wanted to be prepared.

  “Okay. So we’ve got a dead planet in the middle of nowhere. I’m guessing that the t
hird briefer is going to tell me about the Cappans?”

  “Yes, sir.” The third briefer took over the spot. “While Zeta Four has been uninhabited by humans since the last mining company explorers left around sixty years ago, the planet is now occupied. Approximately two years ago a group of Cappans settled the planet.”

  “Wouldn’t somebody have noticed that at the time?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not really, sir. There’s no reason. While the planet isn’t far away by galactic standards, it’s a dead end. The jump that leads to the Zeta system doesn’t go anywhere else.”

  “So then . . . how did we find out they were there?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  I glanced at Tanaka, but he kept his eyes trained ahead. I knew the answer to the question—Omicron had helped them escape Cappa in the first place—but I wanted to assess what everybody else knew. I couldn’t read Tanaka. I nodded for the briefer to continue.

  “Our estimate right now is that the population is between ten and fifteen thousand—”

  “Hold on. I’m sorry to keep interrupting, but you said fifteen thousand.” I knew their population already from talking to their leader, but it gave me another opening to probe.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I only know of four ships that escaped Cappa. No way could they carry that many. Not that distance. They’d have to have cryo.” A huge troop transport could carry hundreds or thousands, but the ships that left Cappa hadn’t been that large. “Were there more ships?”

  Everyone in the room stared at me, Tanaka turning in his seat to do so.

  “What? Do you think I don’t know a few things about what happened on Cappa?” I had given away a little information, but if it helped keep them off balance and guessing at what I knew, I’d happily pay that price.

  “I don’t know how they got there, sir, but we’re pretty sure on the number,” the briefer continued. “We have satellite imagery that shows they’re mostly living in one settlement. We’ve seen minimal movement away from that area. Here’s a visual.” The view changed, showing a village of prefabricated buildings in a flat area surrounded by some sort of dirt cliffs on all sides, almost like a bowl.

  “And if we zoom out,” he continued, “we see that they’re on this large island. It’s about fourteen thousand square kilometers.”

  “Island . . . I thought coast was out,” I said.

  “It is, sir,” said the female briefer from her position over by the wall. “But this island rises to about a thousand meters elevation fairly quickly. A series of cliffs and bluffs protects the island from the effects of the tide.”

  “What are they doing for subsistence? Are they shipping stuff in, or growing it locally?”

  “Mostly local, sir,” said the current briefer. “There’s some indication that they’re farming in the cave systems. They should be rather conducive to growing several kinds of fungi and lichens that fit with Cappan nutritional needs. We haven’t seen goods delivered from off planet.”

  “Okay. I’ve got a good lay of the land. What’s the mission?” I looked at Tanaka.

  “That will be all,” he said to the briefers. They filed out through a flimsy door, awkwardly silent.

  “No more briefers?” I asked.

  “Sir . . . about that. I’m really sorry. But we’ll brief you on the mission once we’re on board.”

  I stared at him for a few seconds. “Really?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  From his look I could tell he was legitimately embarrassed. It wasn’t his idea to keep me in the dark. I didn’t care. It gave me ammunition to mess with him. I had very little leverage, so I’d use whatever I got. “So let’s get this straight. You’re keeping me imprisoned, I have no communication, but somehow I still can’t be trusted with information on what we’re trying to accomplish.”

  He looked away. “That’s correct, sir.”

  “Which means that it’s so fucked up that you’re afraid . . . no, amend that, someone is afraid that I’ll back out.”

  “I honestly don’t know about that, sir. It seems pretty straightforward to me.”

  “So you know the mission?”

  “Yes, sir.” I could have let it go right there and taken his word for it, but I wanted to push a little and see what happened.

  “Then tell me.”

  “Sir, I don’t have the authority to—”

  “You said it’s straightforward.”

  “Sir, I can’t—”

  “Fine, I’m not going,” I said. I made the decision on the spot, but once I said it, I liked the idea. I didn’t see a way out of the building, so I needed to create some chaos, see if it opened up any opportunities.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “You have your orders not to tell me the mission. So what do your orders say if I refuse to get on the ship?”

  “Sir—”

  “Are you going to sedate me? Put me in cryo against my will, haul me off to some dead-end planet and hope I’ll do what you need me to do when we get there? Come on, Tanaka, is that it?”

  He squirmed in his seat. My outburst made him uncomfortable, because even though he was in charge of the mission, he had been trained not to piss off senior officers. “I don’t have orders like that, no, sir.”

  “So you’d have to call somebody.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So call them.”

  He hesitated. “Sir, you really want me to—”

  “What I really want is to know why somebody thinks a group of trained professionals needs a washed-up old colonel along for the ride. And until somebody tells me the mission, I’m not going to have an answer to that. Since you’re not able to give it to me, I want to talk to someone who can. Am I missing the mark? You don’t need me for a simple infiltration mission. There has to be something else.”

  After a moment, he nodded. “I’ll make a call, sir.”

  I didn’t expect anything to come out of my outburst, and though it had been spontaneous, I’d kept it to a time when it was just Tanaka and Matua present. Matua would keep his mouth shut, or he wouldn’t have been assigned to me. I could apologize to Tanaka later for being an asshole since nobody else had seen it. If I’d embarrassed him in front of his troops, that would have been a different level of problem. Either way, this probably represented my last play before the email went out to Plazz. I still didn’t love that option, so I’d defaulted to what I always do: I tried to make something happen. It would either give me a chance to improve my position or it wouldn’t, but it didn’t seem likely to make it worse.

  Ellen Haverty stepped into the east campus conference room with a look on her face reminiscent of someone stepping in a pile of shit. I didn’t know if her disdain was for the meager surroundings or for me, though I had a pretty good guess. At least when her eyes met mine, she faked a smile. “Colonel Butler. And here I thought we’d concluded our part of the business.”

  “Ms. Haverty. I’d have been happy to come to you or to do this over video. I really hate to put you out like this.” I returned her “fuck you” smile.

  “I find it best not to put things on technology these days. You can’t be too cautious, you know.”

  “Did you learn that from Gylika?”

  Her eyes went hard. “I’m here out of respect. The least you could do is act civil.”

  “Forgive me if I treat you like an extortionist. Not sure where I got that idea.” Apparently I didn’t feel the need to be civil.

  “Look. You wanted to talk to me. I didn’t have to come. I suggest you get to whatever it is that you want to discuss before I change my mind.”

  “Fair enough. I want to know the mission.”

  She took a seat in the moderately-priced office chair across from me. “Why would you need to know that? I’m told that you don’t like to get the details of missions before you fly, as things change while you’re in cryo and there’s time to figure it out after.”

  I couldn’t help but crack a smile at
her, despite her being an evil troll. She’d done her homework, and she was right. She’d pegged my normal thought process. “This is different. When I went on military missions, I at least had an idea of what was expected. What I waited on was the details. I’d expect Mr. Tanaka would give me any changes when we come out of cryo in two or three months.”

  “One month,” she said. “You’re not on military transport anymore. Our ships are faster.”

  I gave a small nod. “I appreciate that. Get it over with quicker.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Here’s my issue. As I understand it currently, this mission makes no sense. There are thousands of Cappans, and we’re going in with two hundred. That’s not enough force to make them give something up if they don’t want to. It’s too small to fight, too big to infiltrate.”

  “That’s why we’re sending you. To negotiate.”

  I’d thought through the possibility of how I’d do that. We’d threaten to blow the planet from space, and use that as leverage. Then it would depend on how well I could get the Cappans to believe that. That didn’t take into account that I was also working with the Cappans, which dropped a half dozen twists into an already ridiculous situation. “You don’t need me on this mission,” I said. “Tanaka will tell you. In fact he’d be a hell of a lot happier without me looking over his shoulder.”

  “I’m not in the habit of asking my employees for their opinion on my decisions. We pay Mr. Tanaka very well. I don’t much care if he’s happy, as long as he gets the job done.”