Spaceside

by Michael Mammay

  “Captain Tanaka is down,” I said, first over the first platoon net and then over the company frequency.

  “First platoon, what’s your status?” The response came after a few seconds. A female voice. Larsson. With Tanaka down, that put her in command. My life had just gotten worse. Not as bad as Tanaka’s, though.

  Nobody answered. After several seconds, I thought about giving the report myself, but something in my gut told me not to. After a while longer, she asked again, this time on the first platoon net. Smart. All the leaders who were on the company net were probably down, so nobody had heard her when she broadcast there.

  “Ma’am . . . this is Sergeant Kapoor. I don’t know who’s in charge. Red six is down, so is red seven. We’ve got . . . I don’t know. Maybe six of us left. They were everywhere. Estimate a hundred and fifty enemy. Maybe more. We kept shooting them, but they kept coming.”

  The net stayed silent for a few seconds before she responded. “Is Colonel Butler still with you?”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Secure him, and continue on the initial course,” she said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I couldn’t hold my tongue. “We need to abort this miss—”

  My transmitter cut off. After a few seconds of silence, it became apparent that she’d shut my receiver down, too. I couldn’t talk or hear. The sudden isolation disoriented me for a moment in a way that the combat never had. I recovered my wits quickly and stalked over to Kapoor, who was ostensibly in charge of what was left of our unit. Bodies lay strewn throughout the trees. Somebody moved on the ground to my left, and I turned that way instead. I needed to think before I acted. I might get only one shot with Kapoor, and I needed to make it count.

  Blood seeped down the legs of the soldier’s armor—a woman—from a crack at her waist. I pulled her med pack and ran a scan. She had no chance. I worked her helmet off and placed the med pack against her neck, waiting for the pop of the injection. It couldn’t save her, but at least she’d be comfortable in her last minutes.

  I don’t know how I ended up sitting, or how long I’d been there. It . . . there was too much. The death. I remembered it from previous battles, I had the dreams, but here . . . I sat in a daze, unable to move.

  I yelled into my dead microphone and the sound rattled inside my helmet. I yelled and I yelled until my throat hurt, and then I was crying.

  I lost track of how long I sat there before I stopped. Probably not long. A soldier moved into my line of sight and instinct kicked in. I pulled myself together. We were still in combat, and there was no time, so I mashed all the crap back down inside and struggled to my feet.

  I needed to know about the other units, if they’d been hit as hard as we had. If they were, someone would talk some sense into Larsson. We didn’t have ten soldiers left who could walk in our platoon. We had wounded we needed to evacuate. If Larsson tried to press forward, the soldiers wouldn’t follow her orders. Not now. Not after what we’d gone through.

  A shadow crossed my faceplate again and I looked up to see a soldier—my suit identified her as Kapoor—gesturing with her rifle for me to get up. Then a second soldier joined her, and relieved me of my weapon. What the fuck were they thinking? We needed every shooter we could get if we were going to make it off this planet alive. If they understood, if they cared, they didn’t show it. Or at least I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t know what Larsson ordered, or if they’d pushed back at all. What she’d promised them. I was a prisoner, plain and simple, but worse than that was the isolation. Not knowing.

  I had no doubt that Larsson meant to kill me. But if that was the case, one of the soldiers could have just shot me. Maybe they balked. Maybe she didn’t give them the order because she didn’t want to test their loyalty. She could have them bring me to her, and she could do it herself. I considered attacking one of the soldiers, going for a weapon, but that would provoke them. Regardless of their orders, they hadn’t shot me, and I didn’t want to change that. This had ceased to be a combat mission for me and turned into a hostage situation once more.

  Of course nobody had told the Cappans that. I started to form the basics of a plan. When they attacked again, that would be my chance. I didn’t know where I’d go, stranded on a mostly deserted planet, but I’d use the confusion and get away. Maybe I could hide out and wait for the humans to leave. I could take my chances with the Cappans.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  We sorted through the carnage of what used to be our platoon. I did my part, helping tend to the wounded. I might have been a glorified prisoner, but I was still a soldier, and so were they, regardless of if they served on the wrong side. I had no right to judge. For all that they’d done since they signed on for this mission, I’d done much worse in the past. I’m a hypocrite, but not that much of one.

  We separated the dead from the wounded, marked a landing zone, and left the injured but ambulatory to supervise evacuation. They’d be safe enough once the ships could finally make it to our location. I couldn’t hear the communication, but I assumed the other units had taken heavy casualties as well. Five of us remained mostly uninjured from our platoon.

  Somebody must have decided that it was inconvenient not to be able to speak to me, as a channel opened up and Sergeant Kapoor spoke. The sound of another human voice lifted me, though my situation still sucked. “You still don’t have comm access to the command nets, but you can respond on the private channel if somebody else opens it.”

  “Thanks.” I had a dozen other replies ready, from berating to begging, but that’s all that came out. Probably smart.

  “We’re going to move out, soon. I hope you’re not going to give us trouble, sir.”

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “XO has an idea, but she’s not telling us much. We’re heading to the original objective.”

  “To do what? There are five of us and we’ve got three klicks to go. Who knows what lies in between?”

  “Scans show nothing, for whatever that’s worth.” Her tone said that she understood that the Cappans had been fooling our scans all day, so I didn’t push it. But I couldn’t just let this lunacy go.

  “Why keep going? Why not make the call yourself to abort?” I kept my voice neutral, no judgment. I was curious more than anything, trying to figure out what could keep a soldier moving forward in such a ridiculous situation.

  “Because if we don’t, there’s no exfiltration coming. Not for us, not for the wounded.”

  “What?” I didn’t believe it.

  “Exactly what I said, sir. If we keep moving, they evacuate the wounded. If not, then we all sit here together until . . . well, until who knows what.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Tough call.”

  “Not really. Look around.” She gestured at the group of dead soldiers at the other side of the clearing. “You think we’re not expendable here?”

  “This is fucked up.”

  She nodded. “Yep. I guess we deserved it, though. Picked up a lot of paychecks on easy missions in the past. The bill always comes due though, right?”

  “Can I at least have my rifle back?” I asked. “If we get into it again, I can help. I promise I won’t shoot any of you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “If you die, I die. You’re my only ticket off of this planet. Let me help save my own life.”

  She thought about it for a moment. I tried to make out if her lips were moving, if she was asking for another opinion via her comm, but the light glinted off her faceplate, obscuring my view. “Promise that you won’t run.”

  I thought about it for a split second. “I promise I won’t try to get away from you or do anything to harm your mission. This group here. But if you run, I’m running with you. And if you’re all dead, all bets are off.”

  “Deal.” She walked over and got my rifle. “Get yourself as much ammo as you can carry, too.”

  “Thanks.” I went to the pile where we
’d collected the platoon’s ammunition. I had most of my load, still, but I grabbed some more. Explosive, mostly. With just a few of us, I wanted all the firepower I could muster, little as it was. I meant what I promised Kapoor. She was in this as deep as I was, though for different reasons, and it appeared that our way out lay in the same direction for the moment. If that path diverged sometime in the future, I’d reevaluate.

  We set a quick pace, jogging, though the suits made it almost effortless. Somewhere along the way we’d lost one of our drones, but we flew the other one low, zipping in and out of the trees in front of us, for all the good it had done so far. Overhead the engines of our support aircraft echoed, too far away to be distinct or even to allow me to pinpoint them. But close enough to respond.

  The woods ended at the crest of a steep drop that fell away about thirty or forty meters into a depression probably ten or twelve kilometers across. Hundreds of off-white, prefabricated buildings sat in not-so-neat groupings that almost resembled small villages, with narrow swaths of grass separating one group from another. We’d arrived unmolested. The Cappans had to know we were close, if not our exact location, but nothing moved other than the calf-high grass rippling in the breeze.

  I upped the magnification in my helmet and scanned the area and made an awkward hand-signal to Kapoor to move the drone forward into the bowl to give us video. Here and there tools or other implements leaned against buildings, the remnants of life. Somebody lived here and had been present recently, but nothing specifically suggested the Cappans had been around in the last few hours. Perhaps they’d evacuated when we landed. It would make sense, since we could have easily used rockets and aircraft to attack their vulnerable living area.

  “Contact,” said Kapoor. A second later, enemy icons appeared on my display. I used that to guide my search and located half a dozen Cappans in an almost hidden position on the right-most edge of the encampment relative to our location.

  “Got them,” I said. “Can’t tell if they have weapons.”

  “Assume they do,” she said, unnecessarily.

  “We have orders?” I asked. The Cappans were out of rifle range, so we had limited options.

  “Sit tight and wait,” she said. “Observe.”

  I sighed and went back to scanning. I identified a second outpost of Cappans, this one better hidden—nearly underground, they had dug in so well. I had my system populate the master feed with red icons so the others could see them. I didn’t have time to further assess as a group of blue icons appeared, and then almost immediately another, smaller group. The remnants of the two other platoons had come into range. Judging by their numbers, they’d been hit almost as hard as we had. Seven in one group, ten in the other. With our five the total number stood at twenty-two out of an original hundred and sixty. That put us right around an eighty-five percent casualty rate, which well exceeded what any unit could expect to take and still function. But here we were, continuing. If we had been the good guys, people would call it heroic.

  We weren’t the good guys.

  As if to punctuate that thought, the roar of aircraft grew as both our support birds came in fast. I hoped it was just for a show of force. My stomach twisted when they each dropped two objects. The bombs almost appeared to float, like they were leaves on the breeze and not two hundred kilograms of metal and explosive and death. But they only seemed to float because of the speed of the ships that released them and the horror of watching something terrible but inevitable. They slammed into the ground all within two seconds of each other, flashing as they hit and throwing up dirt and chunks of polymer from one little group of structures at the outside of the encampment. The wall of one building, seemingly intact, flew some fifty meters into the air, tumbling several times before falling back to the ground. The sound reached us a couple seconds later, four distinct crunches followed by smaller thuds of falling debris.

  The aircraft gained altitude, banked, and headed back toward us on another pass. I flipped my helmet to maximum magnification and scanned the wreckage, but I didn’t see any bodies.

  “What the hell is she doing?” I asked, forgetting that my microphone was dead. Destroying the settlement wouldn’t get us what we needed unless the mission had changed to simple retaliation. I didn’t think it had. In theory, someone in those buildings held the key to a multibillion-mark industry. Rational people didn’t throw something like that away. Corporations definitely didn’t, and I had no doubt that Omicron still held the strings on the mission, one way or another.

  The aircraft bore down again before pulling off at the last moment, banking hard and moving into a racetrack pattern, circling the area without ever leaving view. A moment later I understood why, as a loudspeaker sounded from the top of the bowl, maybe ninety degrees around to our left, nearest where the bombs hit.

  “Attention! We want to meet with your leadership. You have five minutes to agree or our ships will drop more bombs.” It took me a few seconds to realize the words were in Cappan, and I was hearing a translation. Apparently Larsson hadn’t shut down that function of my helmet.

  For at least two minutes, nothing moved in the settlement below us. I wondered if anybody occupied any of the buildings. If the leaders that Larsson demanded to meet had evacuated, it would be a rough day for the Cappan settlement. It did beg the question, though. If they weren’t here, where were they? And would destroying their homes matter? Someone in my group pointed, and I followed it to a door that had opened in a building. I hadn’t noticed it before because of the identical color and prefabricated material, but the building was perhaps four times larger than the other structures. I found myself holding my breath, though I don’t know what I expected to happen.

  Three Cappans emerged, moved away from the building and waved. I couldn’t tell if they meant it as a signal to identify themselves or as a method to forestall the next attack. With only a loudspeaker for communication, we couldn’t know.

  “We see you,” said the loudspeaker. “Wait there and do not move. We will come to you. If anybody fires on us, we will destroy you and your entire settlement.”

  She lost me. Larsson had to be making some sort of play to get the information, but it appeared to be a sort of mutually assured destruction, assuming she meant to go down herself, which I expected she would. It was a pretty big risk to assume that the Cappans valued their settlement enough to hold their fire. Not something I’d want to bet my life on, which Larsson was doing.

  “Let’s go,” Sergeant Kapoor said, startling me out of my thoughts.

  “Me?” I asked.

  “You and me,” she said. “The others will stay here and provide cover.”

  “Okay. What’s my role?” Larsson might have still wanted me to broker the deal, but she’d resorted to threats, so I didn’t have a lot of latitude left with which to work.

  “Come with me and don’t do anything stupid,” said Kapoor.

  I wanted to ask, Like walk into the open without a plan? but just said, “Roger.” Either she didn’t know, or she wasn’t telling. Regardless, it wouldn’t help me to argue.

  The steep grade would have been difficult without the assistance of our armor, but our heels dug into the soft parts, making easy, if awkward work of loose dirt and the sixty-degree slope. We reached the bottom of the basin and the first buildings, which measured about three meters by four meters for the most part, though from up close a couple of them were slightly bigger than the others. I peered in a few of the clear polymer windows. From about a dozen buildings, one set of eyes looked back. They’d evacuated, but not completely, which made me wonder if the stay-behinds were part of a plan or had refused to leave. I pushed that out of my head. The Cappans had their reasons, and I couldn’t influence them.

  We reached what I now considered the command center of the Cappan encampment at the same time as Larsson, who came with two soldiers trailing her. The three Cappans hadn’t moved. I’m horrible at reading Cappan body language, but they gave me the impression of calm, w
hich I took as a good sign. Rash decisions at this point on either side would end only one way, and not a good one.

  “Are you in charge?” Larsson asked. We all stood a few meters apart, roughly in a triangle. Me and Kapoor, the Cappans, and Larsson and her muscle. I’d have felt a lot better if Tanaka had made it.

  “This way,” said the Cappan standing slightly ahead of the other two, and he headed toward the building. Larsson followed without hesitation. I looked at Kapoor, who shrugged, then started after them. Larsson’s two guards stopped outside, which I assumed was at her order. Kapoor gestured for me to go in, and then she peeled off and waited with the other two, but not before she took my rifle. Larsson must have had a lot of confidence in her plan, going in with just the two of us, and me unarmed. I wondered what she knew that I didn’t.

  It took a second for my faceplate to lighten in the dimmer interior. A lone Cappan waited for us at the end of a long, rectangular room. Computer terminals lined the walls, eight or nine on each side, but nobody sat in the chairs in front of them. When we reached the Cappan he had a yellow circle around one eye, and though he was dressed differently, I recognized him from our previous meeting back on Talca. I kept my face neutral, but I smiled on the inside. Whatever Larsson knew that I didn’t, I had at least one thing on her to make up for it.

  “Greetings,” she said.

  “To you as well,” said the Cappan. “Would that it could have been under better circumstances.”

  “Indeed. But there’s still time to salvage the situation.”

  The Cappan cocked his head slightly. “That would be good. We have both lost enough soldiers.”

  “We’ve brought you a gift,” said Larsson. “This is Colonel Butler. The destroyer of your world.”