Ben grunted but didn’t break his gaze at the stars. “Tell me about it.”
“Heard from Jenkins you went downtown,” Ramirez told him. “I was jealous until she said the place was abandoned.”
“Not abandoned,” Ben corrected. “Just… sparsely populated.”
“Maybe it’s just the weekend,” Ramirez guessed. “Probably see more people tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” Ben allowed. “Gonna be hard working with them if they don’t come out.”
“Maybe it’ll be easier,” Ramirez said, some of his smile losing its polish.
Ben turned his eyes to him. The sergeant was no longer smiling. “You’re from Vega, right?” Ben asked. “The Concordia colony?”
Ramirez nodded.
“When was the last time you talked to your folks?”
“I sent them an email before we disembarked,” he said. He seemed to sense something in Ben’s question and followed up quickly. “Vega wasn’t hit or anything.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Ben said as if assuring him. He knew Ramirez hadn’t had a girlfriend back on Persephone either. He was reluctant to ask, though. Some people’s relationships had been obvious, but those who didn’t like talking about their home life then found they still didn’t like talking about it now that that home was gone.
“Fort Accetta was my first posting,” Ramirez said, leaning against the hooch next to Ben. “Straight out of boot and into Ranger training. I joined because I wanted to see the galaxy, see Earth.” He looked up at the aurora borealis dancing above them. “I guess I got that.”
“I got a scholarship to UP,” Ben told him. “ROTC. I wanted to be that cool guy who went to school on one of the colonies. See stuff other people hadn’t. When I graduated, you know how it is, it’s cheaper to keep you where you are than to send you somewhere else, so they asked if I wanted to be a Ranger officer.”
Ramirez looked at him for a long, quiet moment. “Hey, Sir,” he said cautiously, “I don’t think I ever said anything, but… um… I’m sorry. You know… about your wife.”
“Thanks,” Ben said, and that was all.
Ramirez waited a second to see if the captain wanted to add anything more and then turned back to the sky. “Sure is nice, isn’t it?”
Ben nodded.
“Well… have a good night, Sir. I’m heading back to the hooch. See you tomorrow.” He offered Ben a salute despite not being in uniform and head back down the path on his original course.
Ben didn’t watch him go. He was wondering what Jessie would make of this sky. She had majored in astronomy, it was what brought her to Persephone to begin with.
It was weird that he couldn’t talk to her. Weird when he considered the fact that he wouldn’t ever again. They had talked as much as friends usually did, maybe a little less once they both graduated and had their own careers to think about. But he could usually count on her when he needed to talk.
He knew he was supposed to feel worse about it. The command chaplain on Gamma Hydra had tried to comfort him, but Ben had pushed him off on someone else who needed it more. That chaplain had probably thought Ben was just trying to be a tough guy, but truthfully Ben knew there were people who were hurting more than him, and it made him feel like garbage to take that time away from them.
It wasn’t that he didn’t miss Jessie or wasn’t torn up about what had happened to her. It was simply that their relationship had been… complicated. And yet, at the same time, very simple. Complicated in that their marriage was less than straightforward, and simple in that they had both benefited from that.
But it would be wrong to say that he had lost the love of his life. She had never been that.
He thought of the last time he had talked to her. Tod had just attacked Epsilon Eridani, and the 5th Rangers had been ordered out. He’d been given three hours to get his affairs in order. He left Fort Accetta, drove home and started packing up anything that hadn’t been in his go-bag. He called Jessie, who was out with her boyfriend, and let her know he had to leave. She asked if he needed her to do anything. He said no, and she told him to be careful.
That had been it. Compared to the tear-streaked goodbyes he had seen between significant others at Fort Accetta later that night, it hardly qualified as a goodbye.
When he got the news that Persephone was gone and received the emails from their families, expressing their condolences, searching for news, he had felt like such a dirtbag. He was speaking to them as her husband, but he had never really been that.
The aurora turned from green to red for a moment, undulating across the sky. It was late. Tomorrow was another day. Turning from the light show above him, he went back into his hooch and collapsed in his rack.
Patricia looked out the LTV’s window and tried to squint through the light coat of dust that obscured the view through the bullet-resistant glass. They’d been at it for five hours now, and it was almost midday. This street happened to be familiar, being the one on which sat the mayor’s office and the strange temple opposite of it. It had the feel of “main street,” and that was why she wanted to make sure she saw it again, even though their early efforts this morning had been fruitless.
Ramirez put the LTV in park and opened the driver’s side door. Climbing out, he reached inside and pulled his rifle from the steel rack in the center console. “Hope there’s a bathroom here,” he grumbled. “I felt kinda bad peeing behind that guy’s tree.”
“He won’t notice,” Burgers noted as he climbed down from the turret and opened the rear driver’s side door. He likewise turned to grab his rifle.
“What if he does, though?” Ramirez asked as Patricia stepped out of the vehicle. “Like, what if human pee turns the leaves on trees yellow or something? Has anyone checked that?”
“No, Ramirez,” Burgers sighed. “I can say with certainty that no one has checked to see what happens when you pee on things here.”
“Besides,” Patricia piped up as she made a few notes on her clipboard. “Even if it does, how would the guy know it was caused by human pee? It’s not like the Va’Shen checked either.”
Her joke tried to mask her disappointment. Of all the houses they checked this morning, they had only come across one Va’Shen, an elderly man who glared at them from his garden as they drove past. Patricia was hoping that here, in the village proper, there would be more people.
And, remarkably, there was. An elderly Va’Shen woman, her back bent as she made her way down the street, passed nearby. Her gray fox tail wagged in fits and starts behind her.
Burgers raised his hand. “Good morning, Ma’am!” he called with a smile.
Patricia heard the old woman grumble something in reply, understanding just enough words to know the greeting was not being returned in the spirit in which it had been offered. She winced just a bit.
“What’d she say?” Burgers asked.
The terp bit her lip and turned to him. “She said you’re nice,” she lied.
“See?” Burgers asked Ramirez with a wide grin. “Progress.”
“Dude, I’ve been shot down by women on five worlds,” Ramirez told him. “I know ‘take a hike,’ when I hear it.”
Patricia checked her notes and frowned. Their little unofficial survey mission had so far shown them enough empty housing for at least five hundred Va’Shen, so where was everybody? It’s not like they just weren’t coming out. They literally weren’t around.
After her somewhat disastrous performance yesterday, Patricia had promised herself to make sure next time would be different. Never again, she decided, would she walk into a room without knowing everything an intelligence analyst should know about what was about to happen. And after their conversation on that same street the day before, she knew that the lack of Va’Shen faces watching them from windows was important.
And she was going to find out what was going on.
“Okay,” she said, putting the clipboard under her arm. “Let’s go say hello.”
They started down the main
drag in the direction of the temple and the mayor’s office, stopping every so often to knock on shop doors with no response. Burgers crossed the road and tried shops on that side, turning to them and shaking his head after each one.
Patricia knocked on one door and was surprised to see a curtain pulled aside and an elderly Va’Shen woman looked through the window back at them. The curtain fell aside a second later before Patricia could react.
“Wait!” she called before switching to Va’Shen.
Nothing.
She knocked gently, but urgently on the door again.
“Give it up, LT,” Burgers said as he crossed the street back to them again. “This place is dead. They don’t want to talk.”
“I guess if the situation were reversed, if this were Earth and Va’Shen were walking around our streets with guns, we wouldn’t want to talk either,” she said glumly.
“LT, I’m from Texas,” Burgers told her. “If the situation were reversed, there’d be gunfire by now.”
“He’s got a point,” Ramirez told her. “I mean it’s like they’re not even scared. Three people with guns and uniforms knock on your door and you don’t answer it? It’s like they’re waiting for us to kick the doors in.”
Burgers turned his gaze to the rooftops, suddenly wondering if they were being watched by snipers, waiting for a reason to open up on them.
“If we see a sniper, at least that’s a person,” Patricia told them when Burgers raised this possibility. “At this point, I’d invite them to lunch.”
“Great,” Ramirez grumbled. “And still no bathroom.”
Patricia’s eyes fell on the main stone gate of the huge temple nearby, open and inviting. She remembered what Warren had said yesterday. “Come on,” she ordered, striding for the entryway. The two Rangers dutifully followed, rifles slung.
Just as she was about to cross the gate onto the temple grounds, a silver-haired Va’Shen stepped out from behind the stonework and blocked their path. Patricia came up short, and Ramirez and Burgers unconsciously raised their weapons, but only a hair.
Burgers cursed. “I hate when they do that!”
Patricia swallowed. There had been no hint at all that anyone had been standing so close by. She cleared her throat, happy to know that her little gamble seemed to be paying off.
The Va’Shen, an old vixen, pointed at the temple behind her, her tail swishing angrily from side to side.
The intel analyst squared her shoulders, aware that she had to play this carefully.
Patricia paused again to regroup. She didn’t recognize the word.
With an angry tail flick, the Va’Shen turned from them and started back onto the temple grounds.
The three soldiers stood there dumbfounded for a moment before Ramirez finally spoke up.
“You didn’t ask about the bathroom,” he pointed out.
Ben stopped to let the bulldozer drive by before stepping into the dusty road on his way to the collection of yellow helmets working across the street. While the forward operating base was technically operational, there was still a lot of construction left to do. As a result, bulldozers and other earthmovers maneuvered around guard towers and barracks, trying to work as troops dashed to and fro.
Warren was flipping through pages on a clipboard as he gave directions to two other SeaBees. Seeing him approach, he paused and gave Ben a salute.
“Sir,” the Navy senior chief began. “You didn’t have to come out here, I would have come to you.”
“No problem, Chief,” Ben said with a smile. “Anything… and I mean anything… to get out of that office. You have no idea how much time you spend on emails and typing reports until you have to sit at a desk without that stuff.” He put his hands on his hips and took a look around, admiring the progress the Navy engineers had made already. “Garcia said you need me.”
Warren turned and gestured at the flattened square of dirt that took up several hundred square feet of the base. “The good news is that the new landing zone is ready for use. It can handle two Pawnees at the same time or one Starlander dropship, but we shouldn’t get many of those.”
“Outstanding,” Ben said. “I was sweating how we were going to evac anyone who needed a hospital.”
The sailor nodded. “Well, assuming you can get the call to go through, MEDEVAC from Jamieson should be able to get here in about an hour. Until we finish running the copper lines between here and there, though, you’re gonna have to rely on the radio, and that is currently the very definition of unreliable.”
Ben nodded. “How long for the copper lines?” he asked.
“Better part of the month,” Warren told him. “Copper landline phones haven’t been a thing since the twenty-fifties. They had to hire a contractor to actually make the wire and another contractor to make the phones to go with them.”
“Might as well tie two cans together with string,” Ben muttered. The Fuzz seemed to enjoy making things difficult. Ben was okay with not having to read a hundred emails a day. Not being able to call for help when one of his people was hurt was something he wasn’t willing to stand.
He looked up at Warren and arched an eyebrow. “You said that was the good news,” he said. “That implies the other kind too.”
Warren nodded. “Now that the primary LZ is finished, we need to start on the alternate site, off-base. We need those maps.”
It was Ben’s turn to nod. “Lieutenant Kim is out there today doing some meet-and-greets. I asked her to check on them while she was out there.”
“Problem is, Sir, we need to start soon,” Warren informed him. “These earthmovers are shared between the different SeaBee units. And a guy from Sector Five is supposed to be here in two weeks to get them.”
Ben turned as the sound of an LTV’s motor approached from behind him. “Speak of the devil,” he said as the vehicle stopped, and Patricia hopped out. Ramirez and Hamburgers joined a second later, giving Ben a salute.
“LT, we were just talking about you,” Warren said.
“It’s not about Ramirez pissing on some local’s tree, is it?” she asked.
“Um… no,” Warren replied, confused by the comment but also morbidly fascinated by it. “Any luck getting those maps?”
Patricia rolled her eyes. “We talked to Kasshas again, and he said, and I quote…” She paused and bit her lip before shaking her head. “You know what? I can’t quote what he said. I didn’t recognize half the words. The gist of it is that today is a Va’Shen holiday and there was no one available to check the archives.”
“Convenient,” Ben remarked dryly.
“Ain’t it?” she returned. “He said we can check again ‘at another time and place.’”
“How’d the meet-and-greets go?” Ben asked.
“Not good,” Patricia sighed. “We came across five old Va’Shen total, and none of them wanted anything to do with us.”
“Old Va’Shen,” Ben muttered. “Again.”
“Could they have evacuated?” Patricia asked.
“Why would they?” Warren replied. “This area didn’t even get hit. I heard they’re actually talking about sending refugees from up north down here.”
“Well, there’s plenty of room,” the intel officer remarked. “There’s enough housing here to accommodate a thousand Va’Shen, at least. And most of it’s empty.”
“Shoot, Sir,” Burgers broke in. “They must have heard Ramirez was coming and hid all their women.”
Ramirez gave the other Ranger an obscene gesture in response.
“Come on, Sir,” Ramirez complained. “That’s cold!”
“No, I mean, what if they sent their women and children out to hide?” Ben suggested. “Their men are probably all up at Jamieson or dead. You got a hundred and fifty alien invaders coming to your town.” He shrugged. “If it were me, I’d send my w…”
He broke off suddenly, leaving the thought unfinished. “Maybe they’re just waiting for the all-clear from Kasshas,” he finished finally.
“All right, so what happens to them in the meantime?” Patricia asked. “If I were hiding from evil aliens in the woods, I’d wait a long time before I’d risk coming back. What if they have sick or injured? If they have kids with them, do they have food and water and medicine?”
“Sounds like their problem,” Warren shrugged. “It’s like when a kid runs away from home. They’ll come back when they get hungry.”
“What if they don’t?” Ben asked. “What if they think it’s better to die out there than endure God knows what at the hands of ray-gun-wielding tentacle monsters from another world? And when they do come back, and realize we’re not like that, how many will have died already?”
“Well, if that’s what’s happening,” Patricia said, “Then Kasshas should know where they are and how to get them to come back, right? I mean, surely he knows by now that we’re not bad.”
“We nuked six of their cities,” Warren pointed out.
“I mean… aside from that,” she corrected in exasperation.
Ben put his hand to his mouth and silently rubbed his five o’clock shadow.
“So…” Burgers broke in tentatively, “Do we care?”
They all turned to him. “I mean, is this something we care about now?” he went on. “I think Chief’s right. We’re not here to protect Va’Shen from stupid decisions. We can’t put a leash on them and run their lives for them.”
Ben thought on the sergeant’s words for a moment before answering, but Patricia beat him to it. “These are the first intelligent life forms we’ve ever encountered after landing on more than eighty habitable worlds,” she said. “They may be the only other intelligent life out here. Wouldn’t it be better if we were friends?”
The Vixen War Bride Page 4