by Randy Moffat
Sho was determined to quash the negativity. He needed them in tip-top shape mentally as well as physically. Their mission would launch in two days and he needed them on their game. He used the most ancient technique to distract them. He held a party.
He broke out half of his supply of assorted Australian Red Wines, Chinese Fen jiu White Rice Wine and American Whiskey that he had carefully smuggled up on one of the TESS missions. He had planned the hooch for two reasons. Half for a pre-mission celebratory toast and the second for toasting the dead after the mission was successful. His pre-mission liquor load was now co-opted for a farewell to Corporal Suen. Sho made sure that the irony was clear to them. Sho had used their hated target’s own missions to transport the happy juice they were going to drink up here to this station. They cheered and Sho gradually made sure they were ignoring Suen’s fall and focusing on their abuse of TESS instead. The toast was sweet on their tongues because they planned to do what marines throughout time love… drink and then fuck the enemy right up their ass. Sho then raised a bottle of Jim Beam, said a final goodbye to their teammate who was now tumbling through the solar system unchecked—first casualty in a war to come. Sho had been advised on his lost man’s locale by the leader of the space station crew who was morbidly tracking him on radar. The astronaut had informed him that Corporal Suen would orbit the planet three more times in a decaying orbit and eventually elliptical motion would cause his remains to enter the atmosphere and burn up. Sho shivered secretly as he contemplated such a pyre as the end of a long journey to suffocation. Publically though Sho conspicuously raised his personal bottle and sucked in a mouthful of fire through the nipple on the end; grateful of the metaphor as the booze burned its way down his throat and gullet like Suen would soon be doing back to mother earth.
On top of Suen though, Sho had another more important challenge to their leader’s motivation that his men knew nothing about. Since they had come up to the station he had clamped an information embargo on news from down on Earth. He was the only person aboard allowed to know details about the growing civil war raging down in China. Only Sho knew that Hú had encountered serious trouble recently down earth-side and that the loyalist army was beginning to clamp down on Hú’s troops all over China. It bothered him on a personal level. Sho was up here facing these TESS wimps instead of down there fighting for Hú and the country. He had no choice. He would do what he could where he was. Finish the task quickly and return quickly to Earth and help the cause down there. He steeled himself for the task at hand.
“Fuck TESS!” He thought, determined to avenge every man he had lost during training. He even toasted the fact they would avenge Suen the whimperer. They would certainly bring vengeance onto the perversity called TESS on the boy’s behalf. TESS must pay for keeping the secrets of the space drive from Father China!
His men raised their own bottles when they saw him raise his bottle to his lips and they all suckled like a thirsty crèche as if in response to his thought.
Once General Fun had Premier Lau’s permission to proceed, he had acted immediately.
Fun’s covert political officers acted on his orders like a single sinew of CCP musculature and struck like a coiled cobra across the nation. Messages were sent out through every method of communication that Fun could lay hands on and signaled his men to make that strike. Surprise was essentially absolute. Within twenty hours reporting indicated seventeen hundred and twelve disloyal military commanders, executive officers, staff officers, line officers and key NCO’s were assassinated or penned up under arrest. In addition hundreds more known or suspected Hú civilian political sympathizers were arrested and sequestered the same night, later gist for the courts and their inevitable guilty verdicts. This was war. This was China. It was a nation where Mao had outdone Stalin in setting a tenor of terror, assigning actual percentages of populations in districts to be arrested or eliminated. He had actually set often exceeded quotas for how many counter revolutionaries should be randomly found and shot. It had all been done before in China.
Like most human endeavors the operation had not gone perfectly though. Military hierarchies can lend themselves to a cult of personality and the loss a command figure or two was often enough to cause the revolt in a Hú unit to collapse and the force to return itself to state control—if only through fear. In a certain number of units though the sympathies of the men or other officers were still with Hú and they rose up to continue to provide new leadership in favor of Hú which meant some units resisted the return to the CCP. There had been some personnel losses for Fun too of course. They were negligible. Fun had lost 103 men caught in the act and killed outright, another 123 who had been apprehended after their attack and more or less arrested or shot. There were also 77 who had fled before they carried out their orders and were now out of touch with their units or combat ineffective.
Fun considered his overall results impartially but with considerable satisfaction. He estimated that overall a little more than half of the Hú military units had been compromised by the actions of his commissars. It was clearly shaping up to be a victory. The enemy’s operations tempo was thrown off completely. They had been knocked off the offensive. They had previously had things their way, but no longer. This was actually the point. Fun smiled. Time to strike further while the enemy was off balance. Fun had contacted the People’s army with the good news and ordered them off the defense and over to the offense which they did with sighs of relief.
It was a time to celebrate. Fun was in a good mood. He wanted to reward anyone who’d shown a positive talent during the ‘cleansing’ operation. He planned to put them in for excellence awards. A medal as Hero of the Communist party was reserved for those commissars who had been most diligent in executing their duty. There were many excellent candidates. Near the top of the list though was a certain Corporal Liue from the 122 Guards Infantry. Liue was certainly running for best in class within Fun’s esteem. Keeping a cool head and using only a knife the junior NCO had in a single night executed several turncoats including his commander, his executive officer, his intelligence officer, his logistics officer, his Sergeant Major, a staff Sergeant and two guards. By killing the guards he had freed from arrest a certain Captain Wang, the assistant operations officer for the battalion who had steadfastly refused to give up his party loyalty and had been under close arrest by the Hú supporters at the time. By freeing him Liue had effectively put Captain Wang back in charge as the senior military officer present. Sanctioned by Liue, who was now the senior political officer present. The pair had then acted swiftly remove additional Hú waiverers and emplace Lau loyalists in the unit’s positions of authority. Due to Corporal Liue’s single-handed, cool, bloody, but amazing work the entire unit, strongly in the Hú camp was now reporting to Premier Lau rather than Hú. Pretty good for an underage corporal.
Fun had his aide make a note to have Liue brought into the capital as soon as possible for featuring in a “news” campaign. Fun was smiling as he wrote copy in his head already. Liue—A hero of the new China. He would very publically receive the country’s highest Military award of the Hero’s Medal. A loyal, courageous and impressive son of the people’s republic. Fun smiled reservedly to himself. He of all people understood the risks. The public loved a hero, but were less fond of lunatics. If Liue was a good kid they would make excellent press with him for a time, but judging from his “talent” with a knife he appeared to be just a little too good at the killing part. Fun knew the type. A certain number of warriors come to enjoy their work just that tiny bit too well. They excel while the war rages about them, but they have trouble fitting back into peaceful surroundings again after spilling blood for the motherland. The danger was what Fun had mentally pegged as the “Jack the Ripper” syndrome. The truly dangerous ones tended to get nostalgic for the iron hot smell of hemoglobin. You had to make sure they never got a chance to run amok among civilians trying to recapture the scent and ruin the propaganda campaign built
around them by indulging in their proclivities outside the parameters of their soldier’s sanction.
It was only a fleeting small concern though in a large game. Overall the entire operation of cleansing the ranks had been an impressive display of control and the precision in the use of power by Fun.
Hú would have gone to bed in control of half of China’s military. He had awoken bewildered with less than an quarter of the army still responding to his control and his political allies sniffing the air. Fun knew the wisest ones among those who remained loyal to Hú had caught at least a whiff of which way the cold winds were suddenly blowing across the headlines. He hoped they were examining their proximity to the life boat stations in case they had to abandon ship.
In less than two days after Fun’s “night of the commissars” the CCP army units came out of their relative passivity and began attacking their opposite numbers in any situation where they could guarantee three to one odds. The gloves were off. Military on military violence increased steadily. At three to one the CCP were likely to win any attack. Even more significantly, the military began to hunt down and confront Militia for Work units across the country with bullets and bayonets. They were going after Hú’s underpinnings. While Hú was still raging passionately about his loss of units from Fun’s operation and was accusing random people in his command of treason right and left, the Lau parts of the army went over to offensive actions all across China. Hú’s standing orders for the Militia were that they should surrender not an inch of ground. Unfortunately para-military light infantry units were no match for a modern combined arms army bent on removing them with artillery, tanks and aircraft working together with increasing skill. Since they could not run and were clearly outclassed, they began to fall.
Hú had possessed the initiative until Fun’s people acted. In that day he lost the lead. Icons showing the units of action he still possessed on his map begin to disappear and he raged still more with each one. He had been feeling giddy about his future. Now anger became his predominant emotion. Like all men who have depended on their personality to control events and then suddenly find that events were not going their way Hú returned to the historical script. He turned turtle. Overnight he developed a fortress mentality and began reaching for whatever tools he still possessed and calling them back towards him. Their new mission was to form a shell around him and protect him while he reconfigured his plans. This took the form of an order to all military forces he still controlled to fall back into the northern Chengzhou military district. Military units loyal to Hú from as far south as Hainan island and to the west in Xingxiang moved towards his now heavily fortified headquarters in Chongqing.
Chongqing was a major metropolitan river city that resembled Pittsburg in some ways. It sat at the intersection of major rivers and was surrounded by hills and mountains. Some of the mountains around Chongqing were some of the most rugged terrain on the planet. If all you are contemplating is defense it made perfect sense to dig in there as the walls were all around it, high and hard. At least it made excellent sense tactically. The irony that Hú was now making Chongqing, site of Chiang Kai-shek’s mainland stand against the CCP in November 1949 his own Fort Zinderneuf was not lost on Fun though. The “Night of the Commissars” had got Hú thinking small instead of big. He was tactically strong, but strategically weak and getting weaker.
Strategically the initiative had now changed hands. Now that Hú had retrenched he would defend and it was Lau who was the attacker.
Fun smiled. He intended to keep it that way.
Tanya Matthews had been herded hurriedly aboard a truck, then a boat and finally onto the SS Tellus in irons.
She had traveled in leg and wrist cuffs to here. For the last travel legs she had been buttoned up into a space suit, enclosed claustrophobically in a helmet with a blacked out visor so she could not see out. Finally she had been pulled and tugged off the Tellus in that suit to here; where ever ‘here’ was. It had been rather terrifying to be yanked roughly about in the darkness unable to anticipate being pulled up, pushed down, strapped in, unstrapped, led about and then made to stand still. She knew that a false move in a space suit could be disastrous and had been afraid to challenge her treatment even if given the means. It had felt like eternity, but realistically she realized it had only taken a couple hours. What she was certain about was that ‘here’ was somewhere in space as there had been two brief moments of apparent or real weightlessness during the trip and she still felt extraordinarily light.
Finally a pair of beefy TESS ratings had entered with thumping feet abruptly a few minutes ago, taken off the cuffs, stripped off her suit and finally lifted off the blinkered helmet. They had not spoken as they re-cuffed her hands in front of her and then departed without explanation.
She looked around to find that she had been left alone in a large stone chamber, but Tanya’s feeling of lightness made her assume she was somehow on the moon. It frightened her; filling her with the new fear that she was to be held here indefinitely—beyond any hope of release or even rescue. The ‘Bat Cave’ in Missouri had been bad enough, but it had sunk in finally that TESS was an organization with the new found ability to hold her in durance vile anywhere in the solar system. Held well beyond range of any rescue. Doomed forever. It made her feel very small… and very vulnerable.
Suddenly a woman slid into view using a gliding motion appropriate to light gravity. She had a shock of white hair that she kept in a pony tail.
Tanya recognized her from her pictures. Captain Johnson. Chief of TESS engineering.
Johnson looked her up and down frankly and non-judgmentally.
Finally she spoke.
“Do you prefer having the cuffs on or having no cuffs?”
Tanya answered smartly and politely.
“No cuffs, thank you.”
“Good. Remember that preference.” Johnson said matter-of-factly. “Though between you and me—I would prefer it that way too.” She held up a key and took the steel bracelets off.
She waved her hand.
“Welcome to TESS Space Station L5.” She widened her hands.
That startled Tanya. Not the Earth’s moon then! She looked at the native rock of the chamber. It was something not built by man, simply hollowed out of existing stone. Another body then. Another planet’s moon? An asteroid perhaps? There had never been a single breath of anything called TESS Space Station L5 spoken back on Earth or at the academy. Security was very tight about it’s existence. Questions raced through her mind. Foremost among them though was… just how much was TESS really capable of?
“L5?” She asked politely.
“It’s what we call it.” She patted a stone wall affectionately. “Our space station sits at the L5 Lagrange point. She hangs there on the fulcrum of gravity between Earth, moon and sun. She is your new home for the time being. No cuffs is the easy way. You selected the easy way. I am cautioned to remind you that you are not to make any mistakes—violations of TESS rules will mean the chains go back on and we return to the hard way. It’s your choice. You are here to prove yourself to us. To me really.”
“Prove myself?” Tanya asked in a subdued voice that was just this side of frightened again. She cleared her throat nervously.
Johnson cocked her head.
“Frankly you are our prisoner. Our only prisoner… ever… so far.” She smiled crookedly.
“But I didn’t harm TESS. I wasn’t going to…”
“Stop please. Save it! You were an agent of a power who should not be inimical to TESS. A power that we support every single day. A country we support in a manner that is exemplary—on time, on task and always always always as we agreed upon. A power with the resources, but no real reason to steal the technology that we protect and which they have access to as long as it is through TESS. Dangerous technology. World ending technology in the wrong hands. So let’s not bother with any charade which portrays you a
s a snow white dove in the midst of a flock of crows. No protestations of innocence. You would have given them the data you were given. Wouldn’t you? You thought you had the real stuff. And then you handed it over even though you said you wouldn’t during your TESS training. Isn’t that so?” He blue eyes bored into Tanya’s firmly.
Tanya flinched first then shrugged.
“Alright. Yes, Captain. I did hand it over. But you must believe me when I say… is was NOT without reservations. I did not want to, but felt I had to…” Tanya ended weakly holding her hands open like a supplicant which she was. She also felt somehow eager suddenly that Captain Johnson believe her for other reasons she couldn’t name. There was something about the woman that made her want to convince her that she was not truly as bad as the evidence made her sound. Still worthy somehow of… of… . TESS. She surprised herself with that.
Johnson nodded.
“Thought so. Frankly I was hoping you were not as hard core as you sounded in some of security’s reports. “OK… You are being frank… .” She said gruffly. “So I will be too. We are making this up as we go along. TESS is an exploratory space service. Get it? Neither the Admiral nor I much fancy turning TESS into a prison authority. Admiral McMoran decided to see if there was some way we could change you from a burden and evolve you into an asset instead.” She saw a slight hitch in Tanya’s face and held up her hand. “Look… I will make you a deal. For the time being I will not ask you to betray the US in any way. No double agent crap or blackmail about something or other. Whatever the terminology is. So you understand I agree I will not ask you to engage in any direct actions against the country that sent you. But you must understand me too. Just between us… . TESS could care less about the US per se… or any other country on the planet for that matter. What you need to get into your head is that our eyes are no longer on the home world. They are on the stars. If you truly want to understand us you need to look out there instead of back at the old blue marble. We want you to become a TESS asset in that sense. We can sure use you. I looked at your academy results. You did remarkably well in the time you were there. You certainly have the brains for TESS service. The question is… do you have the will? I thought we would start out by discovering if we can trust you in small things. The removal of the… bilboes is our first gesture in the direction of establishing a trust relationship again. A start on your journey to your next life if you will take it. Your part of this gesture is that we expect you to adapt and prove our faith and trust is not misplaced. You will have some freedom of movement around the station with only some minor areas that will still be kept off-limits to prisoners until you prove you can be trusted. Essentially you can go anywhere you chose within the designated areas… which between you and me includes most of this station. In addition, I intend to offer you some useful work too. Something that will contribute to TESS’ success rather than… well… making yourself a millstone around TESS’ neck and draining our resources for the rest of your life. Do well at the work and we will see about maturing our relationship from prisoner-turnkey into something else that looks much more civilized. We’ll call ourselves cautious allies for now and perhaps team-mates in time. You doing well up here may bring about changes in the level and scope of the work I can offer you too. This ‘incarceration’ is all about building trust between us rather than punishment.”