“We should be safe here,” Weig said. “Now as the senior official with the army, I think it’s best that we take the president and-” Weig’s shouting must have attracted some unwanted attention because gunfire rippled through the store. Several spaceships in bottles smashed to pieces. A shelf full of bobble heads burst as rounds hit the actual president.
She cried out and fell over, blood spewing from her hips. While the others dove for cover, Rebekah suddenly screamed and Starnes looked up to see a gunman jerk her to her feet by her hair.
“Nobody move,” he said. “Now I want an unmarked car, a case of krone’s, don’t follow me or she’s gets it!.” He motioned with his assault rifle towards Rebekah. Damn it.
“Look pal,” Starnes said. “You don’t know who you got there.” His phone suddenly buzzed. Stall for time, an unknown number said. Ok, interesting. “She’s a modern woman right there. All of her wealth goes right into her community, and I’m not talking shopping. She opens soup kitchens and open closets regularly.”
“No one else has taught more kids how to read!” Konrad cried as he stood over his wife, applying his coat as a bandage. Sharp guy catching on. He typed out a quick text on his phone. Get girl away, track this phone.
“Here, I’ll sweeten the deal,” Starnes said. He held up his phone. “This device has the firewall to undo the virus ravaging Union systems. If I give you this, will you hand her over?” Oh flashed on his screen and he tossed the phone to the gunman.
The gunman let go of Rebekah to cath the device. She pushed off of him and jumped into Starnes’s arms. Seconds later, they felt the heat of a furnace as a plasma sword punched through the roof directly into the gunman. He didn’t even feel it.
26
Reiter stood with his arms folded. On one side of the hidden bay they’d found the others in, the Lowe knelt on one side with Kennedy’s tinhat on the other side. The threat of the abominable tinhats was gone, but old tensions rose to the surface.
Across from him, Kennedy stood resolutely, Major Irving clinging to his side. “The boy must come with us,” he said. “He needs to be with his own kind.”
“You’re talking about him like he’s an animal,” Wesser said. She stepped past Reiter and jammed an accusing finger at the Unionists. “He’s a young man, a human just like us.”
“He’s not exactly like us,” Irving said. “He needs to be with other tubers, unlike you. We won’t slap him on a dissection table to figure out why he works.”
“So what, you can slap a MAG uniform on him?” Webb replied. “So you could turn him into a weapon?” Irving stepped up, but Kennedy held up a hand.
“As if you wouldn’t do the same?” the big pilot said, his jaw clenching as he spoke. Hans just sat in between them, holding onto Winona as they looked from side to side. Tactically, they were at an impasse. While they could easily kill Irving and Kennedy and leave, the MAGs outside the facility would likely destroy them. He knows on some level, what they did to him was wrong. Yet, he knows our people panicked and pressed teenagers into service.
“Besides, you killed Weathers,” Irving said. “Vile as he may have been, you killed a MAG officer and a civilian while he was helpless. There must be retribution.” Webb snorted.
“What, you’re any better?” he asked. “Or is it only a statistic when you wipe out a hospital?” Kennedy glared. “Yeah, we heard about that, it was all over the news, a seventy-five ton experimental war machine against a bunch of people missing limbs, tell me about how helpless they were!” Reiter held up a hand and Mo set a hand on Webb’s shoulder.
“We’re at an impasse,” Reiter said. “Though I do have a question for you.” Kennedy locked eyes with Reiter. “If you take that young man, and mold him to fit your own plans, how are you any different from the people you despise?” Reiter returned the man’s stoic gaze. “If you really were the leader you claim to be, you’d at least make a choice consistent with your principles, or you can be a hypocrite, just like the people who made you.”
“He’s trying to manipulate you,” Irving hissed. “They’ll use the boy as a weapon as soon as they can, what’s stopping them from breeding their own psychics?”
“We don’t need psychics to win,” Mo said. “Wonder weapons never won anything, anyway.” A surge of pride welled up in Reiter at Mo’s words.
“Give him a choice,” Reiter said. “The choice you were never given.” Kennedy looked from him to Hans and back at Reiter. Finally, after the longest second in Reiter’s life, the other pilot sighed.
“Hans,” he said. “What do you want to do?” The Young man looked up and at both sides. Closing his eyes, he took a few deep breaths. If Reiter didn’t know better, it was like he was seeing something.
When he opened his eyes, he looked up at Kennedy, concern in his eyes. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to go with them,” he said. “It’s going to be okay, I just need you to be okay with it.” The whole room seemed to hold its breath as all eyes fell on Kennedy.
“Are you going to be safe?” he asked. Hans nodded. “Then it seems I have no other choice. As soon as we leave this facility, the Tharcians have an hour to clear out. Once that hour is up, our truce expires.” Irving clearly didn’t like Kennedy’s decision, but didn’t seem eager to reprimand him or counteract him.
As Winona helped Hans over to the other group, the young man looked back at Kennedy. “Oh, real quick, I have one more thing, Mister Kennedy,” he said. Trying to stand on his own, he turned his whole body to face him and stiffened his back. “You have to protect Chaney and Mendez. Penny is important too. Oh and whatever happens, don’t let Charles Wake anywhere near Revolution Square. Nothing good will ever come out of it.”
The sudden deluge of information forced the room into a state of stunned silence. Did he really glimpse the future? Despite the testimony of the others present, Reiter doubted the boy possessed all the abilities they claimed he demonstrated. But based on Kennedy and Irving’s faces, the boy had said something that struck a nerve with them.
“Who are those people?” Reiter asked. Kennedy shook his head.
“No one that directly concerns you,” he said. “Now lets get out of here, before I change my mind.” Reiter climbed back into the Lowe as Kennedy jumped into his tinhat along with Irving. With his much larger group, Reiter instead opted to carry the rest in the Lowe’s hands with the injured Rosi joining him in the cockpit.
“Is this your book?” She asked, pointing to a black notebook strapped to an empty panel. Reiter nodded.
“Look through there if you want,” he said as he unstrapped it and passed it to the jump seat behind him. “From what I heard, you’ve come pretty damn close to winding up in there, a few times.” He sighed. “I’m going to have to add Holtslander, among others, Webb told me about all he did.” Rosi nodded.
Glancing over his shoulder, he watched her going through the pictures until she paused on one. “There’s a big one here, with you and Sergeant Mo,” she said. “Is this the old black platoon?” Reiter nodded.
“Yeah, the old guy, that’s our old platoon sergeant,” he said. “Great guy, the guy messing with Mo, that’s Gos, total clown.”
“How so?” Rosi asked. Despite all the pain, Reiter smiled.
“Well, he found an interesting use for his sword,” he said. “It was a few years ago…”
Shaking his head, Starnes looked on over the damage done to the little shop a week prior. He leaned against the hood of a command car, the pilots from the battle sitting on the long hood behind him.
The massive hole in the ceiling and floors where the plasma sword had penetrated still hadn’t been fully patched. Naturally, the owner of the shop had been pissed. Less so when the compensation from the federal government and the Reinhardt family hit his bank account. He looked over at the pilots that had pulled security the other day.
Ironically, a former Union pilot had pulled off the ridiculously precise move to turn her sword on and back-off just enough to kill t
he gunman and not injure or kill anyone else in the building. He’d recognized her as the pilot captured by Reiter’s company. Her wing woman was another former Reiter soldier. I sense a few promotions are in order.
“So what’s going to happen now?” Corporal Zoro asked. Starnes glanced over and shrugged.
“For you ladies?” He said. “Last I heard, they were going to send you over to the 3-9th back west. Should be a big push to take back Pulaski in the summer.” He looked back at the store. “And as soon as she’s able, the president’s going to address the nation. They just need to get the bullets out of her spine.”
“Is there a chain of succession?” Fletcher, the former Union pilot, said. “It seems like in a situation like this it would be good that someone had the reins.” Starnes nodded slowly. It seemed like an odd question to him, but he decided to be patient with the artificial woman next to him.
“Yeah, there’s a vice president,” he said. “Beyond that it goes to the heads of various houses of congress and then cabinet members.” Fletcher nodded and looked on.
“I hope this doesn’t shake your country too much,” she said. “From what I understand, things can be rather… tumultuous after these kinds of things.” Zoro elbowed her.
“Hey girl, it’s kinda your country too now,” she said. “It’s like you said, you really hedged your bets when you chose that surgery.”
Fletcher smiled at the younger woman. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “If I ever got back into Union hands, they’d execute me, so as far as I’m concerned I’m a Tharcian.” Starnes raised an eyebrow.
“It’s that easy for you to take up arms against your own people?” he asked. Fletcher shook her head.
“The only non-tubers I interacted with were our trainers,” she replied. “And it became pretty clear that we didn’t have much in common with naturals, so I just stuck to being as Zoro would say ‘a bomb ass pilot’ and a hardcore Unionist, I thought I simply owed my existence to the surrounding people.” She shook her head.
“If I may ask, what changed your mind?” Starnes said. Fletcher flexed her back and looked up at the sky.
“There was no daring raid to rescue me,” she said. “And as my mind scrolled through all the terrible things that could happen to me, I realized I’d just been told all of these awful things to frighten me into fighting to death, I wasn’t meant to be captured, I was meant to die.” She sighed and leaned forward. “They didn’t make me for my benefit, they made me for their own ends. Weather I lived and died was irrelevant, as long as my life furthered their cause, that’s all that mattered.”
“But you used to believe in that,” Starnes said. “Are you sure you want nothing else to do with them?”
“Sure I did,” Fletcher replied. “But all their words about a pure, fair, and prosperous world, they’re just empty platitudes. I never signed up for that. I never agreed to that. It was always my place to do this before I was born.” She took a deep breath. “In a way, it’s why I admire the lot of you, all the possibilities your lives had and you chose this. Others like Mo and Reiter even make sacrifices to do this while balancing a civilian career.”
“Of course, it’s a little easier to balance now,” Zoro said, a certain sadness creeping into her voice. “Right now, we don’t have anything to go home to.” Fletcher reached out and put a hand on the younger girl’s arm.
“Well, I guess I’m in the same boat as the rest of you,” she said with a sympathetic smile. She’s certainly come a long way, it’s a damn shame she still has that bomb on her neck. Starnes sighed and got off the hood.
“You’ll fit right in,” he said before checking his phone. “And I’ll say this, you may be back in your homes before you realize it.”
The two women stared at him as he opened the message from Jon to read it a little more clearly. “Is there something new?” Zoro asked.
Starnes gave a quick nod before putting his phone away. “The President will be out of the hospital soon,” he said. “She’ll be wheelchair bound, but as energetic as ever.”
“Well, that’s good news,” Fletcher said. “She seems like a formidable woman. I figured it’d take more than a few bullets to keep her down.”
Zoro pushed off the hood and approached Starnes. “With all due respect, sir, how does that get us back in our homes?” With a grin, Starnes held up his phone for them.
“Captain Reiter and the others were successful in rescuing a young First Nation girl,” he said. “The Union had been holding her to keep the First Nation out of the war, just in case apparently, but that’s backfired on them hard.”
“Were the First Nation even interested in getting involved?” Zoro asked. Starnes shrugged.
“Who knows, but as soon as the President is ready for it, she’ll hold a conference with the remaining CA leadership and the First Nation.” He smiled, his next words all the sweeter. “The single strongest nation on Mars at the moment is joining the war on our side.”
Chaney’s fingers let over his keyboard as he entered more data into his model’s. The combat data from Eden’s Gate proved invaluable as it informed his models of the performance of future units. Especially the data on the Tharcian Tiger. He shook his head at the enemy’s recent obsession with big cats. Or medium cats, if he recalled the report correctly.
“Mendez,” he said. “What was the name of that new panzerter the Tharcians are using in space?” The Commodore barely looked up from the report she read on the small couch in his office. She wrote casual clothes that looked soft, and she dangled a slipper off one foot as she lay with her legs crossed and her tablet close.
“The Ozelot,” she replied. “And it’s a right irritating thing, its more agile and has better weapons for beating panzerters and light ships.” Chaney raised an eyebrow.
“Is an Ozelot very big? Like the cat it’s probably named after?” He asked. Mendez shook her head.
“It’s about the same size as the Panzerter III,” she said. “As for the animal itself…” She quickly tapped something on her tablet before shaking her head. “Not really, it’s bigger than a house cat, but not by much, also the Tharcians seem to have a spelling problem because according to the internet, it’s Ocelot with a c that sounds like an S.” She smiled, a look of self satisfaction spreading across her lips. Chaney, on the other hand, still worried.
“How’s the war in space going?” he asked. Mendez curled her hair on her finger as she spoke.
“Titan and Deimos are still free,” she said. “Though the Tharcians are cut off from their Jupiter Sphere possessions thanks to our actions in the belt, I doubt their colonies get through year’s end.”
“Optimistic,” Chaney replied. “Though I hope we last that long.” Mendez set her tablet aside and looked at him.
“Now why would you say that?” She asked. “We’ve just won a strategic victory at Eden’s Gate, as well as secured our hold on Jupiter’s Trojan zone in Lagrange 5, despite our setbacks, we’re on back on the path to victory.” Chaney shrugged and leaned back.
“For ever victory in space, we suffered a loss on the ground,” he said. “That’s the math we’ve been dealing with up to this point, and I hate to say it, but I don’t see it changing after one victory.” He stood up from his chair and began pacing the room. “Most of the units attacking Eden’s Gate were fresh, more seasoned troops stayed south and hit the salient, now the survivors just learned a lot from a challenging battle, not to mention we tipped our hand with the Phobian and Martian Sniper, the MAGs as well as the republican armies are already pushing for full scale production.”
“And?” Mendez asked. “As far as I’m concerned, your field test seems to have gone spectacularly.” Chaney glanced at his computer, then shook his head.
“There are still issues with the power plant,” he said. “Orders are orders, but damn we need time to work out some kinks.” He sighed. “Not to mention, we’re relying on the Avalonians to ship our resources from space to the surface. That bill’s going
to come back and bite us, even if we did get the space elevator working again.” He spread his hands. “We have all the raw materials to keep building ships, panzerters and armored vehicles, but soon we’ll have to expand our recruitment pool or find a way to grow tubers faster, but my point is, despite all of our preparations we are unprepared to fight a war of this magnitude for very long.”
Mendez stood and crossed the room. “We’ll win this fight,” she said. “And then we’ll deal with any Tharcian or Vinnish holdouts. We just need to hold out a little longer.” Gently, he took her hands.
“It’ll take years to rebuild all the damage,” he said. “And that’s just on the surface. Imagine the cost of rebuilding damaged and destroyed settlements in space, it’d be like trying to raise Atlantis up from the depth of the ocean.” He sighed and took her hands in his. “I’m sorry, I just don’t see a true winner in this war.”
She held his hands in his, but she looked away. Play it how they might. They both knew it. No matter what happened at this point, he was right.
Kennedy stepped away from the whiteboard and nodded. He stood in a tent erected in a courtyard. “This is more than adequate,” he said. “And I appreciate sliming down the actual battalions.” He now possessed two panzerter companies, each outfitted with eight Martian standard types divided into assault and support platoons and augmented by a Martian sniper.
Supporting his two panzerter companies came a sixty-man infantry company. The infantry would be transported and protected by a newer model of the venerable Capricorn IFV. New armored suits, based on captured Tharcian “half-frames,” increased their survivability and lethality.
His scouts ditched the scout cars. Instead, they would be provided with a new recon variant of the same Capricorn, supported by a similarly refitted Terran. Three Jupiters lead by Khan would make an excellent anti-armor section while four Serpent Anti air vehicles protected them from drone attack. Their quad close in defense guns could even intercept mortars and rockets.
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