by Rick Partlow
It was a good fucking question, and not one I would have asked myself. Too much other shit had gone on---was going on---in my life for me to think about something so personal and, I don’t know…silly, almost. There was a war and innocent people, innocent children were starving to death because of things I’d done. Was now really the time to explore my feelings?
But he’d asked, and the question kept rolling around in my head, ricocheting from one side to the other. Had I loved Anna? Hell, no. That was just a relationship of convenience; it only existed because our parents had put us together. We’d had a lot of fun, but even if I’d given in to Mom’s attempts to control my life, Anna and I would never have wound up together long-term.
Sophia and I, we had shared some pretty bad times over the last year. She’d saved my life, and we’d been there for each other, until the one time we hadn’t. What did that make us?
“I’m not sure yet,” I admitted to him.
“It’s better if you don’t,” he said darkly, his voice bleak. “All it does is give you something to lose.”
He turned and walked back up the ramp. I stared after him, wondering if I’d ever actually met the real Carl Braun, or if he’d died a year ago, alongside his Janie.
“Hey,” Sophia said, coming up behind me as the last of the crates passed by, carried by two men. She put a hand on my cheek, wiping off a smudge of dirt I’d got there from the tunnel wall. “You look like hell, Munroe.” She was smiling when she said it. “Come on, Marine.” She tugged at my arm. “Let’s get you to bed.”
I followed her willingly, both because she was taking me where I wanted to go, and because I didn’t think it was all bad, having something to lose.
***
It had been months since we’d been this close to Amity and I still thought it was crazy and suicidal, but Kel and Cowboy were going and they’d asked me to come along. The DSI agents were in charge of the diversion on the other side of the city that would get us out in one piece, and I’d be damned if I’d let Chang show me up.
It had snowed all this morning and the coat of white almost managed to disguise the gulag that the city had become. The high wire-mesh fence that started at the Tahni base and surrounded the central part of the city sparkled with ice and the security floodlights from the surveillance towers they’d put up around the perimeter sliced beams of yellow through the low-hanging fog.
The moon was out this evening and the few centimeters of snow fairly glowed in its light, making me feel horribly exposed as we crawled through it on hands and knees. Whatever the suits were that Kel and Cowboy were wearing had fully functional chameleon camouflage circuits and blended in seamlessly with the snow as we high-crawled down the draw, but the coating on my armor had been badly damaged during the ambush a year ago, so I was wearing homemade snow camo in the form of a white poncho, white ski pants and white boot and helmet covers.
What the hell good that was going to do against the magnetic fields and motion sensors on the fence I wasn’t sure, but Cowboy had assured me they could take care of that. Fucking spooks, always playing their need-to-know games. I didn’t even know their real names or ranks, and I’d got to the point where I didn’t even want to ask them. I had my own secrets to keep, and I’d rather guys like this not bother looking into them.
I just kept my interval between Kel and Cowboy, wondering how the big man managed to crawl so smoothly and stealthily carrying that big-assed rifle. It took us over an hour to make it down from the tree-line to our destination, and even at that slow of a pace I felt like my arms were about to fall off. I was beginning to think the only reason they brought me along was to fuck with me by seeing how far and fast they could go without a break before I asked them to stop. Which was damned humiliating; I was used to being the strongest and fastest in any squad or platoon I was in, all the way from Boot.
When we finally reached the slight dip in the terrain about thirty meters from the fence, just to the left of a small personnel-access gate, I rolled onto my back and sucked in a few deep breaths, keeping an eye on Cowboy. They were as likely as not to kick this off before I was ready. It was weird looking at him and Kel with their hoods on, like staring at a shadow. He seemed to sense that and pulled his hood up to his hairline before flashing me a thumbs-up.
“You okay, Munroe?” I heard his voice in my headphones and blinked in disbelief because his fucking mouth hadn’t moved. I knew there were spook types with mastoid implants that could pick up and transmit subvocalizations…maybe he and Kel had them? I guess it made sense. They were pretty cutting-edge with everything else.
“Ready when you guys are,” I told him, lying through my teeth.
“Just like we rehearsed,” Kel said, and I thought it was half to himself, not because he distrusted any of us to remember it. “Give us thirty seconds to disable security, then it should be safe to come through the gate. Take up a watch position just inside the entrance and don’t let anyone run up on our backs, but don’t give us away if you can help it.”
“I got it,” I assured him.
Cowboy pulled down his hood, then reached into a pouch on his tactical harness and took out a smooth, round, plastic device about the size of a baseball.
“Stay down until we move,” he told me. Then he lunged over the rise and threw the little ball in an easy whipping motion that I didn’t think had the power to get it all the way to the fence, but I resisted the urge to lean up and check.
I knew what it did, from the briefing: it attached itself to the sensor inputs with a swarm of short-lived nanites and overloaded them for just a few seconds, not enough for anyone to notice, but supposedly long enough for the two of them to get to the other side of the fence and inside the building.
He and Kel waited a long five seconds, then they were gone, moving faster than I could follow. Then I did surge upward, digging my boots in and climbing over the top of the rise in time to see Kel and Cowboy already almost to the fence, running faster than any human I’d ever seen and barely visible in their camouflaged combat suits. They were heading straight at the fence, not towards the gate, and I was beginning to wonder what the hell they were doing, when they jumped over the three-meter-tall barrier without breaking stride, landing with a spray of snow on the other side. The base was made up of several connected octagons, each one with an entrance hallway on either side, and they made straight for the nearest, pausing to do something I couldn’t see to the security lock there before it opened up and they were inside.
Shit, I forgot to count, I realized with a start. Thirty seconds they’d said. I estimated maybe ten had passed already, maximum, so I began the countdown from there.
I’d reached somewhere around fifteen when I heard Cowboy’s voice.
“Security’s down. Get inside.”
I yanked myself to my feet and started running, at a dead sprint but feeling like I was in slow motion compared to how fast those two had moved. It seemed to take forever to get to the gate, but when I did, it swung open at my touch and no alarm sounded. There were no live guards inside the wire at night; they counted way too much on their security systems giving them enough warning, just another symptom of their lack of preparation to wage a counterinsurgency.
From the gate to the entrance was another thirty meters and another rush, and I slammed into the door there with my shoulder, knocking it open and bursting inside, sweeping my Gauss rifle ahead of me. There were two dead Tahni technicians on the floor inside the door, lying at the base of a bank of security monitors, their throats ripped out and their blood splashed across the room. I stared at them for just a heartbeat, then moved past to the next hallway, knowing I should have stayed there to stand watch, but needing to see.
The corridor led to a storage room, then to what seemed like a kitchen, and there were three Tahni workers in it, twisted in fear and frozen in death in warm pools of red. I stepped through the blood, gritting my teeth at the tacky stickiness under my feet, and moved to the cafeteria. I knew from Chang’s
briefings that it doubled as a place of worship, where food was combined with religious ceremonies of some kind and eating areas were pits and pillows and oil flames at intervals that seemed random to us but must mean something to them.
One of their religious ceremonies had been going on; we’d planned it that way. The cafeteria had been packed with between thirty and forty Tahni soldiers, and the few of them left alive were dying as I watched. Smoke hung in the air, static electricity crackled and whole swaths of the room were blackened and burning from whatever it was that Cowboy and Kel were carrying as weapons. Parts of bodies that had exploded littered the room, and the ones that hadn’t died from the blasts of…plasma, maybe?...were trying to run out the exits.
As I watched, black and grey blurs overtook them, moving between them and their escape route, and leaving writhing bodies bleeding out from throats ripped away or stomachs sliced open. Here and there, for just a moment, a blur would solidify into a human-shaped figure with what looked like blades of some kind sticking out of their wrists, and then they’d be in motion again. None of the Tahni were armed except for side-arms, and none of them got off a shot. Neither did I; Cowboy and Kel were moving so fast, I was afraid I’d hit them by mistake. I’d been watching for ten seconds and there was one Tahni left alive, backing away from the two of them as they slowed to a stop and stepped towards him slowly, deliberately.
I didn’t need to see what happened to him. I backed up quickly, almost slipping in the blood on the kitchen floor, then ran back through to the security office and stopped there, leaning over the monitors, shoulders shaking as I took deep, shuddering breaths.
What. The. Fuck.
That was when I noticed the movement on the screen. It was a Tahni High Guard battlesuit, huge and ugly and mottled grey, shuffling awkwardly like it was moving in slow motion, though I knew it could be incredibly fast and deadly. It was walking outside the perimeter of the fence, on patrol; burning irreplaceable isotope fuel rods in its backpack reactor because the Tahni commander was just bound and determined that we stupid, weak humans wouldn’t make him look bad again. And the damn thing was right outside the door.
“We got a problem, guys,” I transmitted.
“We can see that.” The voice was through the air, not through my headphones.
I didn’t jump out of my skin, but it took some effort. Both of them were behind me, hoods pulled off, staring at the monitor screen.
“How long till Chang’s supposed to blow the road gate?” I asked them.
“About ten seconds ago, according to the plan,” Kel said in a dolorous tone. “I hope the silly fucker didn’t get himself killed.”
“Relax,” Cowboy said, shrugging. “If he did, we can take the thing down, if we have to.”
Kel eyed him doubtfully. “Maybe we can,” he admitted. “But doing that’s going to have a hell of a thermal signature right out there in front of satellite coverage, and then we’ll have a fucking assault shuttle on our asses while we try to get back to the forest. Wanna’ lay odds on that plan working, Cowboy?”
“You’re always such a bitch, Kel,” the taller man muttered, the corner of his mouth turning up slightly. “No wonder your Okie ass can’t keep a boyfriend.”
“Yeah, fuck you, too, you Texas hick,” Kel shot back, chuckling.
I stared at them, thankful they couldn’t see my face. I started to ask myself if they were nuts; but after what I’d seen, the better question was, were they even human?
Then we heard it, a faint rumble off in the distance. If we’d been outside, we probably could have seen the smoke cloud rising into the air on the opposite end of the city, where Chang and Kibaki and Sophia and a few others had set off a brick of HpE planted against the gate in the security fence. If things went according to plan, they’d set one of the cargo trucks we’d stolen rolling through it, waiting to draw attention. When it did, and they started shooting at it… Another explosion, this one bigger, as the explosives in the truck went off, hopefully in the middle of a bunch of the enemy. Tahni security alarms began to howl all across the city, except in here where Kel and Cowboy had disabled them.
“He’s going,” I said, jabbing a finger at the flat-screen 2-D monitor.
The High Guard trooper was jetting out on a stream of superheated air run through his backpack reactor by a small turbine. It wasn’t as much flying as jet-assisted jumping, but it could get them anywhere in the city in seconds.
“So are we,” Cowboy declared, pulling his hood back on. “Kel, take point,” he said, right before he dragged it down over his mouth. Then his voice still sounded, somehow, from my helmet speakers. “Munroe, we’re going to be moving fast and there won’t be time to rest. I know you can’t keep up with us at top speed, but I figure you could go full-out a bit more than a Normal.”
“What the hell’s a Normal?” I asked.
“People who don’t have their genes engineered to be faster and stronger and more durable than everyone else.” His reply was harsh and truthful and just when I thought it was impossible to be more afraid, I was. There was a pause and then a chuckle. “Or, people who didn’t get turned into super-troopers with a bunch of Space Fleet R&D biotech. Or have their joints replaced with bionics by the DSI.”
That, at least, made sense of things. No wonder Chang and Kibaki could move so fast and so far without rest. But how the hell had he known about me? That couldn’t have been just a guess.
Before I could ask, Kel waved for me to follow, then headed out the front door.
“What the hell are you guys anyway?” I wondered idly, just before I sprinted after him, working hard to keep my balance in the snow.
“That’s classified,” Cowboy said from behind me, his voice not out of breath, partially, I’d come to realize, because it wasn’t his actual voice at all.
“We’re the guys you never heard of,” Kel said from in front, visible only as a spray of snow that rose in his wake. His normally dour voice was playful, like this was what made him feel alive. “We’re the guys no one ever hears of.”
Cowboy finished the thought for him. “We’re the Glory Boys.”
Chapter Seventeen
“This is a fucking trap,” I muttered again, staring at the walls like they were about to close in on me.
The building was one of the few left standing outside the city, and that was mostly because there was nothing worth stealing from it. It had been the beginnings of an auditorium; some developer had the idea of doing live opera and stage plays as part of the resort vacation experience on the “primitive” colony of Demeter. He’d lost his funding shortly after pouring the dome and it still stood as a monument to his folly. And now, maybe, to ours.
The cavernous dome was empty and featureless, the floor still bare concrete, and the only lights were the utility lamps we’d brought with us. A few moths had snuck in when we’d opened the jury-rigged plastic sheeting we’d been using for a door and they fluttered around the lamps, casting monstrous shadows on the wall.
“If it is,” Sophia whispered back, her shoulder against mine, “then your Fleet Intelligence buddies will sniff it out. That’s why they’re not in here with us.”
I’d forgotten anyone else could hear me. I was too used to wearing my helmet in the field, and having it keep whatever parts of my internal monologue that slipped out private. But Chang and Kibaki had thought it important that I take it off and “show my humanity,” whatever the hell that meant.
“I don’t know why the two of us are here at all,” I told her. I nodded towards the two DSI agents, who were seated close to each other on the overturned plastic spool that had once held fiber-optic wiring for the sound system that was never installed. They were chatting quietly, a conversation punctuated by Chang’s occasional, high-pitched laugh. “Couldn’t they handle this themselves?”
Besides the four of us, there was a squad of my best people, hand-picked for this, guarding the exterior, concealed as best they could in the brush that had grown up aroun
d the building in the years since its construction. It was all Chang and Kibaki had allowed us to bring along and I’d had to fight for even that.
“Because he needs to face the people he’s been fighting against,” Sophia repeated the explanation Chang had given us before. “It’s important to them, psychologically.”
I snorted softly. I hadn’t bought it from him and I wasn’t buying it from her.
“He’s coming,” Chang said suddenly, standing and turning towards the door. Always the cautious one, Kibaki stepped back and put the light between her and the entrance, her pistol drawn and hanging at her side.
I had my Gauss rifle slung across my chest, an antiarmor grenade loaded and my right hand on the pistol grip, while my helmet was in my left, ready to slip on if needed. Sophia had an adapted Tahni KE gun and I saw her fingers tighten onto the foregrip we’d affixed to it.
The plastic sheeting rustled as a hand with too many joints in too few fingers pushed it aside and Colonel K'tann-len-Renn-Tan stepped through. He looked older than when I’d seen him on video that day he’d executed what was left of the Amity city government. His face was gaunt and his uniform hung off of a chest that had once been stouter. The braided queue of hair that wrapped around his throat had strands of silver in it. I couldn’t read Tahni expressions for shit, but his looked much different now than it had in that broadcast.
He was unarmed, and I had to assume he’d actually come alone, or Kel and Cowboy would have warned us. That had to have been a huge risk for him. He walked over to us stiff-legged and straight-backed, then made a gesture I’d seen Tahni soldiers give to each other, perhaps the equivalent of a salute.
“I know your language,” he said, the accent unspeakably strange.
Chang responded with a string of mellifluous Tahni, smiling smugly. “And I know yours,” he added in English. “But let’s stick to ours, for the sake of the others.”
The Tahni commander looked over at me, eyeing me up and down before he spoke again.