Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  I cut the fleeing Tevynian down with another burst and kept running.

  I found Colonel Brooks huddled in the lee of one of the fallen bunkers, her command team gathered around her like an entourage, and just about as useful under the circumstances. A conventional commander needed a medic, an RTO, a weapons platoon, a spotter, and more. The armor filled all those roles and didn’t require that sort of specialization, but the slots were there and tradition demanded they be filled. I suppose the group served as a bodyguard for Brooks if nothing else.

  “Colonel Brooks,” I said, digging my heels in and scraping to a halt on the slick pavement. “We have a prisoner at the LZ. You guys get anything?”

  I hadn’t meant it as a challenge, though I suppose it had come out that way.

  “These assholes don’t seem big on surrendering, Andy,” she said, her M900 shouldered as if she expected a counterattack at any second. “They don’t much seem afraid to die, either.”

  She motioned to the east of the bunker, between it and the curving, concave wall of the refinery. At least a hundred Tevynian troops littered the ground, many obviously hit by ground support fire from the shuttles but dozens of others ripped apart from the guns of the Rangers.

  “I don’t know for sure how many of the enemy we have on this island, but it can’t be more than a couple thousand, given the housing we’ve seen and the limited number of shuttles on planet, but they managed to control at least three times that number of Helta.”

  “The Helta here weren’t soldiers,” I said, trying to be fair about it. “And no one thought this place was worth taking, much less defending. But yeah, I see your point. Can we take this place back or should we just dust off with our prisoner and call it a win?”

  Brooks’ helmet swung around as much as it could, the motion triggered, I knew, by a sharp turning of her head toward me.

  “I believe,” she said by way of an answer, “that the main body of what’s left of the Tevynians have sheltered inside the refinery. We’re mopping up the leavings here, the ones who got caught outside or ran from the bunkers, but the others are trying to make the refinery their Alamo.”

  I snorted.

  “I dunno, Colonel, these fellas strike me more as Thermopylae types than Alamo types. Tell me, we have any intelligence on whether there are any Helta inside the refinery?”

  “I haven’t tried to get anyone inside. I’m cleaning up everything out here and securing the Helta compounds we passed on the way in. I sent a platoon in one of the shuttles out there to make sure there weren’t any enemy troops left outside the perimeter.”

  “Do me a favor,” I asked her, “and get them on the horn, see if the Helta there know if we have any friendlies inside the refinery.”

  She shifted and fired off a burst on full-auto at something behind us and I tried not to flinch at the snap-crack of a half dozen slugs breaking the sound barrier. Satisfied she’d hit whatever she’d been aiming at, she eyed me from beneath her visor, the light striking it at just the right angle for me to see her skeptical expression.

  “What do you have in mind, Andy?”

  “This refinery is expendable. We’re here for the EPWs and the Helta civilians.” I raised my shoulders as close to a shrug as I could execute in the armor. “And maybe I should feel worse about this, but I’m about to ask the Jambo to drop an Impulse gun round right on top of this place and let the Helta rebuild later.”

  Her smile shone through the visor, touched by the sunlight.

  “You know, Andy, that’s about the most sensible idea I’ve ever heard from a Marine.”

  “Coming from a Ranger, Colonel Brooks,” I said, “that means almost nothing.”

  Chapter Four

  “Why are we here?”

  “Is that a philosophical question, Andy?” Olivera asked, casting a sidelong glance at me before he turned his attention back to the Tevynian prisoner on the display screen.

  I felt as if we should have been on the other side of a one-way mirror, like all those old cop shows I’d watched as a kid, but this was a starship, not a police precinct in New York or LA, which were the only cities in the country with crime, according to Hollywood. And the Helta had no tradition of interrogating prisoners, much less dedicated interrogation rooms, so we were standing in a small conference room watching the goings-on in a medical ward halfway across the ship.

  “No, General,” I said, not concealing my irritation, which wasn’t so much at his attempt at humor but more at the fact I’d come here straight from Wellspring, with no opportunity to shower. “Not why do we exist, since I clearly exist as an example of awesomeness for all the species of the universe. Why are we on board the Truthseeker questioning this asshole instead of on the Jambo? Or better yet, why didn’t we just wait until we got back to Earth and let the CIA handle this shit?”

  On the screen, the Tevynian jerked against his restraints and bellowed in incongruent silence, his curses and invective muted along with the three Helta technicians adjusting the equipment in the padded couch. Their vaguely ursine features were twisted in what I recognized, after months of serving alongside them, as stress, and I wasn’t sure if it was the presence of the Tevynian that bothered them or the presence of the OSI officer and the Space Force medical technician in the corner. The Helta had gotten used to working alongside humans, but it was another thing entirely to have such a tangible and visceral reminder that the Tevynians were the same species as us.

  To me, the mustachioed, wild-eyed, bleached blond Tevynian in his brightly-colored, checkerboard tunic and trousers couldn’t have looked more different from Air Force Office of Special Investigations Captain Lopez, with his dark complexion and buzz cut and camouflage utilities, but Joon-Pah had confided that we all looked alike to the Helta.

  “The answer to that question, Andy, is the same as why we shipped Al Quaeda EPWs to Egypt and Saudi Arabia back right after 9/11, and why we let the Salvadorans handle the disposition of La Sombra terrorists during the Venezuela business.”

  The chill that went down my back couldn’t be explained away by the dried sweat inside my skinsuit or the too-chilly air conditioning on Truthseeker.

  “Are we talking enhanced interrogation, sir?” I asked him. Which was just a euphemism for torture, and I didn’t have a favorable opinion of it, not least because it wasn’t reliable.

  Olivera smiled thinly.

  “Don’t worry, we’re not waterboarding anyone. Together with the Helta, we’ve developed a chemical cocktail guaranteed to loosen up the tightest lips.” He snorted. “Not that this shithead is reluctant to talk. I don’t think he’s stopped cussing us out since we got him on the ship, or at least that’s what the translators tell me.”

  “I confess to being ignorant of your internal politics,” Joon-Pah said, hanging a step behind Olivera’s right shoulder like a shadow, “but why is the use of chemicals in questioning the enemy a problem?”

  When I’d first seen the Helta, my initial impression was that they looked like a bunch of were-koalas, faces fuzzy at the cheeks, eyes rounded, their ears slightly higher than a humans, protruding farther from the skull, their noses flattened and their mouths small and thin. I’d later found out they were descended from sun bears, the kind they have in India, taken by the Elders whenever the hell they showed up on Earth and genetically engineered to sentience, but the koala impression just wouldn’t go away. And talking were-koalas were still somewhere north of the line of my willing suspension of disbelief. I know, it should probably be higher since I made my living for a few years post-Marine Corps as a science fiction writer, but this was reality and it shouldn’t have felt this unreal.

  “It’s military law,” Olivera explained. “They don’t want us mistreating prisoners, and according to laws written well before we had access to your medical technology, that includes giving them mind-altering chemicals. But….” He smiled. “There are no rules about our allies running their interrogations according to their own laws. Nor is there any rule abou
t us observing said interrogations or offering medical support to preserve the health of the prisoner.”

  “This seems to be a meaningless distinction,” Joon-Pah observed. “Are all your laws so oddly written?”

  “Basically,” I admitted. “They were all written by lawyers.”

  “Shouldn’t lawyers be the most qualified to write laws?”

  “You’d think.”

  It did seem odd to me the military was perfectly all right with us dropping a relativistic kinetic kill weapon with the power of a small nuke on the Tevynians in the refinery complex, but had a problem with us giving this enemy some sort of alien truth serum. But what did I know? I’m sure any JAG lawyer knows more about it than I do.

  One of the Helta medical technicians waved at the video pickup and Joon-Pah reached over and turned on the sound.

  “The prisoner is ready, Captain,” the Helta said.

  He was speaking English clearly, if with a Godawfully strange accent. The crew of the Truthseeker had used electronic teaching methods I wasn’t sure would work for humans to learn our language in just a couple months and I envied them the ability. It had taken me four years of high school, four more of college and two years of service in Venezuela to master conversational Spanish, and that was a fairly simple language that had actually originated on Earth with people who had vocal cords the same as mine.

  And speaking of vocal cords the same as mine, the Tevynian was still yelling at the top of his lungs, his language hauntingly familiar in ways the Helta tongue was not.

  “Give him the injection,” Joon-Pah instructed.

  The Helta medical technician pressed a small device I’d been told was their equivalent of a hypodermic needle into the Tevynian’s neck and the blond soldier shuddered and swore and spat for what seemed like a good thirty seconds before he finally went slack, his eyes going out of focus, drool slipping from of the corner of his mouth.

  “Ask your questions,” the Helta technician said to the OSI agent.

  “Does he have a Tevynian language program?” I asked Olivera. “Or did he actually learn that tongue-twisting shit?”

  “Captain Lopez is a dedicated man,” Olivera said. “And we dedicated him to learning that language using the Helta records.” He snorted. “He wasn’t happy about it, but the linguists said it was closest to Lithuanian and Lopez already spoke it.”

  “Lopez speaks Lithuanian?” I repeated, squinting at Olivera. “Why?”

  “It’s a long story.” He shushed me, putting a finger across his lips. “We have a translation program on this end, though.”

  Lopez said something that sounded like Russian Pig Latin played backwards by a Baptist preacher searching for Satanic prayers.

  “What’s your name?” the automatic translation program intoned in a very good approximation of Lopez’s voice.

  The Tevynian replied, sounding drunk or stoned beyond anything I’d heard in four years of partying at the University of Florida.

  “Vercingetorix,” the translator supplied, and for a moment, I wondered if it was broken. “Son of Drutalus.”

  “What rank do you hold in the Confederation?” It was disconcerting at first, their lips moving a few moments before the translation came, but I got used to it and eventually my brain just erased the gap.

  “I am a Commander of One Hundred in the Ground Forces of the Confederation, next in line for Command of One Thousand beneath Cacitorix.” The only fault of the translator was it made the words too clear, much clearer than Vercingetorix was actually speaking under the influence of the drugs. “I have received many wreaths of glory for my service.”

  “Tell me something, Commander-of-Twenty Vercingetorix, do you know of the Confederation attack on the Helta shipyards at Fairhome a few months ago?”

  “We all know of it.” The Tevynian’s voice firmed up as if he forgot where he was and got enthusiastic, despite himself. “It was a great victory! The Helta weaklings will be unable to forge any more of their warships there, and our conquest of their pitiful Alliance will be even swifter!”

  “Where did you hear of it? Do you get official news reports from your government?”

  “The Confederation shares all of its victories with its warriors. How else would we embolden our hearts for the struggle?”

  “Goddamn,” I murmured. “This guy sounds like an extra in a Conan movie. Or is that the translator?”

  “Quiet, Andy.”

  “Do you know how the Confederation found the location of the shipyard?”

  I grunted. That was a longshot. This guy was the equivalent of a company first sergeant, and while a Top was a formidable figure, he wasn’t usually a font of military intelligence. Vercingetorix laughed sharply.

  “The Helta are amateurs at war. They have no concept of operational security. They leak their secrets like a man drunk with new wine. They wouldn’t have lasted a minute under Alexander.”

  Now that name I didn’t need the translator to understand and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. That was no alien name, nothing that might have evolved on its own over tens of thousands of years. That name was a couple thousand years old, more or less.

  “Who the fuck is Alexander?” I blurted, but Lopez beat me to it.

  “Alexander who?” he asked the man.

  “Why, Alexander the Great! Who other?”

  I was, for once, speechless. Olivera’s mouth was hanging open and I figured mine had to be a mirror of his.

  Lopez seemed nonplussed as well and it took him a good ten seconds to ask his next question.

  “How do you know of Alexander the Great?”

  “He is the greatest warrior who ever lived!” The Tevynian seemed outraged at the question. “He conquered half of his world! Who has not heard of him?”

  Olivera touched a control by the display and I thought I detected a tremor in his hand.

  “Ask him,” he instructed Lopez, “what world he conquered.”

  Lopez stared into the video pickup for a moment before nodding.

  “Which of your worlds did Alexander control?”

  “None of ours,” the Tevynian confessed. A grin spread across his face, raising the edges of the mustache like Dracula’s cape. “At least not yet. The legend of Alexander is from our home, from before the Elders, the great gods, came and gathered us up to plant us among the heavens.” Vercingetorix’s arms were strapped down, but he pointed with his right forefinger, waggling it like an old-time preacher promising hellfire. “The Elders knew we were destined to rule and they put us in a place where we could seize the tools we needed. And these Helta abominations will soon feel our fury when we take what is rightfully ours, what the gods promised us.”

  “And what’s that?” Lopez asked him. “What are you going to do?”

  The Tevynian’s hand clenched into a fist.

  “We will send our fleet into the Helta home system and take their treasure, their technology, their ship, take their subhuman people as slaves. History will forget their Alliance ever existed and they will be known only as our servants!”

  Joon-Pah’s ears went back flush against his head, his nostrils widened, lips pulling back from his teeth. Instinctive reactions for the Helta the same as they were for us. He was either angry or scared. Or both.

  “When?” Lopez asked. “Do you know when your people will attack the home system of the Helta?”

  “Everyone knows!” Vercingetorix laughed, spittle flying in unrestrained glee. “We need not keep secrets for there is none to oppose us. They might bring every ship they have to bear and still we would take what is theirs and make it ours!” The laugh turned into a racking cough and the Tevynian’s head lolled backwards, his face going slack.

  Lopez shook Vercingetorix’s shoulder, his teeth clenched with urgency.

  “When?” he insisted. “When is it going to happen?”

  The Tevynian frowned at him, squinting as he struggled to focus. Lopez slapped the prisoner across the face and his head rolled to the
side, drool dripping onto his shirt.

  “When?” Lopez repeated. “When are you going to attack?”

  Vercingetorix. I remembered where I’d heard the name now. It had been bothering me the whole time. It was from Celtic Gaul, in the time of the Romans, before Caesar conquered them. Two thousand years ago.

  “During the Feast Days of Beltane,” the Tevynian said, the words so slurred I was surprised the computer was able to decipher them. “Three weeks.”

  Chapter Five

  The air was fresh and cold and smelled of dust and cow. It was winter. I’d forgotten it would be winter back home. I hadn’t expected that when I’d signed on for this. Danger, sure. Loneliness, perhaps. Boredom, certainly. But I hadn’t expected to lose track of the days and the months and the seasons.

  There was no snow here in West Texas, but the ground was covered with morning frost and I could see my breath against the pale yellow dawn sky.

  “I like it out here,” President Crenshaw said, leaning against the railing of his front porch.

  He looked more natural in a T-shirt and jeans than he ever had in a suit, and it might have been easy to mistake him for a rugged, weathered Texas rancher if it hadn’t been for the Secret Service agents positioned at either end of the porch, and more out among the cottonwoods at the edge of the gravel road to the ranch house. And us. Brooks, Julie, Olivera and I were still in utility fatigues and combat boots and Joon-Pah was in the traditional Helta bridge uniform, which looked quite lot like the getup a Napoleonic soldier wore around the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.

  “It’s certainly less crowded than DC, sir,” Olivera opined. He’d grown more comfortable around the Commander-in-Chief over the last few months and so had I, though I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t belong in meetings like this. “Does this place belong to your family?”

  “No,” Crenshaw said. “We weren’t ranchers. My dad was in the oil industry. I bought this place after I was elected, just to have somewhere to get away, for occasions just like this.”