by Evan Currie
“Yes, ma’am.”
*****
Craig swore, looking toward the gate. “We have trouble.”
His spotter twisted, looking over, and let out a slow whistle.
Men and vehicles were coming in through the gates, and they didn’t look like they were arriving for a social occasion.
“Boss,” Craig said quietly, “we have an issue.”
Chapter 19
Parithalian Diplomatic Cruiser, Red Sky
Seinel would have been swearing, if he weren’t one to keep all emotions as close to his core as he kept his holdout weapon. The Alliance bureaucracy was not in any way being particularly cooperative with his requests, and the entire situation was making him wonder how much of it was normal obstinacy and how much was conspiratorial in nature. He was now all but certain that at least some of it was the latter, just the degree of which remained in shadow.
Most of his recent information requests had been dropped into some black hole between the stars, or as near as he could tell, and it seemed that the only solid responses he had gotten were in the negative.
No, the humans may most assuredly not fire on the planet. No, you may not fire on the planet. No. No. No.
He’d expected at least some of that, of course; it was hardly common for any government to allow an alien force to engage people on their territory in any sense. Permitting the humans to use ground forces, even as a joint operation, was stretching what the Alliance would allow to begin with.
However, he had expected his follow-up request to provide fire support himself to be granted.
When that answer came back as quickly as it had, the wheels began cranking in his mind.
In his experience with the Alliance, or almost any governmental body for that matter, fast answers were bad news. It meant that someone had already thought of what you’d just asked, made a decision, and then decided not to tell you about it until you asked. There were few reasons to do that, almost none of them good.
He was preparing a new set of requests, strategically arranging for them to arrive at different specific times and to be sent to different branches of the Alliance government, in order to see just how far the conspiracy—whatever it was about—had spread, when an urgent pulse from the planet below demanded his attention.
Seinel examined the file identifier first, noting that it was from Kriss, and then quickly opened it.
As he read, a sensation of cold and ever increasing depth began to weigh on him.
This is impossible. No one would be so…interminably foolish. Would they?
Seinel killed the file and immediately looked over his requests again.
Something is far deeper here than I feared. What is going on?
*****
USV SOL
“Well, this isn’t good.”
Mattan snorted, amused by the sheer ballsy weight of that particular understatement. “Admiral, you have a talent for stating the obvious.”
Ruger shot him a mild glare, but compared to the chill in his guts he was feeling from looking at the colonel’s report, his irritation with Brigadier Mattan was a minor thing.
“Okay, I get selling weapons,” he grumbled, “I do. I even understand selling weapons to terrorists. It’s a dumbass thing to do, but hell, we’ve done it before and no doubt we’ll do it again.”
That was true enough, Mattan knew. Selling weapons, even to your enemies, occasionally made some flimsy sense. Often your enemies had enemies of their own that you didn’t like, and that was enough to excuse arming them.
What they were looking at now, however, was something very different indeed.
“No one, but NO ONE,” Ruger went on, “sells weapons of mass destruction. Goddamn period. You don’t even sell those fuckers to your allies, let alone potential terrorists. What the hell is going on here?”
“That is a question I don’t think any of us can answer just yet,” Mattan said. “However, it’s clear that this isn’t the situation we were briefed on by the Alliance. The only question is did they know how badly their briefing was fouled up? Or are they as flat-footed as we are right now?”
That, Ruger supposed, was the question.
Wasn’t it?
*****
Arkana
Elders’ Compound
“This makes less sense than the blanks,” Kriss growled out as he examined the data Sorilla had pulled from the aircraft’s computer. “And I assure you, the blanks made no sense at all.”
Sorilla was grim as she examined the data more in depth, agreeing with him as far as she was capable.
She’d found reports of recent acquisition of Alliance singularity devices.
They were crude versions of the Ross’s gravity valve that, while not nearly as versatile in nature, were more than powerful enough to take out…well, honestly, she wasn’t entirely sure how powerful they were. The Alliance had never used them on any targets during the war, preferring tactical weapons on the ground and ship-based strategic weapons in space.
That was fair enough, to her mind. Largely SOLCOM had followed similar doctrine. The only group that didn’t were the Ross, which she supposed counted as Alliance, though Sorilla had begun to segregate the two in her own mind.
“How much yield are we talking about?” she asked, grim-faced.
“Yield?” Kriss asked. “As I understand your conventions, I do not believe the term applies. The explosive power associated with these weapons is incidental and hardly adds anything significant to the damage. They are sub-planetary devices, which means they can be used on the surface of a world without creating a sufficiently massive singularity to swallow said world. However, in terms of destructive power…I believe the correct term would be their radius.”
“Which is…?” Sorilla asked through clenched teeth.
Kriss made a face she couldn’t decode. “In human terms…ten kilometers, I believe.”
“Jesus.”
A ten-kilometer radius meant that if one of those were set off, everything for ten klicks around would be destroyed. Not damaged, mind you. Destroyed. The weapon would dig out a bowl of dirt, suck in buildings, people, everything for ten kilometers in every direction, and compress it together with enough force that, when the singularity lost cohesion, the resulting expansion would snap atomic bonds. The implosive power would then turn explosive, and everything would be spit back out as energy.
Well, mostly energy. Some of the matter would survive the singularity long enough to be flung back when the field collapsed. Not many weapons Sorilla was aware of would use buildings, for example, as shrapnel.
“Leaving these intact would be a mistake,” Sorilla sighed.
“It would be a crime,” Kriss corrected her. “A high crime against the Alliance. We must neutralize those weapons.”
That was not really what she wanted to hear, though she had no intentions of leaving those things around. Adding the pressure of “high crimes” to the play just made things that much more aggravating to deal with.
Deal with it they would, however.
“Alright then, Sentinel. Let’s be about it,” Sorilla decided. “We have a location on the material, so I’m calling for backup. You should do the same.”
Kriss nodded grimly. “I am beginning to think that we should simply wipe out every insurgent and be done with this entire situation.”
“Careful,” Sorilla said. “Violence has never in the history of the universe solved anything. Usually it just makes problems like this worse.”
Kriss snorted. “That is an amusing statement coming from one such as yourself.”
“Violence isn’t a solution,” she reiterated. “Violence is currency we use to buy time to implement a solution. And like all currency, if you overspend on what you’re buying, you get screwed. The key is to buy just enough time to achieve our goals, otherwise we’re likely to get ourselves in a death spiral where we’re forced to spend more and more violence to buy less and less time. Eventually, if you go that route, you
wind up being forced to choose between giving up or just murdering every living thing in your path until there’s no more time to buy. Neither option is palatable to me, so let’s do this the smart way, if you don’t mind?”
Kriss grunted his response, but didn’t object.
Sorilla figured that was the best she was going to get. She masked a sigh as she considered the situation, knowing that whatever they did, there would be an inevitable blowback. It was the ultimate problem when dealing with insurgents of any stripe.
A key factor in their strategy was death. Their own.
It was how guerilla forces drove recruiting, by encouraging their enemies to kill them. It was also one of the hardest things for civilians, and even most soldiers, to understand about terrorists. They really did want to die, or rather their leaders really wanted the rank and file to get killed. It was good recruiting propaganda, and terror groups recruited or died on the vine.
Conventional forces set against terror groups were in a no-win scenario from the beginning. When your enemy wanted you to kill them, and they were willing to inflict incredible horrors on random targets to force you to do just that, you had little choice but to give them exactly what they wanted.
The key was to only do what you had to, nothing more. Collateral damage was a gift to the enemy, and treason to the innocent and allies alike. Of course, that only worked if someone had a plan to actually correct the issues that led to the terrorist problems in the first place.
Too bad it was so much easier to say than to accomplish. Few people gave a damn about the causes of the problem. They just assumed that if you solved the problem itself, everything would be fine, while ignoring the underlying issues that would inevitably result in more of the same happening in the future.
On the other hand…literal army marching through the gates.
“Make your calls,” Sorilla said. “Let’s bring the thunder.”
*****
USV SOL
Alarms blared from all sectors as the SOLCOM Navy chief stomped across the deck, hammering on hatches.
“Wakey wakey!” he yelled. “Get ready for a hot drop, ladies!”
The soldiers in the tubes, who’d been there waiting for days already, hit their acknowledgement switches in turn, and lights began turning green as the chief made his way to the command and control statement. Once there, he keyed into the ship’s command network. “Drop pods are green. Waiting for launch orders, Captain.”
“Standby for insert coordinates and final clearance, Chief.”
“Aye aye, Captain. Standing by,” the chief confirmed, tapping in a series of commands.
The green lights on each tube were joined quickly by a second light shifting from red to yellow as he opened up a connection to the entire group.
“We are in launch-standby mode,” the chief said firmly. “ETA to DZ is ninety seconds, barring de-orbit burn.”
The men in the tubes acknowledged the update, leaving the chief to his work as he waited for the final order.
It came within the minute.
“Launch is green, Chief. Flush the tubes.”
“Roger, DZ window opens in thirty-eight seconds,” the chief said firmly. “Engaging automatic launch sequence.”
A new alarm blared as the yellow light began blinking, the countdown entering terminal launch mode.
“Drop in thirty seconds.”
The computer voice took over then.
“Twenty-nine…twenty-eight.”
The SOL swept orbit over the primary colony of the world below as the countdown progressed, the launch tubes swinging into position just as the final few seconds ticked by. In the silence of space there was no sound, or any flash of light or fire, or practically any visible trace at all as the first three tubes launched.
Rotating cylinders thunked heavily into place before three more fired.
And again.
And again.
Six repetitions of three launches per, fired off in the span of less than twelve seconds, putting eighteen men briefly into space before the fires of entry friction began to ablate away their armor.
Eighteen shooting stars tore through the atmosphere of Arkana in a loose spread formation, followed by two drop ships and four alien shuttles from the Parithalian flagship paralleling the SOL’s orbit.
War was coming to Arkana, from the deep black to the dusty sands.
Chapter 20
Sorilla surveyed the compound. “Overwatch, situation?”
“Nominal. Minimal movement,” Craig replied.
“We’ve located coordinates for local WMD stash,” she said, kneeling by the doors of the hangar and sweeping the exterior with her implants. “New mission priority. Secure and demilitarize WMDs. Drop inbound.”
“Roger that, ma’am. Orders?”
“Provide cover for team and drop. Sending target coordinates now,” Sorilla said firmly, sending along the pulse of data with her words.
“Receipt confirmed, orders acknowledged. Wilco.”
“Aida out.” Sorilla broke the link as she waved Brackston and Kriss forward. “The WMD depot is inside the compound,” she said. “It’s sure to be guarded, but we should be able to secure it with minimal casualties.”
“Is that truly a mission priority at this point?”
Sorilla glanced at Kriss. “Depends on whether you want to do this properly or not. We’re not going to risk our own people, but if we can take it clean, that’s what we’re going to do. So keep your people back. We’ll survey the scene and direct the drop team in. Your team will provide support and cover if things go bad, as will our drop ships. That work?”
Kriss looked unhappy about it, but finally nodded.
Sorilla half thought that the only reason he agreed was because it would mean more fighting for those Sentinels already present, but really didn’t care much as to his reasoning. As long as he held up his part, she was willing to take it and call it a win.
She lifted her hand, getting the attention of everyone as she sent highlighted data to the HUDs of her own people.
“Break on my signal,” she ordered. “Move toward the depot. Ghost as long as possible, but do not allow any forces to flank our positions. Better to break cover than get ourselves surrounded when the balloon goes up. And it will go up. Clear?”
No one spoke, not even the Sentinels, but most nodded firmly.
“Good. Break!”
The team slipped out of the hangar, covering each other in groups as they sprinted across the open field to the next building.
*****
Mitchell Sands balanced the rifle he carried on the strap across his shoulder, bracing it on his knee as he leaned up against the side of the Elders Hall, and lit the cigarette in his hand. The flash of sparks spotted his vision briefly as he sucked in the smoke and held it, blinking against the light and smoke.
Rumors were rampant, and he knew for sure that the Elders were in an uproar, but no one had told him what the hell was going on yet. Whatever it was, he hoped it was good enough to be worth wasting his time as he was.
He let out a cloud of smoke, chest heaving as he relaxed back in the shade cast by the building he was resting against and wondered how many, if any, of the rumors were worth the air it took to relay them. Everyone was buzzing about contact from Earth, which seemed like a dream.
Everyone had sort of figured that Earth had descended into the crapper after the ship had left. It sure seemed to be heading that way in the histories. Multicultural idiocy had let terrorists right in through the front doors of nations that should have had more sense but were blinded by liberals’ bleeding hearts.
It shouldn’t have been sustainable, but if Earth had made it seriously into space, he supposed that somehow they’d pulled it through.
Probably got smart finally and just wiped out all those barbarian fuckers, he supposed. It seemed like that was the only sensible solution, after all.
Mitchell took a last long drag on his cig, casually flicking the smoldering s
tick into the sand as he pushed off the wall and started to move again. He crossed past the corner of the building just as a flicker of motion moved in his peripheral vision.
Mitchell didn’t get a chance to turn in that direction when a looped arm draped around his neck and tightened abruptly as another reached forward and knocked the rifle from his grip. He struggled, gasping as his air was cut off, and more spots popped in his vision as everything started going dark.
*****
Chief Brackston dropped the figure back in the shade of the building, propping him up in a sitting position as he retrieved the half-smoked cigarette and tucked it back into the unconscious man’s lips.
That done, he gave the weapon he’d taken a brief once over before ejecting the round from the chamber and catching it in midair.
“Looks like a modified NATO round,” he said as Sorilla approached from behind him. “Heavy, big, but pretty much obsolete.”
“It’ll do the job against anything short of power armor,” she said, “and enough of them would probably push our armor to a failure point just the same. That’s not a hunting round.”
Brackston nodded, closing his fist around the military-designed, armor-piercing round. He tossed it aside, then reached into the breach of the weapon he was holding, using the strength of his armor to break off the firing pin before he tucked the rifle back into the arms of the sleeping watchman.
Sorilla was already past him, signaling for the next team to move as she took up covering position and let them leapfrog to the next position.
Brackston hefted his assault carbine and followed along, taking his position in the formation as they crossed the compound, heading for the location listed for the Alliance WMDs. He kept part of his attention on the Lucian “allies” of the moment, impressed by their line discipline now that the action had commenced.
Prior to that, he had to admit, he hadn’t been overly impressed with them.
Unruly, seemingly angry, and, as Aida had told him, action junkies.
SEALs without the focus, almost, at least until the fighting starts, he supposed. Of course, he had known more than a few SEALs who pretended to be total hotheads when not on mission as well. The difference being, they’d been on mission since leaving the SOL and the Lucians didn’t seem to be pretending.