Alliance Marines: The Road To War

by John Mierau

  No one moved.

  “Fine,” she growled and reached for Willard’s rifle. With a snarl, he twisted the gun out of her reach and raised the back of his hand to strike her.

  Janeen jerked back awake with a shrill scream. Tentacles shot out of her back and propelled her to her feet. More tentacles reached out, stabbing blindly.

  Willard gasped as his thigh went numb. He looked down in time to see the semi-solid crysteel spike emerging from his pant leg before it whipped, sending him flying.

  Bowen let loose on full auto. Willard slammed into Tubby and Red. Behind him, Janeen shrieked again.

  The world went sideways. Willard landed on the stairs. Suns exploded behind his eyelids.

  Bowen screamed and fired another burst. Willard staggered to his hands and knees, wincing to bring the world into focus.

  He could make out Janeen’s shadow in the doorway. She had too many arms, like some death goddess he had read about once...then she was gone.

  He heard coughing. Moaning.

  Mentel was leaning over him, reaching for the gun again. He jabbed her in the side. She hit the ground, wheezing. He’d landed the punch just right, sending a spasm into her diaphragm. “Can’t breathe? Good,” he rasped, climbing unsteadily to his feet. “Too bad it’s only temporary.” He pushed the side of her head and she fell his way, panicked eyes whipping from side to side.

  “Bone!” he called. He wasn’t at the foot of the stairs anymore. Willard took a second look around. Judy was on the floor, crying on Tubby’s shoulder. The scientist had a bloody mouth and a laceration on his cheek—probably from colliding with the butt of Willard’s gun as he flew by—but otherwise looked okay.

  He stepped over Mentel—still blessedly silent, but also unhurt—to recover his weapon and jog to the door. Steaming holes in the pod, some blood on the doorframe and on the deck plating outside… but no Janeen.

  He turned around, and saw Bowen—most of him—bleeding out on the downstairs hallway floor.

  Bowen was a lot heavier than he was—even with only one arm—but Willard picked him up and weaved out the door, following Tubby, Red, and Scott. The kid had the door to the next pod open by the time Willard crossed the exposed, warehouse-sized space.

  Inside the pod marked ‘The Fridge,’ the tubby guy moved agilely around Willard and cleared a table for Bowen. Red swooped in and cut the spacesuit off his arm first, and in a few cuts more, stripped it off to the waist.

  Scott hip-checked Willard out of the way and evaluated Bowen’s cleanly severed shoulder. “Calvin: blood volumizer, bottom drawer!”

  Tubby—Calvin—already had a handful of vials and plastic cases in his hands.

  Willard forced himself to take a step away from the table and let the doctors save his friend's life.

  “Scotty,” Red called warmly, serenely from above the hand wash station on the opposite wall from the door. Scott looked up, a dazed expression on his face. “Calvin can assist,” she said through the surgical mask already over her mouth. “See what’s wrong with Lieutenant Tsu’s leg.”

  Willard looked down and saw the blood slick dripping down from a hole in his thigh. Oh, right. He’d forgotten about that. His eyebrows knit together.

  How the hell did I make it all that way carrying Bowen?

  Scott herded him gently away from the table and up onto the stairs to the second level. The kid had to work pretty hard to get through his spacesuit. Willard laid all the way down on the stairs when Scott came back from the operating room with an instrument tray and started making friends with the hole in his leg.

  “Very lucky. Minor muscular damage, no skeletal damage at all. Missed the major blood vessels, too.”

  “You got stabbed before I did,” Willard remembered. “You okay for this right now?”

  Scott chuckled. “One thing doctors can do in their sleep is suturing. Want something for the pain?”

  “Hell yes!” Willard hissed. “But only something I can take and shh-shit!” Willard gasped. “Shoot straight!”

  Dr. Kincaid looked over Willard’s spacesuit, patting the sides until he found the standard issue first aid kit on the side. “You’ve got just the thing.”

  Pain flared when Kincaid opened up with the same painkiller-enriched spray skin Bowen had fixed his own shoulder with. Then, the world picked up speed as the meds kicked in.

  “Better!” Willard sighed, “but go easy with that spray, I’ve been on my feet or flying for eighteen hours.”

  “The Churn? How bad is it out there?” Scott asked.

  Right, he’s been locked in a Faraday cage -with a psycho torture victim on a rampage- and he still thought to worry about others.

  Good people.

  “We knew we’d take a hit…and we did.”

  Scott was silent after that.

  Willard kept a hand close to the rifle leaning against the wall beside him and grit his teeth while Scott cleaned up the wound.

  “How do we get a call out for backup? I’ve got two soldiers sweeping Ryson that need to know what’s in here with us.”

  “We start running down the spoke and shoot anything that follows?”

  Something pulled in Willard’s thigh and his breath hitched in pain. He hid it behind a laugh. “We’ve got two guns and limited clips. Unless you know where there’s more?”

  Scott looked up and smiled. “As a matter of fact…”

  Willard nodded. Good news at last.

  “Okay, we’ll just…wait until Bowen can be moved.”

  Scott frowned and looked back down. “Could be a while.”

  The thing pulling in Willard’s thigh pulled harder. Like a vulture tugging his veins out for worms. He put his head all the way back and picked a focus point at the top of the stairs.

  Deep breath in…holy hell that hurt!…deep breath out.

  Curse and repeat.

  His focus point was at the monitor at the top. A list of the test subjects' names.

  JANEEN PARSONS

  I hope I get the chance to end you!

  Deep breath in.

  CAROL STEEPS

  How much did you know before you volunteered, Carol?

  Deep breath out.

  ELARD BAAKO

  He knew that name, but where from?

  Ow.

  Deep breath in.

  BOYD THATCHER

  Boyd? Who named their kid ‘Boyd’?

  Holy shit OW.

  Deep breath out.

  LEHU ZHANG

  Willard’s eyes flew wide. He slapped Scott’s hand away and scrambled up the stairs.

  “Lieutenant!” Kincaid called. “Your sutures aren’t finished!”

  Willard stumbled to the top and read the name again.

  It still said Lehu Zhang.

  “Where is he? Where's Lee Zhang?” He turned and shouted down the stairs. “Take me to him now!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  White light. Awareness.

  Pain.

  Lee gasped and returned to life, again.

  “It’s really you! I got you, Captain!”

  “We brought him out of it fast, Lieutenant, let me examine him quickly.”

  Lee blinked. Blobs of shadows refined themselves into discrete shapes with color and depth.

  He blinked some more and meaning began to assign itself.

  Someone above him shone a light over his eye and away, over his other eye and away.

  “Equal and responsive,” said a voice.

  Dr. Kincaid’s voice.

  Lee remembered operations, rehabilitation, and skills integration exercises.

  The holes in his body.

  He remembered when his implant told him to die.

  “No!” Lee cried and smashed his hand out, catching Kincaid on the jaw and spinning him away.

  Long thin hands grabbed him by the shoulders. “Captain, it’s Tsu! It’s Angel! I’ve got you, Lee.”

  Angel?

  Lee remembered the gangly pilot whose overwatch kept his men
alive across the south plains, all the way to South Reach City. All the way to Government Row.

  He stopped struggling, opened his eyes, and saw that very man standing above him.

  “Yeah, that’s it, I got you. You’re a goddamn sight for…” Willard’s eyes roamed down to Lee’s shoulders. They widened in horror. “Holy shit,” Willard gasped.

  “We can do a lot to heal the dermis,” Kincaid told Willard compassionately, then bravely leaned over again. “Don’t worry, Phoenix, we’ll get you better.”

  Lee tensed inside. How could Willard and Dr. Kincaid exist in the same place and time?

  He queried his implant.

  It was eleven months after Operation Sinkhole?

  He’d spent eleven months in hell.

  An alarm drew his attention.

  There was a message waiting for him in his internal queue.

  A message from Janeen.

  He accessed it. Code injected itself into his implant.

  “You’re free now, Phoenix,” he heard her voice say. “They can never control you again.”

  Someone slapped his face. “Stay with me, boss!”

  Willard’s voice drew him back.

  “Willard…?” he began, and stopped. The echo of Janeen’s message called to him.

  Free?

  He didn’t know what to ask or where to start

  Willard's voice sounded just the same. “I’m in over my head, here, Cap. You save my ass, and I’ll fly you out of here, same as always. I swear I’ll see you free of this place, but I could use a little help, no lie!”

  Free of this place?

  The words, from a man he trusted with his life, overcame the dread that came whenever he was switched to play more games.

  If Willard Tsu needed his help, he’d have it.

  Lee held his hand out. Willard clasped it, forearm to forearm, wonder and amazement lighting his face. “Welcome back, Captain.”

  “G-got your six, Angel,” Lee croaked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Bowen’s eyes were open. “That’s… Paladin?” he slurred. “Never met him in the…war.”

  Willard looked over at Lee, standing next to the far left of three operating tables, talking to Scott.

  His scalp was shaven. Raw, white scars criss-crossed his cranium. Silver disks with glowing blue centers covered his body, same as Janeen’s. They were ringed with sores and infection, same as Janeen’s. His mind seemed right, though.

  God, Willard hoped Lee’s mind was still right.

  “These guys call him Phoenix now, but that’s still Lee Zhang. The guy who got me through…” Willard’s voice trailed off. After the battle of Government Row got called on account of alien invasion, the team had been told Lee was dead.

  He beamed at Lee. The first thing Captain Zhang wanted to know—while still wrapped in blankets and trembling hard as he shook off the effects of the coma that he couldn’t form complete sentences? What had become of the soldiers under his command.

  Did everybody make it out of the Row?

  They had. Worse for wear, maybe changed, but every soldier that had accompanied Lee into Government Row was in the Fleet, still serving. In one capacity or another. Jake, Sameen…Carson, too, even.

  Only then did Zhang lie back and let Scott and Red finish examining him.

  Willard paced back and forth, holding back amazed laughter. He couldn’t wait to tell Jake and Sameen.

  All he had to do was survive the crazy lady with the crysteel ninja skills.

  The doctors got Lee hydrated and assessed his vitals—strong and stable, zero damage from his cryo stints, from having his autonomic system temporarily switched off via his interface, or from the coma the doctors had crash-induced to save his life until they could get his body working on its own again.

  Willard thought all of that was a slight miracle. Then, while he helped Dr. Kincaid dress Paladin—or Phoenix, now, according to the mad scientist doctor people—Lee badgered the man for information about how Lee ended up here and what he’d gone through.

  “You’re looking at one of the original implant test patients,” Kincaid said with genuine respect in his voice, “and one of the only fully integrated wielder implants online.”

  “How’d he…get here?” Bowen asked him.

  “Peace treaty,” Willard said, colouring the words with all the disgust he felt. “He was an Earther POW. The Alliance pardoned most criminals, but the worst offenders had to volunteer for dangerous service to get out.”

  “More dangerous than…joining Fleet?” Bowen gasped.

  “Might have something to do with Lee having no family to come looking for him. Or that he killed Gov’s military commander on the last day of the civil war. Bet that stung.”

  Willard was raging inside. Lee was a war hero, and this is what happened to him? Left for dead, friends never notified, then stapled to circuit boards like a human guinea pig.

  Yet Zhang had held on, and kept his sanity.

  Unlike Janeen Parsons.

  “He’ll help us get out of here, Bone,” Willard whispered fiercely, “and then we’re going to see to it everybody knows his story, so they’ll never stick him in a box again.”

  Willard looked over at Bowen and found him passed out, snoring lightly.

  “Janeen did this?” Lee whispered, approaching Bowen’s bed. He looked at the empty space where an arm should be.

  “That, and he put a hole in that Kincaid doctor’s shoulder. She killed the other two doctors on their team, and even on the verge of passing out she still wants Mentel dead. Which I can understand, on account of her being more reptilian than human. Unfortunately, given she’s a super genius and all? Free pass.”

  Lee rubbed the back of his head, gingerly sliding his fingers off his bald scalp and onto the silver contact grafted onto the back of his head. The interface wasn’t hurting him. In every experiment, they pushed its cybernetic and organic components until his brain felt as if it were baking in his head. The crysteel ports covering his body still itched something fierce, and a couple of the infected ones burned like hell, but he could hack it.

  Seeing Willard again made him feel more connected to the galaxy, and the stakes of this new war, than he had since the day Dr. Mentel showed up in prison, offering a chance to get out.

  If he survived what she had planned.

  Lee had accepted the risk of getting an untested cybernetic interface sewn in his brain in exchange for a chance get his life back in success or to make Reach a safer place in failure, between his corpse and his interface’s logs.

  Maybe it was in the fine print, but Mentel hadn’t covered the part about turning him into a mind-controlled puppet.

  Or that he’d remember everything that happened while the override pulled his strings.

  He remembered Carina patting him on the head, as she switched him off. Over and over again. His body shook as fragments of the override trials flashed in his mind.

  Hop up and down, Lee.

  Strip, Lee. Mm. Very nice.

  Sing the song I like while you slice your wrist.

  Form a crysteel spike. Now, stab Baako with it.

  Let's play a war game, Lee. How many can you kill? How fast?

  He closed the door on those thoughts. Not the time to look back. He looked up at the display above the stairs, where Willard had spied his name along with those of his fellow test subjects. Thatcher, Steeps, and Baako were still popsicles. The doctors had refused to wake anybody else after Lee, and Willard agreed. Calvin (Tubby) and Taschen (Red) were neither prize specimens: he hoped they could take turns keeping Bowen on his feet when they started moving. There was no guarantee the other patients would wake up fit enough to move, and there could be side effects from the comas, or more lasting effects from Mentel interrupting their breathing and other autonomic functions than what Lee had suffered..

  That left Scott to open doors—and hold a gun on the delightful Dr. Mentel if necessary. Willard and Lee would need both hands wrap
ped around the two machine guns. Willard would take point and Lee would take rear guard.

  Lee didn’t like leaving the others behind, helpless in cryo suspension, but he couldn’t imagine Janeen coming after her own.

  “Paladin?”

  Lee jumped, frightened out of his head by Willard’s voice. He banished the memories, banished the shaking.

  “Phoenix,” he coughed. “Not Paladin. Not anymore.”

  He’d lost the right to use that name.

  “Okay. Uh...Phoenix?” Willard looked confused, but he didn’t come out and ask his questions. He leaned in, squeamish—no, disgusted with himself. “We need to find Mentel before we get out of here. We need the edge that psycho gives us against the Takers.”

  Or all she did to us was for nothing, Lee thought. “Fine, she gets to live,” he said, hardly believing he said the words.

  “We’ll find her a nice padded cell when this is all over. We can visit her together. I’ll bring popcorn.” Willard beamed at him. “Damn, it’s good to see you, Cap.”

  Lee’s lips twitched a little in response. “Really good to see you, Angel.”

  “You feeling more like…well, I don’t want to say yourself, but human at least?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that.”

  Red—Dr. Lachman—approached with tiny, silent footsteps. Her face was burning. Lee could feel the shame dripping off her. “I’m sorry, Lehu. We didn’t…” The tears returned. “We didn’t know.”

  Lee felt a wave of hate for the spineless woman, but he pushed it down. He jerked his chin once.

  “When can we move Bowen?” Willard yawned.

  Dr. Lachman’s demeanour changed to professional disapproval. “We shouldn’t be moving him at all. Or you, or Lehu or Scotty. Your bodies are near collapse, and too many emergency stimulants will eventually overload your—”