by Richard Fox
“When! For the love of God! Blessed Saint Kallen and all her gauss bullets, I said when!”
“Sorry. I thought you were acknowledging my instructions,” Medvedev said.
Opal growled.
Garrison swayed, eyes rolling around, air squeaking from his nasal passage. He took a sharp breath. “OK, I’m good. Opal, stop making that cry-baby sound. You’re freaking me out.”
“Opal no cry. Garrison cry. Hurt ears,” Opal said.
“I understand, big guy, no shame in it.”
“Pathetic,” Medvedev said, applying gradual pressure.
Hoffman shifted his stance as he watched the scene, glancing at Masha to be sure she hadn’t escaped again.
“When,” Garrison said.
“Are you certain? I didn’t feel it go back in.”
“When!”
“My apologies. Perhaps I did feel it go back in this time,” Medvedev said.
“I really hate you,” Garrison said.
Medvedev checked the angle of the arm and position of the shoulder. He shook his head. “There must be more external rotation before we move in anteriorly. Brace yourself.”
“No, no, no!” Garrison said as Medvedev twisted his hand and forearm away from his body, keeping the upper arm pressed tight to his rib cage. Without waiting to explain what was next, Medvedev seized his shoulder and wrenched it forward.
“Striiiiiiiiiiiike Mareeeeeeeens,” Garrison wailed, then vomited between his feet. King turned away as Hoffman shook his head to clear an unexpected feeling of light-headedness. Masha puffed out her lower lip and made a sad face for Garrison, something between motherly and mocking.
Medvedev stood. “There! It went better than expected. You cried like a little girl, but we did it.”
Garrison looked up, his head still between his knees, his face slick with sweat, tears filling his eyes but refusing to fall. He rotated his arm slowly, then raised an elbow gingerly.
“By the Saint!” Garrison exclaimed. “Not bad for a filthy traitor.”
“It is better, yes?”
“I wish Booker was here. Better bedside manner and a hell of a lot better-looking than this guy.” Garrison hooked his right thumb toward Medvedev.
“Opal no crush.” The doughboy sat down, pouting.
****
Hoffman adjusted his suit, loosening everything but the wrists, ankles, and throat cuffs that kept it sealed against the environment. Strike Marine armor regulated body temperature with the helmet and gauntlets off, but there were limits. He didn’t want an icicle of Koen air leaking into his sweaty underlayer.
“I’m taking a turn at the cave entrance,” King said. “Garrison is too concerned about the cold for a hardened warrior protected by state-of-the-art gear. I almost had him convinced the negative wind chill would speed healing through his armor. I’d like to see how he does without all our fancy tools.”
“We’ll schedule a training mission in Alaska. Or someplace real miserable like upstate New York in winter. Call it a gut check. Separate the men from the boys.”
“Looking forward to it,” King said and then strode toward Garrison’s sentry position. “Corporal Garrison, you’re relieved. Attend to your gear, take in calories and hydration, then get some rest.”
“Can I do all that near the heat packs?”
“Is your armor working?”
“Well, yeah. Just saving my energy. Could be a long mission,” Garrison said. “I think you should be nicer to someone who just got mauled by the worst medic in the system. Did you break your arm during the crash?”
King put one gauntlet on the forehead of his helmet and squeezed in frustration. “This generation exhausts me. I wish we still made proccies. I’d ask for a tougher batch, less whining and more killing the enemy.”
Hoffman didn’t think the comment was meant for him to hear, so he ignored it.
Masha rubbed the arms of her environment suit. Standing with her feet close together and her posture closed from ankle to chin, she appeared vulnerable and human. Emotions spilled inside Hoffman. He wondered if her spy craft included deep hormonal and emotional manipulation. After everything that had happened between them, he should hate her as the enemy. Apparently, his body didn’t get that memo. In other circumstances, he would take her hot coffee and ask to sit beside her.
It is what it is, he thought. She was an attractive, strong, intelligent woman. What wasn’t to like—other than her traitorous allegiances and nearly getting him killed and costing him his career?
Snow twisted past King at the cave entrance. Opal slept sitting up like an armored car that had been powered down. Medvedev watched everyone, hard eyes looking for weakness in the Strike Marine team.
Hoffman removed two coffees from the remnants of the box from the Mule and pulled the tabs on his way to Masha. He handed her one of the steaming, cup-like bottles. “Drink this. Should help you warm up.”
She took it with both hands and held it close to her face, staring at him through the rising tendril of steam. “Are you trying to kill me with bad coffee?”
Hoffman shrugged. “I pretend it’s good coffee.”
She sipped. “It isn’t.”
“Best coffee for miles,” Garrison said from where he sat near the piled heat packs.
Masha raised one eyebrow and whispered to Hoffman, “Hot coffee in the cold darkness of certain death. How romantic.”
“We’ve been through worse, and I’d bet Garrison’s pay that you have as well.”
Masha stepped a half-stride away from Garrison and Medvedev, nodding for Hoffman to join her as she half-turned for a bit of privacy.
“What is this coffee costing me?” she asked.
Hoffman took a sip, turned the cup, stared at it. “I need to know more about the Kesaht. I’ve never taken my team against them, so I’ve only been given the need-to-know version—basically nothing. I read the name somewhere. It didn’t seem relevant to what I was doing at the time.”
“Hmm. You will learn more than you want to know about the Kesaht very soon. But I could speak of them. I know other things of value to you.”
“You don’t know what’s valuable to me.”
“Like what happened to Corporal Kate Adams and why she was removed from your team?”
“What? How could you know that?” Hoffman squeezed his coffee cylinder.
“My question is, do you even know why she was reassigned?”
Hoffman’s control of the conversation was slipping away. Adams had been removed from his team months ago. King and the rest of the team didn’t even see her leave. She never returned from a weekend pass and a transfer notice signed by the division adjutant was the only explanation he received for her sudden absence. There’d been no word from her since, and no answers from the chain of command on where she’d gone or why his team was short a Marine. But Adams was not the immediate issue in the cave.
“The Kesaht,” he said.
She took a slow sip of her steaming coffee. “They’ve attacked other worlds.”
Masha set her cup aside and interlaced her fingers over a knee. She looked up at him, and it felt like her spy mask slipped away for a moment. “They always try to take the children alive.”
Ice reached into Hoffman’s soul. “Why?”
He thought of Dotari children dying of the phage and hoped the cure his team had brought from the lost Dotari fleet was working.
“You remember the Toth?” she asked.
“I’m familiar with them. I didn’t enter service until after they attacked Hawaii. They vanished off the galactic scene once the Ember War ended. Did a VR range against Toth targets once. Heard some stories about them from old timers that fought them on Hawaii.”
“Not all of them are gone. There’s at least one master left.” She sipped her coffee.
“What do the Toth have to do with the Kesaht? And why do I feel like I won’t like the answer?” Hoffman asked.
Masha shrugged. “We’ve seen a lot of Toth tech in t
he Kesaht fleet. The Kesaht profess a vendetta against humanity—hard to justify as we didn’t know who the Kesaht were until they started raiding planets. Given the Toth’s history with us…we’re pretty certain the Toth are behind the Kesaht’s aggression.”
“Why are they stealing children?”
“Do you know what a Toth overlord eats? Neurological energy. Back during the Ember War, Ibarra and President Garret sent a kill team to destabilize the Toth after their attack on Earth. The Toth big boss, went by the name of Mentiq, ate a…modified proccie. Didn’t go well for either of them.”
“The Toth are afraid to eat another human,” Hoffman said.
“Take your idea further,” she said.
Hoffman didn’t want to say the words aloud. “An adult human could be a proccie. A poison-pill proccie like the one that killed Mentiq. But children…”
“Fair game,” she said.
King stiffened. “Jesus. That’s why the Toth—and the Kesaht—are attacking us? Because we killed their leader?”
“No,” Masha said. “Whatever overlord would’ve come to power afterward would’ve sent us a thank-you card. The Toth have a better reason to hate us.”
Medvedev spoke something in Basque and Opal slapped him on the back of the head. “English.”
Medvedev sneered, then muttered under his breath.
“Nothing wrong with the truth,” Masha said. “Terrans don’t know it. Might help get their asses in gear if they did.”
Medvedev scowled. “You shouldn’t be talking so much. This will go in my report.”
Masha rolled her eyes. “The Toth are almost extinct, thanks to us.”
Hoffman watched Opal, worried about another violent showdown between the doughboy and the legionnaire. He could feel Masha watching him. “The kill team did more than whack their leader?”
“Ha! If only,” she said. “Toward the end of the war, a bargain was made with an…entity. This entity was essential to winning the war with the Xaros. It figured out how to force the Xaros drones to self-destruct.”
“Not all of them.” A shiver lanced up his spine. From his Strike Marines’ expressions, they were having the same flashbacks to the Kid’ran’s Gift and swarms of banshees.
Masha missed the silent exchange between Hoffman and the others. “In return, the entity demanded…elikadura.”
Opal reached for Masha, but King put a firm hand on his shoulder to stop him.
“She is trying to say it was given…nourishment. Fuel,” Medvedev said.
Masha shook her head slightly. “Strength is a better word. Strength it got from consuming the life energy of every Toth on their home world.”
Silence.
“No…that’s xenocide,” Hoffman said.
“The Xaros drones were an existential threat, even with the Masters dead. A sacrifice had to be paid for victory and the Toth were the lambs, so to speak. Given the Toth’s history, I’d call it karma,” Masha said.
King grumbled. “Then how did a Toth end up behind the Kesaht if they were all…eaten.”
Masha shrugged and continued. “Best we can piece together is that an overlord was off world with a jump-capable ship before the Qa’Resh disabled all the drives. He skipped out to the Kesaht’s system with Crucible tech and took over. Years later, they’ve got a Crucible gate of their own and now they’re using the jump network to attack every human they can find.”
Hoffman, sensing a flaw in the logic, locked eyes with her. “The Kesaht think we’re the bad guys, xenocidal villains.”
“We are. It was war. Problem is we don’t know where the Kesaht originate from. Hard to fight an enemy you can’t attack,” she said.
“This is Ibarra’s fault, isn’t it? Wiping out the Toth sounds like something he’d do.” Hoffman had mixed feelings about Ibarra, the scientist who created him, all the other procedural humans, and the doughboys.
“President Garret was part of that decision-making process. It happened with his consent. Even your pal Valdar and the Breitenfeld were there…though he was kept in the dark until it was too late for him to do anything about it,” Masha said. She seemed to be waiting on his reaction, wondering which way he would go.
“The Toth were evil,” King interjected. “We’d be fighting them directly if they hadn’t been taken care of. They wanted the proccie tech when they attacked Earth the first time—so they could raise sentient cattle to feed on. They would never have stopped.”
“We gave up that tech,” Hoffman said.
Masha smiled dangerously. “Earth did. The Ibarra Nation didn’t.”
“And now New Bastion is threatening war against Earth because of you,” Hoffman said, leaning back from the argument. “Thanks for that.”
Masha winked at him. “We live in interesting times. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?”
“What do the Kesaht look like?” Hoffman asked. “Physical weaknesses?”
“Funny thing, the Kesaht are a union of different races,” she said. “The Rakka are their foot soldiers, barely intelligent grunts.” She raised her cup of coffee to Opal. “The Sanheel are the officer class. Big, centaur-looking monsters. Smart and cunning. There are rumors of a third species, one with better reaction times than the Sanheel are capable of. Those are the ones that pilot their ships.”
“Didn’t she say something about Adams?” Garrison asked.
“I must have misspoken.” Masha sipped her drink.
“You know an awful lot about us,” Hoffman said.
“You’ve been after us for a while,” the spy said. “‘Know thy enemy’ is some tried-and-true advice.”
“And what do you know about Adams?” Hoffman asked.
“Adams,” she said, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips, “was not our enemy. What Earth did to her—and the others—concerns Lady Ibarra. Not that you need the details.”
“What? You think Adams was on your side?” Garrison asked. “You two know what semper fidelis even means? Always faithful. Adams was a Strike Marine. Loyal to Earth and the Terran Union. I went through basic and selection with her. She never spoke a word about the Ibarras or did anything to make me think she was a traitor.”
“She didn’t have to,” Masha huffed.
Garrison stood up and leveled a finger at the spy. “You just watch your mouth,” he said.
“Garrison,” Hoffman said, “swap with Gunney and ask him to come over here. He and I need to work out our next steps.”
The Marine shuffled off, working his shoulder in small circles.
“Opal, move Medvedev away from the fire,” the lieutenant said. “Don’t let them speak to each other.”
“Sir.” The doughboy hooked a hand under Medvedev’s shoulder and dragged him to the cave wall.
Masha drained the last of her coffee and lay down next to the heat packs.
Chapter 8
The Mule swooped low over the Teunsaa Valley. Duke glanced through the hell hole, glad he wasn’t using it on this mission. Treetops heavy with snow swayed as the pilot circled toward the clearing and landed.
“Out you go,” said the warrant officer at the door, giving them the all-clear with a thumbs-up.
“Thanks for the ride,” Duke said, then jumped down with all his gear, immediately sinking knee-deep in snow.
Booker landed next to him, frowning at the tactical snowshoes on her feet. “Do these things work?”
Duke shook his head. “Are you neck-deep in snow?”
“Near enough,” she said. “I’m starting to think you enjoy winter warfare.”
“Better than boarding and clearing a void ship.”
“You got me on that one,” she said.
Duke trudged into the woods and hunkered down to watch the Mule make several other false landings, then he led the way out of the area. The snowshoes fatigued his legs but kept the weight of his armor from sinking him to his armpits. Once he was moving, he stayed on the surface—his shallow tracks blown away by gusts of wind. Jumping off a Mule ramp h
ad been beyond the design specifications of the snowshoes.
Booker kept pace with him with no complaints, which was one of the things he liked about the medic—she was tough without making a big deal out of it.
“We should take breaks twice an hour unless you think differently. You’re the medic,” Duke said.
“You’re the expert in long-range reconnaissance patrols,” she said. “I’ll tell you if I need a break. I’ve got nothing to prove.”
“Not to me, you don’t,” he said.
“Not to anyone.”
Duke hiked through snowdrifts, pausing from time to time to check the back trail. The snowshoes continued to minimize evidence of their passage. Field craft still mattered. He set false trails from time to time and used tree branches to further hide their tracks when necessary. Mountains outlined the horizon, sketched in moonlight and the surprising tranquility between storms.
“We have to stop for the night. Dig a shelter and stay warm,” Duke said, trying not to look at her.
“Just you and me, huh?”
“Don’t get any ideas,” he said.
She laughed. “Your virtue is safe with me. But not your reputation.”
“Not sure what you mean by that,” he said, looking for a defensible campsite. “Post up by that tree and hold security while I do this.”
“You talk about titty bars all the time. Deep down, you’re a decent guy,” she said.
“Now you are going to ruin my reputation.” He dug a cave in the snow, then hid evidence of his work. “Mi casa es su casa.”
“That’s…a tiny hole,” she said, staring down into what could have been a snowy grave.
“Think of it as a windbreak with the advantage of being nearly invisible unless you’re standing right here. We’ll sleep in shifts unless it gets so cold we have to consolidate warmth—which is probably going to happen, so be warned.”
“I like warm.”
“The wind is picking up,” he said, climbing into the shelter behind her, then turning to face the entrance. His field of fire allowed one hundred eighty degrees of visibility. Cut into the side of a packed drift, it also provided an elevated position.