“What did you find out about Santillo?” I gestured to the sofa, in case he wanted to sit.
He hesitated. “Stasis, sir.”
“Excuse me?” I glanced at Alenda, and she gave me an almost imperceptible nod, confirming his answer. Of course she’d checked, too.
Hardy sat, the fake-leather sofa squeaking in protest. “Yes, sir. She was scheduled to leave in three days. They moved up her stasis call.”
I stared at him. “Huh.” It could have been coincidence. On the big troop transports, they put everyone into cryo before launch because they didn’t have the staff to handle it in flight. Three days, though. “Did you get a reaction from anyone?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t seem to, sir. One guy asked me why I wanted to know, but I made something up. I thought someone followed me out of the hospital, but I took a random turn and he didn’t match it.”
I put my fist in my palm and mashed them together. Shit. I needed Santillo’s information on the hospital. She’d been my only lead. I considered having her pulled out of stasis, but that would take a ton of effort, and it would sound an alarm to anyone who didn’t know that I wanted to talk to her. At least it solidified my reasons for going to see Karikov. I had no other decent options.
“Good work, Hardy. Lex, do me a favor. While Hardy and I are gone, poke around and see if you can figure out who gave the order to move up Santillo’s stasis call.”
“Yes, sir,” she answered.
“Where are we going, sir?” Hardy asked.
“Prep your kit. We’re going planetside.”
Chapter Fourteen
Mac, Hardy, and I loaded onto a shuttle with nine other soldiers for our trip to Cappa. The ship had six seats along each wall, and Stirling insisted on filling it, even though we’d land at one of his bases, surrounded by his people. My stomach twisted a little, making me glad I’d skipped breakfast. I hadn’t dropped down to a hostile planet in a few years, but the same feeling assaulted me every time. Having a full ship didn’t make me feel any safer.
Mac handed me a rifle and a pile of magazines. “Got you a Bitch, sir.”
“Nice. What are my loads?”
“Three magazines explosive, four guided. Already coded to your helmet.”
“Thanks.” I slapped a magazine of guided into the well but didn’t charge it. Once I did, though, I’d be able to control the flight of the bullet with my thoughts. Bend it a little. It made it hard to miss. Now if I could get someone to take the shine off my body armor . . .
We planned to drop in to Mallot’s old company at Base 17A, spend a day or so there asking questions and getting my bearings, then we’d move by ground to Karikov’s headquarters. Pretty easy, as far as combat missions go.
I studied Hardy, trying to see into his mental state. You always had to watch a guy making his first trip into a combat zone. He looked fine, but you could never be sure. We strapped in for the thirty-minute trip to the surface.
“You good?” I asked him.
Hardy nodded. “Yes, sir. A little nervous. A little excited.”
“That’s normal. Don’t worry about it, we’re dropping into a pretty friendly area. Not a lot of locals around, and those that are there mostly support us.”
“That’s good, sir. Is that normal?”
I shrugged. “It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I don’t think it’s changed that much. Most of the planet supports us being there. Only a small percentage fight against us.”
That split of the Cappans—the 90 percent who supported us and the 10 percent who didn’t—that’s what made Cappa so different. We’d discovered planets with intelligent life before, but never at this level. Cappans were humanoid. Nobody would mistake them for human, with their big, round, bulging eyes; elongated faces; and blue-and-yellow skin. But they were bipedal. They walked. If it had only been that, maybe we’d have fought it like any other war. But the sociologists who came in droves to study them found more. They could communicate. Many species communicated with each other, but the Cappans . . . they could talk to us. They learned. It took a while to figure it out, the chirping and clicking, but within a couple of years the linguists put it together, and we had rudimentary translation.
That discovery stopped the war. For a time. We brought in diplomats. Settlers. Made an effort at peaceful coexistence. Like most things, humans eventually fucked it up. The money got in the way, and we expanded too quickly trying to get at the silver, which pissed off the Cappans. They’d been happy enough to trade for our technology at first, but as the mining companies continued to push, the Cappans started to resist. Protests turned violent, then turned to flat-out hostility.
That’s when we brought in soldiers. Even then, it was like no other war in several hundred years. It had a moral element, and a level of complexity beyond any other fight I’d seen. Because the Cappans chose sides, and we couldn’t tell them apart. Eighteen years of fighting hadn’t altered the situation much, and left us bogged down fighting an insurgency that we couldn’t win, and that politicians and industry wouldn’t let us quit.
The bump and acceleration of takeoff settled into the smooth quiet of a trip through space. I closed my eyes and pretended to nap. My body wanted rest but my brain whirled, wide awake. The questions I wanted to ask when we landed ran through my mind in their own little dress rehearsal. After a couple minutes I gave up the pretense of sleep and followed our progress via a wall screen that fed a picture from outside the ship. Cappa filled the display, a mottled brown ball with some splotches of pale green and a few specks of blue. Cappa had a large ocean out of sight on the far side of the planet, but in this hemisphere a lot of the water resided underground, leaving mostly hilly, rocky desert.
I’d hoped to never see that view again.
We dismounted at Base 17A, one of a couple dozen small outposts on the only human-occupied continent on Cappa. The dry heat punched me in the face as I exited the craft, followed quickly by the smell. Cappa in the summer smelled like stale laundry with a hint of sulfur. The base sat in the middle of a flat expanse of hard-packed, gritty dirt interspersed with egg-sized brown rocks. A group of rocky brown hills, speckled with sharp angles and a few tiny spots of vegetation, dominated the horizon in two directions. I knew from study they were minor peaks, maybe fifteen hundred meters tall, but rising abruptly from the flat ground about ten kilometers away, they appeared much bigger. What made them truly significant was they were loaded with silver, meaning mining, which made Base 17A necessary.
The company commander, Captain Zattel, met us at the bottom of the ramp. He didn’t have his gear on, which indicated a low threat. His wavy black hair, a bit longer than regulations allowed, rippled from the disturbance of the engines. The hair pissed me off a little since he was a commander, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Welcome to Base Seventeen Alpha, sir,” he shouted over the noise.
I nodded and started walking to clear the takeoff zone. Only two of Stirling’s men got off with us, and the ship took off as soon as we stepped out of the blast zone. The silence in its wake was almost palpable. When Zattel spoke again, it came across almost like a shout, though he spoke at a normal volume. “Glad to have you, sir.”
“Glad to be here.” He lied, I lied. The sweat had already started running down my face, and my shirt stuck to my back under my armor.
“I’ve got the men lined up that you wanted to speak to. You can use my office for your interviews.”
“That will work,” I said. “When do you want me to start?”
Kawhoompfh. A rocket hit maybe a thousand meters away, close enough where I felt the compression, and I flinched, involuntarily.
Captain Zattel looked to his left and I followed his eyes to where Lieutenant Hardy lay hugging the ground.
“Get up, Hardy,” I said. “That wasn’t close enough to worry about.”
Hardy glanced about, then skittered to his feet. “Sorry, sir.”
I waved my hand
at him dismissively, ignoring his red face. “No shame. Everyone does that the first time. By the time you hear it it’s too late to duck anyway.” I turned to Zattel. “That happen often?”
“Not really, sir. Couple times a week, maybe. They aren’t accurate. No guidance systems.”
“Small blessings. What was that, one hundred twenty-five millimeter?” I knew it was. Munitions made unique sounds. After a while, you learned to recognize them. But I wanted Zattel to know that I knew. He’d give me less trouble if he thought he couldn’t bullshit me about things.
“Yes, sir. Probably. We’ll get the analysis to be sure, but almost all of them are one twenty-fives.”
I nodded. “Just harassing, then.”
“Yes, sir.” Zattel started walking again and I followed. “Back to your question. We can start the interviews as soon as you’re ready.”
I wiped sweat from my eyes. I’d forgotten how miserable Cappa could get. “Now’s good.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get you set in the office and have First Sergeant line them up.”
Six hours later I emerged from the office and flung my notebook down on a table a little too hard. Part of me wanted to pick it up and fling it again. I’d interviewed twenty-one soldiers and they all told some form of the same story. Nobody had seen anything. Too much commotion. Attention on the fight around them, securing the landing zone. At least six of them were lying. Maybe more, but six for sure. They weren’t even good liars. Someone gave them the story, but hadn’t rehearsed them well enough to stand up to pressure. They stumbled over words, and more than one locked up and stopped talking altogether.
I tried every interview tactic in the book—and some not in the book—to break through to the truth. I tried good cop, bad cop, and every cop in between. I tried ordering, intimidating, pleading, tricking. I swore at more than a couple soldiers. I challenged one big corporal’s manhood. None of it worked.
“Did you get what you needed, sir?” Zattel approached as I evacuated his office. Bad timing.
Screw you, Zattel. Longhaired asshole. “About as you’d expect,” I said.
He stopped short. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t understand.”
“I think you understand perfectly. Someone told your people to keep their mouths shut. Was that you?” I studied his face, the dirt crusted in the sweat under his eyes and on his cheeks.
His face tightened, eyes narrowed slightly. “No, sir.”
I continued to stare, and he met my gaze calmly, his shoulders square and his head level. Shit. I believed him. “Do you know who it was?”
He hesitated.
“I get it. You don’t want to roll over on your people. I wouldn’t either. But we both know what’s going on here.”
He stood silently, his eyes cast down, his weight shifting from one foot to the other. I could have pressured him into talking right then, but as much as I wanted answers, I really didn’t want him to break faith with his soldiers. The unit might never recover from that kind of betrayal.
“I tell you what, Zattel. I’m going to let it go for now,” I said, after letting him stew for a moment. I’d find some way to make his life miserable later.
“Yes, sir.” He met my gaze, and a hint of tension came out of his face. I didn’t know if he understood my logic in backing off, but I also didn’t feel the need to explain myself.
“I want to move out tomorrow morning to Colonel Karikov’s location.”
“Yes, sir. Third platoon will take you. Do you want your lieutenant along, or do you want him to wait here?”
“Yes, he’s coming with me,” I said. Third platoon. Mallot’s platoon. Rather, it had been, at one point. They had a new platoon leader now. I hadn’t met him, but I’d read the name. Lieutenant Politte.
“Roger that, sir. We’ll make sure there’s space. We’ll get you the departure information tonight.”
The platoon stood huddled up on the shady side of their four vehicles when I walked up the next morning, the men and women looking top-heavy in their armored vests. Hardy and Mac trailed behind me. I had my rifle clipped to my gear with a single strap that allowed me to shoot without unhooking, and I carried my helmet in my other hand. Mac had put the platoon radio frequency in one ear, company headquarters in the other. I’d be riding in the back of one of the vehicles, and not in charge, but I liked to keep abreast of the situation around me. I tried to stay pretty relaxed back at home base, and even spaceside, but if you relaxed in a hostile fire area, bad things happened.
I reached the back of the cluster of soldiers and joined them, all watching the fresh-faced lieutenant at the front with the holo map. So young. He had his dark hair in a short buzz cut that looked like someone told him to get his hair cut before reporting to the front, but didn’t explain how. He started talking as soon as I arrived.
“We went over the route last night. A hundred and fifty klicks.” The route lit up on the holo. “It’s a cleared route, so no contact expected, but be alert. They’ve hit cleared routes before, as recently as two months ago. If they hit us, it would likely be at one of these two spots. Choke points.” He lit a spot about halfway along the route where the road cut between two hills, and then another at what looked like a small forest about three-quarters of the way there, the only vegetation on the otherwise bleak route.
“My vehicle has lead,” he continued. “Sergeant Stanzi second, Sergeant First Class Belham, third, Jones, trail. Platoon freq is per the SOP. Someone gets hit, we secure the vehicle, attack through the enemy, consolidate and call for MEDEVAC as needed. Nothing we haven’t done before. Remember, if you see Cappans, ninety-five percent of them don’t mean us any harm. Verify the threat before you engage. Questions?” He looked around and predictably got only head nods. Veterans.
“We move out in five,” he finished. The young man approached me.
“Sir, I’m Lieutenant Politte.” He stood taller than I thought at first. Maybe five centimeters taller than me. That didn’t change the fact that with his baby face and red cheeks, he looked fifteen.
“Good to meet you, Politte,” I said. “I appreciate the ride today.”
“Hooah, sir. I’ve got you and Staff Sergeant McCann in vehicle three with my platoon sergeant. Did you want your aide with you?”
“Colonels don’t have aides. But Hardy can ride with you, if that’s okay. Hardy!”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got a seat,” answered Politte.
Hardy trotted up. “Yes, sir.”
“Ride with Politte. Give you a chance to see what a platoon leader does.”
“Yes, sir,” Hardy replied.
“Is that your platoon sergeant?” I nodded toward a short, dark-skinned man with a thick mustache.
“Yes, sir,” said Politte. “Sergeant First Class Belham.”
“I’ll introduce myself.” I didn’t know Belham. I’d hoped to get lucky and find someone familiar, but it had been a long shot. I didn’t recognize anyone in the platoon, except those who I’d questioned yesterday.
“Sir.” Belham turned toward me as I approached.
“Sergeant Belham. Good to meet you.” I offered my hand, and he took it with a firm grip after shifting his helmet to the other side.
“You been in a Goat before, sir?” The MT-488 hover vehicle, affectionately known as the Goat because it went anywhere and did everything. Not a great fighting vehicle, but well armored and safe. Perfect for a casualty-conscious force.
“Yeah, a few times,” I said. Hundreds, in truth. But I didn’t want to look like I had something to prove.
“Roger, sir. That’s good. So you and your man know the drill if we get hit. You’ll be in back. We pull the gunner down out of the turret, keep moving through the kill zone if we can, exit and assault through if we can’t. Watch for secondaries on exit.”
“Yeah, I’ve got it. You seeing a lot of secondaries these days?” A secondary device was something the enemy placed to hit us after the main attack, often a potato mine. The Cappans liked to put them in culv
erts and behind cover. When soldiers dismounted a disabled Goat, they’d naturally seek out those supposed safe spots and trigger the explosives. They created a lot of casualties that way.
“No, sir. Not lately. But you never know.” Belham put on his helmet, which had a bullet scar along the top. He’d gotten lucky at some point with that one.
“You ready for us to load?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. One on each side. Middle seats.”
I put my helmet on, then triggered the visor, dropping the face shield and heads-up display into place. Once I confirmed that everything was functioning and I could see all the data I needed, I retracted it and climbed up the back ramp into the Goat, ducking my head under the back deck and crouching in the tight space. It had three black seats with high backs down each wall, the two forward ones filled with troopers, the other four empty. I took the middle seat on the left wall and Mac sat across from me. Two more soldiers came in behind us and took the rear. Belham would be in the front next to the driver. Add in the gunner and we had a full load of nine.
One of the soldiers hit the ramp lever and it closed us in. We still got light through the armored windows on either side, so thick that they distorted any view. We weren’t meant to see out from the back, but the windows added a sense of location. I synched my helmet to the internal comms right in time to hear Belham speak.
“We in?”
“Check, Sergeant.” The soldier directly beside me spoke. A female voice.
“Moving out.” The lieutenant’s voice came over the speaker with a slightly different hum that said it was radio, not internal. My helmet could handle up to five communications channels at a time. I could hear all of them, and then switch to broadcast on the one I needed. It took practice to tell the different channels apart as they blended in my earpiece, but I’d had plenty of that. For the moment I had one channel open inside our vehicle, one for the platoon, so I’d hear the four vehicles in our convoy, and one for the line back to company headquarters. On that one I’d hear anything Politte sent back to his boss, or any new incoming orders.
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