Planetside

by Michael Mammay

  “I see,” I said. His story varied slightly from what I’d heard previously, but not significantly. “Then what happened?”

  Xiang turned to Essenbach, who nodded. “Then sir, we pulled security so they could bring in a MEDEVAC. Essenbach and I, we had inner perimeter.”

  “So you were close to the bird when it came in?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said together.

  “Okay, good.” I tapped a note into my device. “Now this is important. Did you see them put Lieutenant Mallot on board?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Xiang.

  “You’re sure?” I highlighted my note.

  “Yes, sir,” said Xiang, and Essenbach nodded. “But that’s not all.”

  I tried to contain my elation. This was the first definitive evidence that someone saw Mallot loaded. “Okay. What else?”

  “Sir—” Xiang paused. “They loaded all the casualties on the ship.”

  “Okay,” I said. He spoke like it was important, but it seemed simple enough.

  Xiang stared directly at me. “Sir, you don’t understand. They loaded all the casualties. The Cappans too.”

  A chill ran through me. “On our ship? They put the fucking Cappans on our ship?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said together.

  “Where did the ship go?” I knew the answer instinctively, but I had to ask. Taking a living species off their home planet violated at least half a dozen laws. A few pandemics and millions of dead hundreds of years ago made sure those laws stayed on the books and were strictly enforced.

  Xiang shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. Up.”

  “So off the planet?” I asked.

  Xiang looked at Essenbach again, then back to me. “We can’t say for sure, sir. But it looked like any other med bird taking off.”

  “Holy shit.” I stood up and started pacing. “Who else did you tell this to?”

  “Nobody, sir,” said Xiang.

  “Nobody?” I stopped and turned to Xiang. “Why not?”

  Xiang flinched, and I realized I’d raised my voice.

  “Sorry.” I forced myself to sit back down. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “Sergeant Belham told us not to,” said Essenbach in a high, squeaky voice.

  “That’s right, sir,” said Xiang. “The day after the attack. That’s when Sergeant First Class Belham told us to keep our mouths shut.”

  “I see.” I rocked back on my stool so it sat on two legs.

  I paused for a moment, fighting the urge to explode, then calming myself before speaking. “Sergeant Belham did the right thing.” I wasn’t sure it was true, but the privates needed to believe it, regardless.

  I caught up with Belham coming out of the headquarters after I finished talking to his soldiers. It was one of those fortuitous timing things, where he was coming to look for me at the same time I sought him out. I didn’t give him a chance to speak, and I walked up and got right in his face. “Why did you hide these two from the investigation?”

  The short sergeant’s face dropped like I punched him in the gut, but he recovered quickly. He took a half step back with one foot to put himself at an angle and create space between us. “I take it that they told you something useful then, sir?”

  “You know damn well they did.” I consciously dropped the volume of my voice so it wouldn’t carry to the entire base.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s good. But if they’d told someone before now, maybe I wouldn’t even be here.” It came out almost as a hiss. “You intentionally covered up information in an investigation.”

  Belham paused, pursed his lips. “Yes, sir. I did,” he said after a moment.

  “That’s it?” I gestured at him with my hands, the way I do when I get frustrated. “No explanation?”

  “Do you want an explanation, sir?”

  “Of course I want a fucking explanation!”

  He nodded. “Walk with me, sir.” He started walking without waiting to see if I followed. I almost didn’t, but something in the way he said it grabbed me. He had too much confidence, and it made me curious.

  “I reported the situation by the book, sir,” he said, after we’d walked two dozen meters.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Hear me out, sir,” he said, cutting off my protest. “Let me say what I’ve got to say, then you go ahead and pass your judgment and do what you’ve got to do.”

  I stopped walking. “Okay. But you tell me everything.”

  “Yessir. Everything. When we got back off of mission the day LT Mallot got hit, I had Sergeant Caena report what he saw. What his whole team saw. Caena was Essenbach and Xiang’s team leader. They all saw the same thing, so he went to HQ and debriefed. Standard procedure.”

  “Caena told you, too?”

  “Yessir, he told me before he told HQ. I’m the one who sent him there. I figured the captain would flip out, but nothing happened. It was late, and we had work to do on our equipment, plus an inventory of Mallot’s kit, so I didn’t follow up until the next morning.”

  “You had to know it was a big deal,” I said.

  “Yessir, I knew what it meant. But when you’re down here in the shit, sometimes the big picture doesn’t matter as much as the little ones. I did what I had to do, I put my soldiers down to sleep, and I planned to check on it the next morning.”

  “Planned to . . .”

  “Yessir. But then things got crazy that night. Multiple rocket attacks. We were up and down, and didn’t get much rest. Long story short, it was almost noon before I made it to Company HQ.”

  “Wait, before you go further. Who did you specifically speak to at Company?”

  “The captain, sir.”

  “Captain Zattel?”

  Belham nodded. “Yes, sir. I spoke to him directly.”

  “Okay.” I blew out air through my nose. “Be very precise. What did you tell him?”

  “I told him . . . no, wait, I asked him. I asked him if Caena filed a report. And he told me that he had.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Then the captain said that Caena had reported nonsense, and he was evacuating him for a psych consult.”

  I stood silently for at least a half minute, processing. Zattel knew. Or he legitimately thought Caena was crazy, but I didn’t believe that for a second. “So what did you do?”

  “What do you think I did, sir? I told the captain that my man saw what he saw.”

  “What did Zattel say to that?”

  “He asked me, very deliberately, if I saw anything myself. Which I hadn’t. Then he repeated himself. He said Caena. Didn’t. See. Anything. That’s how he said it. Then he raised his voice, and asked me if I had a problem.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘No, sir, I don’t have a problem.’ You can check it out with anyone who was in the command post that day if you want. Everyone heard that last part . . . the captain yelling.”

  I nodded. “No, I believe you. So that’s why you had Essenbach and Xiang keep their mouths shut.”

  He nodded. “Yessir.”

  “Shit.” I kicked up dust with the ball of my foot.

  “Yessir.”

  “And when the investigation came around . . .”

  “I never gave the major doing the investigation the names. I told him that Caena thought he saw something unusual, but Caena was gone. Told him nobody else saw anything. Didn’t want anyone else disappearing off to psych.”

  “Wait, you told the investigating officer about Caena?” I’d been looking at the dirt, but I looked back up.

  “Yes, I definitely did.”

  “That wasn’t in the report.” Was it? I know I hadn’t seen it, because I’d have remembered. No way did I miss that.

  “That I can’t help you with, sir. I know I told him.”

  “As part of your statement?” I asked.

  Belham thought for a moment. “No, sir, I don’t think so. I think this was before. As the seni
or guy present the day Mallot got hit, the major talked to me first. Mostly I gave him the names of the people he should talk to.”

  I punched my palm. “Okay . . . okay.”

  “What do we do now, sir?”

  “Hold on, I need to think.” Belham had told the investigator about Caena, and Zattel knew about Caena for sure. Who else knew, and when? “I need to look at the report again, but I left it spaceside. I don’t want to confront Zattel, because I’d give too much away.”

  “Yessir. I’d much prefer you didn’t talk to the captain.”

  “That’s why you had me talk to your men outside the headquarters.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And I still need to get out and talk to Karikov.”

  “Sir . . . about that . . .”

  “Oh just spit it out.” I almost chuckled in spite of myself. What else could happen?

  “When you were talking to the men, I went and checked the satellite feeds for the area where we got ambushed. You’re not going to believe this.”

  “No coverage?” I believed it immediately.

  “They hit us in a fifty-five minute window between passes,” he said.

  “What about the geo-synch?” We had two types of satellites: The high-tech ones that gave the most data, that passed over every hour or so, and the lower-resolution geo-synchronous birds that traded off some capability to be able to maintain a persistent stare.

  “Geo-synch feed was down. Went down almost an hour before we got hit, and didn’t come back on until well after.”

  I stared at him. “Fuck.”

  “Yessir.”

  “That’s a lot of coincidences.”

  “Yessir. Remember after the ambush where I told you something smelled funny? The stink is damn near overpowering now.”

  “Yeah.” I let my arms fall to my sides. We’d been ambushed in a perfect window of time that existed almost never, by a force using tactics they never used, in a location where nobody should have been. I knew what the data told me, but I still didn’t want to believe it. And I definitely didn’t want to say it out loud. But it all pointed to one thing:

  Someone had set us up.

  They’d used indigenous forces, so that pointed the arrow at Karikov because his Special Operators worked closely with them. But someone else could have done it, maybe, knowing that I’d think that way. Perhaps I was overthinking it. Karikov provided the simplest answer.

  “Sir?” Belham spoke, and I realized that I’d been standing there for a while without speaking.

  “Sorry. We can’t go back out until I get some more answers. I need to go spaceside.” I made the decision, and instantly knew it was the right one. I couldn’t put more soldiers at risk taking me out to see Karikov until I knew who wanted to stop me. And until I knew how far they were willing to go to do it.

  “Yessir, I understand.” He paused. “Sir, whatever happens, you need to protect my people.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  Belham stepped in front of me as I went to go, his dark eyes staring up at mine. “No, sir. With all due respect, fuck that. Don’t give me that officer answer that lets you off the hook when they get screwed, and you say, ‘Eh, I did what I could.’ I need more than that.”

  “Belham. I’ll do what I fucking can.”

  He smiled. “Yessir. That’s better.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I reviewed my notes on the shuttle up to Cappa Base. I had a lot of problems, and not a lot of solutions. The disappearance of Sergeant Caena via psych indicated that he’d probably gone through the hospital, where I wouldn’t get a warm welcome. First, someone took alien life off of its planet in contravention of law. Second, the crew that did it was dead, and third, I couldn’t tell anyone about my two witnesses without putting them in jeopardy. Add to that the possibility that Karikov had organized an ambush of our own forces to prevent us from getting to him, and the lovely fact that I had absolutely no way to prove or disprove it . . . yeah, I was stuck.

  My gut said to pursue the Special Ops angle first. I could put some technical folks to work to see what happened to the satellites, and maybe find a lead there. But to do that would alert Stirling, and I didn’t know yet if he had something to do with Caena’s disappearance—I couldn’t rule out the chance that Karikov and Stirling had worked together. Definitely not on everything. No way would Stirling be a party to his own men getting attacked the previous day. Stirling was an asshole, but he’d never go that far. I’d have liked to say the same thing about Karikov, but there were enough signs to give me doubts. Either way, I didn’t know the full relationship between the two, and until I did, I didn’t want to give away anything to Stirling that I didn’t have to.

  The shuttle landed in the hangar with a rough thump, a little harder than normal, and it jarred me back into the present. I stood before the door finished opening and hopped down the ramp and through the tunnel into the decontamination chamber, Mac following quickly behind me. The less said about decon, the better. Suffice it to say that you get sprayed and radiated and scanned in uncomfortable ways to make sure you’re not carrying any nasty surprises from the surface. It had a weird smell that nobody ever explained to me, like a cross between ammonia and burning toast.

  It wasn’t the worst thing I’d experienced, but it was in the top ten.

  Major Alenda waited immediately outside the chamber, which proved useless since we were still in the hangar and couldn’t hear each other until we put some distance between us and the cacophony of engines and machinery.

  She spoke once the noise subsided. “How was the trip planetside, sir?”

  I gave her a nasty glance. “We got ambushed and Hardy got blown up. How do you think it was? And don’t even tell me that you told me so. Not after Hardy got hit.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it, sir.”

  I nodded curtly. “How is he?”

  “He’s stable sir. His hip was messed up pretty bad, and they’ve got him under sedation for at least the next seventy-two hours to speed the repairs. Doctor says he’ll probably be laid up for ten days, and another week after that before he’s fully fit for duty again.”

  “Seventeen days for a shattered hip? That’s a pretty good facility,” I said. “You wouldn’t get much better than that back in the civilized part of the galaxy.”

  “That’s a fact, sir. We get some pretty high-end docs out here.”

  “I guess so.” I pushed the button and the door leading out of the hangar whooshed open. “Thanks for checking on him, Lex.” I felt like crap that he got hit on his first mission, like somehow I’d been responsible.

  Alenda waited for me to enter first, then took a few quick steps to catch back up. “Did you get what you needed for the investigation, sir?”

  “Captain Zattel had everything set up when I got there, just like you said he would,” I said. Alenda was fishing for something, but that didn’t mean I had to make it easy for her. If she wanted to know something, I wanted her to ask it. Something nagged at me about the question. I couldn’t explain it, but I started to assume someone else wanted the answers. Someone above her. It might have been my imagination. My brain does funny things when my own people try to kill me in an ambush. We walked in silence until we almost reached the door to my quarters.

  “Sir . . .” she said, finally.

  “Yes?” I stopped and turned to face her.

  “We got reports about the attack, and then the request for the shuttle.” She paused. “And nothing else.”

  I smiled. “I know. That’s all I sent.”

  “Yes, sir. We got a report from Captain Zattel, but all he said was that you conducted interviews, not what they were about.”

  “Yep.” I nodded. “I ordered everyone I interviewed not to talk about it. Glad to see they listened.”

  “Yes, sir.” Alenda looked down at the floor and clasped her hands in front of herself. “It’s just . . . my boss doesn’t do well with not knowing what’s going on in his command
.”

  “I understand. If I were in Colonel Stirling’s position, I’d feel the exact same way.” I softened my voice a little. “I understand the position that puts you in.”

  Alenda let out her breath. “That’s great, sir. So you’ll talk to him?”

  I thought for a moment. “Sure, I’ll talk to him. Let me get a shower and I’ll head right over. You’d think after decon you’d feel clean. I never do. They should work on that.”

  Alenda gave a half smile. “Thanks, sir.”

  “Don’t mention it.” I had no intention of briefing Stirling, but I didn’t want Alenda to know that. Now that I knew Stirling was interested, I decided to let him wait. It was kind of a shitty thing to do to Lex, but I didn’t exactly have a duffel bag full of other ideas.

  “Hey, did you find anything out about Sergeant Santillo’s early cryo call?”

  Lex shook her head. “It seems on the up and up, sir. They moved cryo earlier for thirty soldiers with one order. I dug deeper, but the only answer I could get was that one of the cryo techs got injured so they had to spread the work out with fewer hands.”

  “Thanks.” I hadn’t expected to get any help there. I suppose it was a plausible explanation, though it still felt like too much of a coincidence. I turned and went into my room.

  I tossed my stuff on the sofa. They didn’t want me at the hospital, and with Hardy unconscious, I couldn’t use him as an excuse to visit. I didn’t want to talk to Stirling, and Karikov didn’t want to talk to me. I had to talk to someone. After a minute, I picked up the comm and pulled up the contact info that Karen Plazz gave me. If there was one person I knew nobody was working with, it was the media. She answered on the second buzz and we agreed to meet for chow in forty-five minutes. I stripped out of my stuff and jumped in the shower. It wouldn’t do to go meet a reporter smelling like combat and decon.

  I beat Plazz to the mess hall and waited for her before I got in line. She came in with her blonde hair pulled back in her serious-looking bun, wearing a white long-sleeve shirt and tan pants that were a little too tight for space duty. At least five soldiers checked out her ass as she walked past. I doubt that was an accident on her part.