Planetside

by Michael Mammay

  Sir—Acknowledge your guidance. Situation is worse than initially reported. Colonel Elliot, the Hospital Commander, was involved in illegal activity planetside that includes Cappans. She’s KIA, but need MEDCOM to act immediately to give me access to the hospital in order to determine other involvement. Need authority to arrest MEDCOM personnel. Highest priority.

  I might not have conveyed the severity of the issue, but I had to trust Serata to trust me. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Except it did.

  Plazz was waiting outside my door, leaning against the far wall, when I exited. I’d planned to go to the gym and had dressed for it. She had dressed appropriately for stalking, apparently, in tan pants and a white shirt, her hair up in some sort of thing in back.

  “Your guards wouldn’t let me in,” she said.

  I glanced at G One. “Huh. Bad guards.” G One gave no reaction at all. I kind of liked that about her. Sometimes you need a good straight man. Or woman.

  Plazz rolled her eyes. “I’m sure. You’ve been avoiding me. But at least you dressed up for the occasion.”

  I looked down at my gym attire, then started walking, motioning for Plazz to come along. “Give us some space, guys.” G One hustled a dozen meters to the front and G Two dropped back behind us. Mac hadn’t returned. Probably recovering.

  “I haven’t been avoiding you. I just didn’t seek you out,” I said.

  “You didn’t answer your line, and your major told me you were too busy to talk.”

  “Odd.” I hadn’t told Alenda to do that, but I couldn’t fault her judgment. Generally any opportunity to put off a reporter made sense. “Not my intention.”

  “You’re going to the gym with an injured shoulder?” she asked.

  “This?” I nodded to my shoulder. “It’s not bad.”

  “Really? Can you raise your hand over your head?”

  “That’s doctor-patient privileged information,” I said.

  “That only applies to doctors giving information about their patients, not the other way around.”

  I looked over at her. “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “I’m going to take a ride. They’ve got a good holo bike here. Makes you feel like you’re riding out in the real world.”

  “Which world?” she asked. “Cappa?”

  “That would suck. They could probably program it, but not for me. I’m taking a nice ride down a shady path beside a lake. I can’t just sit there in my room. I’ll go stir crazy.”

  “So the investigation is complete?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said, a little too quickly.

  “But if you had more to do, you wouldn’t be sitting in your room.” She made it hard to tell what she knew already and what she didn’t. I guess that was the point.

  “Still ongoing.” I took a more formal tone. “I can’t comment.”

  “Yeah, don’t give me that bullshit.”

  I put my hand over my heart. “I’m hurt.”

  “I know,” she said. “You’re hurt from a daylong firefight down on the surface. What was that about?”

  “Who’d you talk to?”

  She smiled without showing her teeth. “Could have been any of a hundred people, now, couldn’t it? It’s hardly a secret.”

  “Still. Who told you?”

  “I’m not going to re—”

  Light blossomed in front of us and a wave of force flung me backward through the air. The sound followed, an earsplitting crack. It seemed to come an eternity after the flash, even though it had to be no more than a split second.

  I crumpled in a heap after what might have been a full flip. My shoulder exploded into fire, a lesser pain ripped into my lower leg, hot but distant. I tried to roll over, find a target, grab my sidearm. The corridor filled with smoke and dust, obscuring the source of the explosion with haze. Plazz lay on the floor to my right, huddled up into herself, her head buried in her arms.

  I continued to scan for targets. G One had been up there near the bomb, but the debris in the air obscured her. I forced myself to my knees, stumbled, then continued to my feet. I wobbled as I walked, staggering forward into the smoke. G Two rushed up to me.

  “Sir, get down!” His voice sounded distant, like someone speaking underwater.

  “We need to—”

  “I got it, sir! Get down!” He put his hands on each of my shoulders, sending a new wave of agony through me, and I jerked away.

  “Gaaah!”

  “Sorry, sir. I need to go find Gute.” He turned and shuffled forward into the smoke.

  An alarm clanged somewhere that sounded far away but probably wasn’t. I rubbed at my ears.

  The smoke disappeared through vents, some kind of emergency system sucking it from the hall. When it cleared enough, I could see G Two bent over what was left of his partner. A red mess. She’d taken the blast too close. Her position walking well in front of us probably saved my life. It had to have been a proximity trigger. If it had been a remote, whoever set it off would have waited for me. It might have been ego, but I had to believe I was the primary target.

  I tried to cut through the fog in my brain. I put my hand to my forehead to wipe away a bead of sweat and it came away smeared with blood. It hadn’t even stung until I touched it, but afterward it burned. Maybe more of an abrasion than a cut. That was my expert diagnosis without a mirror. I did have some experience getting blown up though.

  Plazz still lay on the floor. She’d untucked her head, but was still curled into a half ball.

  “You okay?” I asked. My voice sounded funny, barely audible over the ringing in my ears. “Karen?” I tried to make eye contact, but she wasn’t seeing me. “Karen!”

  “Huh?” She turned her head.

  “You okay?” I shouted.

  People started arriving—a few at first—but the trickle quickly turned into a flood and swarmed around us. Plazz never did answer me before we got separated by emergency personnel.

  I’m not sure when I sat back down, but I struggled to my feet again, ignoring the soldier who told me not to get up. I stumbled, which I’m sure made the soldier say I told you so in his head. I disregarded what was going on in his head and my own and forced my way through the gathering crowd back toward my quarters. I should have gone to check on G, but the MPs had started to cordon off the area and I couldn’t focus enough to argue with them. They’d secure the site until explosive ordnance got there and did an assessment of the bomb, took forensics.

  “Sir? You’re bleeding from your head.” Alenda accosted me as I cleared the majority of the crowd.

  “True,” I said.

  “Are you okay, sir? You’re wobbling. That explosion . . .”

  “I’m okay. G didn’t make it. Plazz . . . I think she’s okay,” I said.

  “Sir, you need to go to the hospital,” she insisted.

  I kept walking toward my room, forcing Alenda to turn around to walk with me. “I’m fine.”

  “Sir, you probably have a concussion. You might be in shock.”

  “I’m not in shock.”

  “Sir, you have a piece of metal sticking out of the front of your leg.”

  I looked down. A finger-sized piece of jagged shrapnel had wedged itself on the inside of my shin, blood oozing around it. That explained the pain. Perhaps I was in shock after all. “What did you find from the mining company’s scan?”

  Alenda’s face lit up, momentarily throwing her off of the topic of my injuries. “Eleven mines show significant anomalies, sir.”

  “Eleven. How significant?” I asked.

  “Very significant,” she said. “Dozens of unexplained pieces of machinery in some cases. I’ve asked them to expand their search to look at areas other than known mines as well.”

  I nodded. “Have our assets run an elemental spectrum scan over the eleven sites.”

  Alenda looked at me. “That’s a good idea, sir. I should have thought of that.”

  “Pretty good for a guy with a concuss
ion,” I said.

  “Sir, you really need to go to the hospital.”

  “Alenda, it might have been the hospital that tried to blow me up. No way am I going to make it easy for them. Just get me a medic to pull this shrapnel out of my leg and glue it up.”

  Alenda breathed out audibly in about the most outward sign of disrespect I’d seen from her. I probably deserved it. “Roger, sir. Will you at least get off your feet?”

  “Sure.” We reached my door and I put my hand on it to activate. “But bring me the results of the elemental spectrum as soon as you get it, I don’t care what else is going on.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll send a medic and get you more security as well.”

  I stopped. “Yeah. Check on G Two, also. He’s going to be in bad shape over his partner.”

  Alenda nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  The medic took longer than I planned. I wouldn’t let him give me anything for the pain because my head was fuzzy enough already, so he had to work a local anesthetic for my leg before he could pull out the metal. Then it stuck. Sometimes it’s just one of those days. He finally worked it free without causing too much additional blood or screaming and got the wound closed, but by the time he finished I couldn’t feel anything from the knee down. He said it would wear off in an hour or so, but the imaginary itching had already started.

  Mac rushed in as the medic opened the door to leave, almost bowling him over. “Sir, what happened? I heard about an explosion!”

  “Sit down, Mac.” I didn’t know if he knew about G yet, plus I didn’t want to keep looking up from my position lying on the sofa.

  “Are you okay?” He stared at the bandage around my leg and whatever the medic had done to my face. I had a new sling for my shoulder, too, but Mac knew about that injury already.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve had worse. Sit.”

  Mac took the desk chair and pulled it over. “I heard about G, sir.”

  I nodded. “It sucks. I’d pushed her farther ahead so I could talk to the reporter. If not, the blast would have got me too.”

  “Yes, sir. I talked to the guys at the blast site.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “How bad were you beat up from planetside?”

  “I’m good, sir. I mostly needed rest. Nothing broken.”

  I breathed out deeply. “Good. I’m going to need you.”

  “We’re getting a squad for protection, sir.”

  I nodded slowly. “I need to see how Plazz is doing.”

  “They took her to the hospital. Her brain got rattled, but she’s okay, I think. Treated and released. A little out of it.”

  “That could be the blast, or it could be the shock of the attack,” I said. “You never know how somebody is going to react to something like that.”

  Mac nodded. “Yes, sir. Ain’t that the truth?”

  “You checked on Hardy lately?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s doing well. Chasing around some female doc, I think. Might be he plays hurt for a couple extra days.”

  “Get him released as quickly as you can. I don’t want him hanging around there any longer than absolutely necessary.”

  Mac stared at me for a moment. “Sir, what the fuck is going on?”

  I shook my head. “I wish I knew. But until I know who set that explosive, I’m not taking any chances.”

  “You think you know who it was, sir?”

  I half shrugged. I didn’t want to tell Mac too much. I trusted him, but I also didn’t want to drag him into the crosshairs.

  “All I know is that there are people in the hospital who know things, and someone tried to blow me up.” I didn’t really think one of the doctors did it, but I couldn’t rule it out and I was done taking chances.

  Mac shifted his lips to one side. “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to spring the lieutenant, sir.”

  “Thanks. Now help me over to my terminal,” I said.

  Mac came over and I put my good arm over his shoulders so he could support my numb leg. I was running out of body parts that worked. We moved awkwardly over to the terminal and I sat down, taking a few deep breaths to relax after the strain.

  “You going to be okay, sir?”

  “I’m good. You get Hardy.”

  Mac nodded and disappeared. I punched up my messages, and Serata’s flashed on the screen so I brought it up.

  Butler—Contain the situation. Expect no help from MEDCOM.

  What. The. Fuck.

  One line, two sentences. I had a serious situation that could affect the entire galaxy if it got out of control, and he gave me two sentences and zero help. It didn’t make sense.

  I started to reply, but stopped myself. If I answered Serata, I’d just get myself in trouble. He’d put up with a lot from me, but not the vitriol I had boiling in me right then. I needed to let his message sit. On a whim, I wrote to Chu.

  Chu—I need to talk to Karikov. No alternates acceptable. Get the man on the line to me. He’s got four hours or I take action without his input.

  Butler

  I had no idea what I would do if he didn’t answer in four hours. Hell, I had no idea what I’d do if he did answer. Maybe Serata’s vague message inspired me. Maybe I was just being an asshole. Either way, I hoped my message might force something to happen. Anything, as long as it gave me a direction I could move. I had a feeling it would work. Someone tried to kill me and failed. A lot of men might take that personally, get angry. I wouldn’t let it affect me, but nobody else knew that. They didn’t know how I’d react, so they didn’t know what I’d do in four hours. I was betting that they’d want to find out before it happened.

  My door buzzed and I shut down my monitor before calling for it to open.

  “Sir, you’re not going to believe this.” Alenda spoke before she even got in the room.

  “I don’t know, somebody attacked me in the corridor of a friendly base, and that’s the second time that’s happened since I’ve been here. I’d believe a lot right now,” I said.

  “I’ve got the elemental spectrum scans back.”

  “Damn. Already? That was fast.”

  “Yes, sir. I diverted the assets from all other missions.”

  I nodded. “Okay, what did you find?”

  “Sir . . . three of the sites.” She paused. “Tritium, deuterium, lithium.”

  “Oh fuck,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fusion engines.”

  “Yes, sir. Or at least, all the elements needed for one. And the tritium levels suggest that they’re either testing or already working.”

  I spun my chair back and forth for a moment. If they had fusion engines that worked . . . I searched back through my memory for what space assets we had that might be able to blockade them. I’d just looked at it, but I couldn’t remember clearly. I shook my head and recalled the information. We didn’t have much. Not enough. Space was too big. Once they cleared the atmosphere, they could go anywhere.

  Fusion engines. Shit.

  “Sir, they could—”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted. “If they’ve got fusion engines, they could leave the planet. If they reached the nearest jump site, they could disappear and we’d never find them.”

  “But they’re in a mine. The ships, if they are ships . . . they can’t be that big. There’s no way, right?”

  I stopped rocking in my chair. “At this point, I’m not sure I’d bet on what they might or might not be able to do. Because if I was betting, I’d have lost a lot of money on ‘There’s no way the enemy has fusion fucking engines.’”

  Alenda nodded. “Yes, sir. They might not be . . .” she stopped, perhaps sensing that I was going to continue my diatribe if she said anything else.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Go ahead. Say what’s on your mind.”

  “Yes, sir. I was going to say that it might not be ships. It might not even be engines. We’d see a similar signature from—”

  “From weapons.
” I finished her thought for her.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fusion weapons. Just one would be the end of Cappa Base. I hadn’t checked our defense systems. We had them, but no base had ever been attacked from a planet, so I didn’t know what they’d handle. We parked the base far enough from the planet so it wasn’t supposed to need defense from it.

  A fusion missile wouldn’t even have to hit us to destroy us. I didn’t know if that was worse or better than a ship powered with a fusion engine. Hell, they might have both. Launch at the base and use the chaos to provide cover for escaping ships. Not that they had anywhere to go. We knew all the habitable planets. They’d eventually have to land on one. Or slam a fusion bomb into it. They could hit us anywhere. If they picked the right targets they could kill tens of millions. Or they could smuggle themselves in somewhere. They had humans. Or mostly humans. I didn’t know how far their network extended.

  I tried to slow my breathing, control myself, concentrate. My head had started to hurt, though I don’t know if it came from the earlier explosion or the situation Alenda alerted me to.

  “Are you okay, sir?” asked Alenda.

  I nodded without looking at her. “I’m good.” My mind went back to Serata’s message. Contain. Shit. How did I contain this? I sat there for I don’t know how long, trying to figure it out. Alenda stood by without speaking. I don’t know why. Maybe she sensed something. Maybe she thought she needed permission to leave.

  “We’ve got to tell Stirling,” I said, finally.

  “Yes, sir.” Her tone said she agreed. When people answer you with ‘yes, sir’ all the time, you learn to read more into it.

  “I need to wait here in case Karikov messages. You go brief Colonel Stirling. Talk to him personally. I don’t want this filtered through an analyst, or buried in some report. Tell him exactly what you told me, and if he doesn’t understand the significance, tell him what I think it means,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The door whooshed open and Stirling entered my quarters exactly seven minutes later. I hadn’t moved from my spot in front of the monitor, but I minimized my messages. I didn’t need to stand up and have him see me wobble.