“Thought so. Take me with you. I will contact the command post.”
“What are you doing?” asked the red–head.
“This is Arun McEwan. The same Aux guy who ran rings around the Hardits in Operation Clubhouse… am I right?”
Arun nodded.
“See? He’s beaten the Hardits before. If anyone can do it again, it’s him. Spartika will want to meet him.
“Come on, follow me,” he said to Arun, who had to race to keep up with him. “I’ll brief you on the way.”
The prisoner said his name was Joel Deacon, and either he was a convincing liar, or he really did tell Arun everything he knew.
Joel Deacon was 22 but looked much older due to the scarring suffered in his role carrying out the dirtiest and most toxic tasks going in the maintenance of Detroit’s shuttle port. This aircraft hangar was built into a mountainside connected to Level 7, and screened by a natural waterfall. Deacon explained that he’d failed the final year of novice school and never made it to cadet.
He identified the vintage Marine as Sushala Kraevoi, aged either 19 or 102, depending on how you counted the years she had spent in ice.
They were part of a small force of Resistance fighters based in the ruins of Detroit under a leader called Spartika. Deacon claimed forty survivors were currently in Detroit with around ten outside on active duty, freeing recruits from slave farms, ambushing Hardit patrols, or making hit–and–run raids on vulnerable targets.
Fifty survivors. And they had described themselves as the Resistance. It wasn’t many, but it would make a good start for Day#1 of the reconquest.
— Chapter 07 —
When Arun and Deacon reached the perimeter post where Hecht’s section had overcome the three survivors, Deacon ushered Gupta to one side and pulled out a box attached to a wire that disappeared into the floor.
He tapped out a rhythm with his finger for about a minute before listening for a response. Arun could hear nothing, but Barney explained.
The survivors were communicating through Morse Code, the little box vibrating its response in Deacon’s hand. Barney put a translation onto Arun’s visor.
Arun couldn’t help grinning. Judging by the long string of insults in the response, the person at the command post had an even bigger grudge against Nhlappo than Annalee Vanderman.
But the former chief instructor’s notoriety appeared to be working in their favor. With a grin on his face, Deacon informed Arun that the Detroit survivor group had agreed to an alliance and they were to proceed to the command post without delay.
Arun followed Deacon, Kraevoi and Vanderman with hope in his heart. His trust, though, needed more than enthusiastic words of support to be won over. He quietly assigned two Marines to each prisoner, with orders to watch them closely.
He was trying to do this the nice way. But only to begin with.
— Chapter 08 —
On the way to the resistance command post, Deacon cheerfully brought Arun up to date on events in Detroit during the civil war and the part he played. From time to time, Kraevoi would give a snort of derision and curtly correct her comrade’s account.
Arun did nothing to intervene during the bickering, nor did he question Deacon when he told of events he couldn’t possibly have witnessed. All Arun wanted for now was a summary of events, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of potential opponents. The fine details could be collected, corrected, and refined later. If they lived that long.
Death came to Detroit from above and below, Deacon explained, but worst of all had been the enemy from within.
The rebels’ first move had been to seize control of Tranquility’s fleet of system defense boats, and of the two orbital elevators that were tethered to Tranquility’s surface.
General Cabrakan, the commander of the Detroit base, had immediately ordered the emergency thawing of thousands of Marines. Beta City meanwhile, over in the other main continent of Serendine, had gone ominously quiet.
Under the influence of months of mind–altering drugs, the Beta City Marines had been in such a suggestive state that they didn’t bat an eyelid at the initial bloodletting in which loyalist officers and NCOs were purged. They didn’t question the orders to ride the orbital elevator and emerge in stealthed swarms until they reached sufficient number to attack all the orbital defense platforms simultaneously.
The Hardits and rebel Jotuns had colluded to hack Beta’s many internal systems. Any units who did not follow the orders of the new so-called Free Corps units without question were lured into their hab-disks where they were locked in. The hab-disks were designed to be self-sufficient, allowing the inhabitants to survive for years before emerging. But, as Kraevoi pointed out, if the Hardit techs had hacked the base, they could also fry the systems inside the hab-disks, turning them from giant survival pods into waterless, airless death traps.
Up in orbit, the defense platforms remained loyal to the old order. The rebels anticipated that these isolated, and in many cases automated, platforms would respond only to force, which is why they moved their Free Corps Marine units into orbit as soon as they could.
But the defense platforms saw the humans coming, and were not fooled by rebel assurances that they were all on the same side.
Raked by case munitions, Fermi cannons and railguns, not even the stealth function of their battlesuits was enough to protect the Free Corps Marines of Beta City. The platforms extracted a fearful toll of carnage on the traitor humans, but they were primarily designed to combat enemy war boats, and heavy objects cast into Tranquility’s gravity well. To defend against close assault by enemy void troops, the orbital platforms were supposed to rely on the Human Marine Corps to throw up skirmish screens.
But those defenders had now become the attackers.
Very few of the Beta City Marines who ascended the orbital elevator that day descended it after the orbital defense shield had been eliminated.
But destroyed it was, and that meant the rebel fleet of war boats now took up station in orbit around Tranquility.
Detroit’s fearsome defensive warren still held out, as did the continent–sized Troggie nest filled with fearless defenders from the barely sentient guardians with rending claws to specialist technician, leader and planner classes, and more.
For a day there was a tense stand-off as the Free Corps consolidated their gains, and the loyalists prepared for the coming fight.
The activity in Detroit was frantic. General Cabrakan had allowed this rebellion to go ahead, this stain on Jotun honor through the settled galaxy. Whether through incompetence or treachery was of no consequence to the regimental commanders who seized Cabrakan and his staff, summarily executing the lot.
The Jotuns were highly visible in organizing Detroit’s defenses. Whether fine tuning the placement of heavy weapons in the redoubt embrasures, inspecting the backups in the water purification system, or a myriad hand-on tasks. The human defenders were astonished because of the Jotuns’ well-known aversion to being underground there was now no sign.
Deacon guessed that the Jotuns had drugged themselves to overcome their phobia. Kraevoi speculated that their phobia had been a ruse, though to what purpose she had no idea.
Arun waved away their arguing as an irrelevance. In his experience trying too hard to make sense of alien thinking was a mistake. Sometimes you just had to accept alien minds ran along different channels, and move on.
Which is what the Jotun hierarchy did now in their strengthening of Detroit. Within minutes of executing Cabrakan, they appointed Colonel Little Scar as commander–in–chief.
The colonel arrested anyone suspected of insufficient loyalty, organized gangs to bring in food supplies from the city’s hinterland, reorganized defenses, and secretly scattered trusted Marine teams to hide outside of the base from where they would organize units of resistance fighters to conduct guerrilla warfare behind the lines of any besieging troops.
It was one of those guerrilla groups who formed the core of the survivor
s holed up in Detroit.
The first of the resistance groups had scarcely left Detroit through secret underground passageways when the lull in the fighting broke.
In the confusion of the arrests, rebel Jotun officers had made their own secret escape from Detroit, and were now safely in orbit when they unleashed the twin plagues.
A tailored airborne virus was released by human traitors throughout the continent. To humans it was harmless, but to Jotuns, deadly. The Jotuns were encased in their battlesuits that should have kept them safe from biological attack, but the suits had long ago been sabotaged by the Hardits, leaving a weakness they could one day exploit. They had waited decades for this opportunity.
With the defenders’ officers dead or dying, the rebels chose that moment to attack. Rebel human NCOs still inside Detroit ordered their units to fire on loyalist defenders. Planetary assault units bombarded Detroit’s topside defenses, before launching a spearhead of assault Marines backed by immense armies of Hardit militia.
The Hardits’ main forces were below ground. In another attack prepared for decades, they launched the second of the twin plagues. Artificial pheromone commands were pumped into the Troggie nest, signals that faithfully replicated the scent of the nest’s Great Leader. Confused and stung to fury by the Hardits’ false commands, the Trogs turned on each other, powerless to resist the Hardit underground assault battalions who drove through the continental–scale nest, exterminating their subterranean rivals and claiming their tunnels for their own.
While the fighting still raged deep within Detroit and through the Troggie nest, the rebel Jotun leaders in orbit began outdoing each other in claiming credit for the victory over FTL comm links to the rebels’ high command.
Suddenly, loyalist AI-piloted drone fighters de-stealthed and swarmed through the orbiting rebel fleet.
The loyalist AIs would have succeeded if not for the Free Corps unit that had once been the 534th Void Marine Regiment, who had captured the moon of Antilles. The 534th raced back to Tranquility orbit where they engaged the loyalist assault. With the battlesuit AIs handling targeting and maneuvering, and the Free Corps Marines adding human unpredictability and cunning, it was a battle of Marine cyborgs versus system defense robots.
Human guile was not enough to compensate for the frail human form; the robots could accelerate at rates that would kill even hardened Marine physiques.
Again and again, the Void Marines tried to make their superior numbers count by breaking up the robot formations and surrounding isolated pockets. For a long time, the robots repulsed these attacks, inflicting terrible losses on the Marines.
But the robots took casualties themselves. In the end the Void Marines simply wore them down by attrition until they were isolated and easy to pick off one by one.
The Free Corps had control of the orbital battlefield once more, but it had been a close run thing.
The rebel commander, General Banba, had achieved her mission objectives to capture the fleet and neutralize both Marine bases. Fearful of further loyalist surprises, Banba recalled all her forces from Tranquility, leaving to the Hardit militias the task of finishing off the few loyalist survivors.
Within days, the rebel fleet was headed out system to fight in their next engagement of the civil war, leaving a cloud of scuttled craft too damaged to survive an interstellar journey.
The Free Corps Marines had gone.
But many tens of thousands of humans remained, Aux workers in the mines and farms, survivors and resistance fighters who had fled the battles or been tasked to form resistance cells. All of them were unified in an abhorrence of the Hardits.
Humanity would not meekly yield to the Hardit slave yoke.
Survivors contacted each other throughout the continent of Baylshore. They even made contact for a while with a resistance group in the other continent, Serendine. The Human Resistance was born.
Propelled by the hope and hatred that burned so fiercely in their breasts, the Resistance recaptured Detroit and then began to take back and hold the surrounding territory.
Civil administration had only just gotten started under the leadership of the supreme Resistance commander, Spartika, when the Hardits finally stirred themselves to stamp out this challenge to their authority.
Humans everywhere were rounded up and held in fortified labor camps. Detroit was retaken by Hardit militia.
“But we found you in control of Detroit,” interrupted Arun at this point in Deacon’s narrative. “You must have rebuilt your combat strength enough to retake the city again.”
Deacon shrugged. “I don’t know about any retaking. The monkeys drifted away and we sort of snuck back in.”
“Welcome to the new Tranquility,” taunted Kraevoi, a devil-may-care wildness in her gray eyes. “It is a world of shackled slaves and the last few stragglers of a failed resistance. Those you see before you are nothing more than diseased rats inhabiting the ruins of our city. Tell me, Major McEwan, are you so sure now that you were right to come back?”
“I’ll tell you what I am sure about,” he snapped. “You need new leadership. Someone with a vision of hope. This meeting with Spartika can’t happen too soon.”
— Chapter 09 —
The Resistance command post was a squatters’ camp in an operations room on Level 3. Arun was very familiar with the thick smell of old sweat that had assailed him the moment he entered — many times he’d spent days or weeks living in his own stink inside his battlesuit. But the suffocating reek of defeat that infected the command post made him gag.
He sat with the Resistance sub-leader at an unpowered tactical control desk. A noise made him glance behind. The sound was another Resistance fighter who had plonked her bare feet onto the control desk. She proceeded to rub at the thick callouses on her soles and heels. The woman was dressed in rags.
Arun was sure there were plenty of smartfabric fatigues available in Detroit that could self-clean, and be programed to the cut and color of smart military garments. But there was no attempt to look smart here, and this worried Arun more than any other sign that the Resistance had lost their spirit. Their clothes were camouflaged by default in shades of old dirt, dried blood, and with a greasy sheen on collars and cuffs.
He turned back to Jennifer Boon, the Resistance officer he was trying to negotiate with. “Well?” he said, trying to keep the disdain from his voice. “Will you join with us or not? Deacon said you would.”
Boon shrugged. “Just trying to keep everyone alive. Look, tag along if you like. You got no complaints from me. We keep going from inertia and I guess you’ll give us a little impetus to keep going longer.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Listen to me, spouting such fancy drent. What I really mean is that we stick together because we don’t know what else to do. You come here with your head stuffed with dreams of glory, but that won’t last. Not with your force strength. It isn’t a matter of us joining you. Give it a few months, and if we’re both of us still alive, you’ll wake up one day and realize it is you who have joined us.”
Arun was so angry he had to look away. He could see Gupta out in the passageway, the stony look on his face clear through his transparent visor. The veteran’s contempt at this breakdown of discipline would be seething inside him.
The smell of cooking wafted in through the hatch, reminding Arun that it wasn’t just the rest of his team who were outside the command post.
He tried once more to make Boon see sense. “What about Spartika? What would she say? Where is she anyway?”
Boon thought a moment. “I suppose when she gets back she’ll work herself up some enthusiasm.”
“And you can’t? Get a grip of yourself, Boon. Are you a Resistance commander or not?”
“Listen, McEwan,” she replied, anger driving out the lethargy in her voice. “The Resistance is finished. Spartika sees it differently, but she doesn’t know when to stop, and she’s not the kind of person you say no to.”
“That’s it!” Arun thumped his hand into the
desk, making the foot-rubber behind him lose her balance and tip onto the floor. “I will not accept you giving up. You are the Human Resistance whether I have to force you to remember or not.”
It was Boon’s turn to slam the desk. She rose to her feet and clenched her fists. “You can take your sense of superiority and shove it up your ass. You swank in here with your shiny ACE-2 battlesuits and think we’re scum. Let me tell you. Two years of war teaches you how to survive. We’re not as defenseless as you think. Threaten me again and you will regret it.”
Arun nodded, almost with respect. “Better. Now take me to Spartika.”
“She’s out raiding. Due back in six days. You’ll have to see the Deputy Commander instead. That’s Amadou McKenzie. He’s out on patrol, checking our topside sensor network. He’ll be back any minute.”
Arun lost it! He grabbed Boon by the shoulders, fighting hard against the urge to crush the pathetic individual’s bones under his powered gauntlets.
All around the room, he heard the sound of weapons powering up.
“This is war,” Arun shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, “not a frakking tea party. I need to see this Spartika and you will take me to her. Now!”
— Chapter 10 —
Even through the AI-doctored view Barney was feeding into his visor, Arun appreciated the beauty of the woodland clearing where dappled sunlight warmed the rich purple and lilac of the foliage. It was only thirty klicks out from Detroit, but Arun was astonished to learn such a restful vista had always existed so close to his home.
One day he would like to lie here without helmet, armor or Barney, and see the clearing through his own eyes. Instead, Barney spoiled the view by sketching humanoid outlines over nearby patches of grass and ferns, the shapes of prone Marines in their stealthed battlesuits. Just like Arun.
After the war he’d explore the woods in peace, but not this clearing, he decided. Because at its center stood a crude, blocky building with a single dark opening. It looked long disused, abandoned decades ago or more. But it wasn’t. This was Spartika’s patrol base.
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