The Forgotten Outpost

by Gus Flory

  The man sniffed the blood on his fingertips. “It’s real blood. Is she going to be OK?”

  Diego looked down at Pristina’s face pressed against his chest.

  “She’ll be fine. She’ll be just fine.”

  The cart pulled in front of the emergency room entrance at the city’s main hospital. Ambulances and electric carts crowded the driveway. Emergency medical technicians, doctors and civilians tended to casualties or rushed them inside in a frenzy of urgent activity.

  Diego carried Pristina into the emergency room. A nurse ran up and checked her and guided them. Diego placed Pristina on a gurney, holding the cloth to her wound to stop the bleeding.

  The nurse checked the wound.

  “I’m OK, Major,” Pristina said. “Go find your team.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve got it from here, sir,” the nurse said.

  Diego strode out of the emergency room, checking his handheld. He tried calling Chief and Moxley again but got no answer.

  The police had locked the city down. They were everywhere. Their cars and vans sped down the concourses with sirens flashing. News broadcasts on screens mounted on the walls showed footage of the Governor speaking behind the podium on the stage at Einstein Plaza, then the explosion, followed by the savage attack by the men in black armor.

  Diego was in a state of stunned silence when he checked in at T-FORCE MAIN. He was ushered to a holding area with the surviving officers from his group. They were soon led to a landing pad atop the roof of the T-FORCE headquarters building and hustled into TH-60s. The landing pad roof opened to the orange Titan sky. The TH-60s hovered upward and away from the city and flew fast and low to Camp Hammersteel.

  When he arrived at the Tactical Operations Center, he filed a report on what he had witnessed with a sergeant from the intelligence section. Everyone in the TOC was in a state of heightened urgency. News broadcasts played up on the large screens. The bearded face of Amad Robodan appeared repeatedly.

  Forty-three people had been killed including four military members, one of whom was LT Obuyaye. An anonymous message sent to the Titan News Network purportedly from a group called the Neo-Fascist Bloc claimed responsibility for the attack.

  A little more than an hour after the explosion, the terrorist attack on Titan became the lead story on Mars and Earth. The bearded face of Amad Robodan appeared repeatedly on screens from Titan to Venus. Intelligence and military experts from Earth and Mars were already analyzing the event and debating whether a Neo-Fascist insurgency was now underway on Titan after three years of calm. Graphics on the screens read, “Terror on Titan,” and, “The Return of Robodan.”

  Diego hovered between the battle desk and the intelligence desk, trying to piece together all the information that was coming in, searching the data for clues to who the attackers were and where they could have taken Moxley. He searched flight manifests and casualty reports for Chief Yanez’s name.

  Gov. Cone appeared on the big screen making a public statement for the cameras. His head was wrapped in a bandage and his arm was in a sling. He urged the people of Titan to remain calm and resolute. “This act of barbarity will not go unanswered. The perpetrators of this cowardly attack will be brought to justice.”

  Col. Butcher sat at the main table on the TOC floor. He calmly asked questions of his staff and issued orders to deploy troops to secure various mission essential vulnerable areas in their area of operations.

  Diego moved to a Mission Secret computer up on the balcony. He watched the news reports on the big screen and checked the intelligence estimates. The information in the intelligence reports was mainly based on open-source content—on news reports. The news seemed to be the main factor driving the colonel’s decision-making.

  Diego called his higher, the Division information officer, to inform him of the Dragon Brigade’s posture, and about talking points for the media queries that were now coming into the battle desk. Diego was told he was not the lead and would remain in a secondary role.

  “Direct all media queries to Division. At this point, no one at Brigade will talk to the media.”

  After several hours, fatigue set in. The sense of urgency began to wane. The TOC slowly cleared of personnel. The colonel informed the staff that he would be on call in his office.

  Diego and several staff members took this as a sign to quietly exit and return to their rooms.

  Diego walked with his head down through the hallways, not looking up as soldiers passed. He trudged down the corridors to his building.

  He sat on his bed and held his face in his hands. His hands and uniform were soiled with grime and blood and the pungent smell of Titan’s nitrogen and methane atmosphere. He was too tired to remove his boots.

  His handheld blinked. He had a message from Havana. He opened it.

  “Diego, are you OK? Send me a message, would you? I’m so worried. It’s all over the news here.”

  She was dressed up, make-up on, her hair done up. Tegan was clinging to her mother’s waist. She had a fearful expression on her face and wiped tears from her cheeks. George stood behind them peering around them and then looking back at the news on the flat screen above the kitchen table. George and Tegan were in their pajamas.

  “We’re worried sick, Dee. They’re saying it was Amad Robodan, that he’s on Titan. That Neo-Fascist terrorists are targeting the military there. They canceled school here and raised security. We’re supposed to remain in quarters. Dee, let us know you’re OK. I’m so sick of this. I’m so sick of this war. Please send us a message.”

  “They’re confirming it was Robodan, Mom,” George said.

  “Oh, Diego. We love you.”

  The message ended. Diego flipped through the screens on his handheld. It was the first he’d heard from them in over a week.

  Why was Havana dressed up while the kids were in pajamas? What was going on there? Why would they cancel school on Mars? Titan was more than a billion kilometers away.

  He stripped down and stepped into the shower booth and cleaned the blood and grime from his body. He put on a clean shirt and shorts and combed his hair.

  He sat at his desk and lifted his handheld.

  “Hey, guys. It’s your Dad. I’m fine. It was a bad attack, but everything is under control now. We’re taking precautions to make sure everyone is safe, and this doesn’t happen again. We’ll find the terrorists and bring them to justice. No need to worry about me. I hope all is well there. Love you.”

  He collapsed on his bed and fell asleep.

  During the night, he awoke to see a text on his handheld.

  “Oh, Diego. We love you so much. This has been so hard for us. Not knowing. We miss you.”

  There was a second message from a number he didn’t recognize. He opened it.

  “Major Zanger, thank you for saving my life. They will keep me here at the hospital for another day for observation, but my injury was not critical due to your intervention. –Pristina Sage.”

  The next day passed in a blur. Six T-FORCE officers had died in the terrorist attack. Four had died on the scene. Two more had died later from their wounds. Another six were injured and hospitalized, including Chief Yanez. Three people were still unaccounted for from the attack. One was Moxley. The two others were civilian men who had no affiliation with the military.

  The entire moon had been locked down as police and military searched for the black-armored terrorists and the three missing men. All communications and movement on the moon were being monitored. Drones and satellites scoured Titan’s mountains, plains, rivers and lakes. Video feeds from each city and town were analyzed for any suspicious activity. Infantry patrols visited the Noer colonies, asking questions, inspecting and searching greenhouses, factories, habitations and storage areas.

  One of the missing turned up twelve hours after the attack, dead in a sewer under Cassini City.

  Diego boarded a TH-60 and left Camp Hammersteel for T-FORCE MAIN. He rode
a transport van through the concourses toward the Cassini City Main Hospital with two other officers and a security escort. Pedestrian traffic in the concourses was light. Police patrols were everywhere.

  Diego found Chief in a hospital room with two other injured soldiers. Chief seemed well. His face was badly bruised and covered in contusions. He’d suffered several broken ribs and a cracked femur, but he would heal. Chief took the news of LT’s death stoically.

  “I’ll be back in the fight soon, sir. You have my word.”

  Diego nodded.

  “Any word from Moxley?”

  “Negative.”

  “Find him, sir.”

  “I won’t stop until we do.”

  Diego left the room. He walked the halls until he found the room he was looking for. The door was open. A nurse was in the room hovering over the bed. Diego walked to her.

  The nurse held her finger over her lips.

  “She couldn’t sleep last night. She’s only been asleep for about an hour.”

  Pristina’s black hair framed her face. A small patch of her hair had been shaved on the left side of her head where a bandage covered her wound.

  “She needed six stitches. She suffered a concussion. Poor thing. But she was one of the lucky ones.”

  Even in this state, bruised and bandaged, Pristina’s beauty was evident. She slept peacefully. He wanted to run his fingers over the smooth, white skin of her cheek. He lingered in the room for several minutes hoping she would awaken.

  “Come, let her sleep.”

  The nurse pulled him gently out into the hallway.

  Diego and his escort rode the van to Einstein Plaza. The plaza was shut to civilians. The atrium roof had been repaired and breathable air had been pumped back in. Much of the plaza was still coated in orange dust and sand. Work crews supervised cleaning robots that were busily returning the plaza to its prior state.

  The area in front of the stage was taped off. Crime scene investigators were standing around in small groups as forensics technicians huddled around the explosion site. Diego picked his way through the tangle of chairs and debris to where LT had been shot. A dark stain marked the location where he had bled out.

  Diego walked toward the corridor where the black-armored men had fled. He ducked under the crime-scene tape. The location where Oscar Bennett had been killed was marked with a police tape silhouette.

  The corridor branched at a right angle into the hallway where the terrorists had fled.

  “Excuse me,” a detective said. “Can I help you?”

  “I saw them run down this hallway.”

  “Major Zanger. I’m Detective Jack Norman. I read your report.”

  They shook hands.

  “They withdrew down this hallway, which branches into several utility hallways that lead to the mechanical floor,” Norman said. “It’s a maze down there. We think they ditched their armor and weapons and lost themselves in the crowd. All surveillance cameras were shut down after the blast, so we can’t know for sure.”

  Diego wandered down the hallways and stairwells to the mechanical floor as the detective followed. He entered a maze of rooms filled with electrical generators connected by cables to a power plant. He stepped through doorways passing stacks of servers and entered a large room where the ventilation and heating system was located. Huge carbon dioxide scrubbers and oxygen tanks that were coated with misty ice filled the massive subterranean room. The room seemed to go on forever.

  He scanned the room with his handheld.

  “The entire substructure has been scanned by our technicians. If there were any clues down here, they’ve already found them.”

  Diego’s escorts messaged him to return. He rejoined them and flew back to Camp Hammersteel.

  He sat alone in his office, reading intelligence reports and news stories, trying to find clues to who the attackers were and where they might be. None of the bodies of the terrorists who had been killed had been recovered. Somehow, their bodies had been dragged away before the scene could be secured. Diego knew he had killed at least two. LT had killed another.

  In one open-source media summary, he read a report of a story by Alan James. The headline read: “Einstein Plaza Attack: Obvious False Flag Terror.” The summary said James was claiming Governor Cone himself had staged the attack to derail the careers of a few rising Noer political leaders. He also claimed that the attack was meant to convince the military to view the Noer population as the enemy. According to James, witnesses had seen crisis actors feigning injuries.

  The report concluded that James was spreading disinformation about government and media foreknowledge of the attacks to undermine Cone in the upcoming election cycle.

  Diego clicked on the link at the end of the report. The face of Alan James appeared on his screen. The chubby man appeared to be in a manic state. He railed against the media and the stupidity of the masses for not seeing the hidden hand behind the curtain—the hand of Fareed Cone, who himself was a puppet of a secret Reptilian oligarchy that ruled over Earth and all the Solar System.

  “I warned you about Amad Robodan, folks. But he’s not who they say he is. Think about it. He works for Cone, man. For T-FORCE. He’s a government agent used to scare you so that T-FORCE thugs can take your rights away, so they can tax you and make you submit to their laws. Cone and Robodan were friends back on Mars, folks. Nobody died at Einstein Plaza. They’re faking it. Crisis actors. And the stupid dopes believe it. Wheels within wheels, my friends. These T-FORCE soldiers, they’re either in on it or just pawns in the Reptilian master plan. Useful idiots, all of them.”

  Diego closed the link. His heart was pounding. He wanted to strangle that fat-faced idiot. He leaned back and inhaled deeply until he regained his composure.

  He found the file Moxley had built on Alan James and started reading it. Moxley had put a lot of effort and energy into the report. James wasn’t from Titan, but from the Moon. His parents were low-level technicians there. James got his start in media at a young age writing copy for the Moon’s main news sites. As a reporter, he had gained a large anti-war following and his reporting became increasingly edgy, taking on the Moon’s power structure and its leading families, calling them agents of an alien conspiracy—Reptilians. He was soon fired. His notoriety increased when he began an underground conspiracy podcast that consisted mainly of angry criticisms and denouncements of the war.

  He moved to Mars where he started an anti-war news site that hosted video news segments, articles and editorials that attracted a growing audience. He even staged raucous anti-war rallies, but his activities put him constantly at odds with the government and courts. He was arrested on sedition charges but fled Mars before he could be brought to trial. He arrived on Titan shortly after hostilities ended and immediately set up a media operation, building a following, and then disappearing underground once the authorities started taking an interest in him. His followers on Titan were mainly young males in the Noer community, as well as disaffected Imcels—weirdos and misfits, basically. However, his audience had been dwindling over the past year, especially after the alien-spaceship-on-Iapetus fiasco.

  Diego read the stats on James’s reports about the Einstein Plaza attack. The number of people visiting his site, watching and reading his reports, had spiked dramatically after the attack. Nearly three-hundred thousand people on Titan had visited his site the day of the attack, from a total population of about 1.5 million. Tens of thousands more from Mars and Earth had also checked in. The numbers were alarming.

  Diego called his higher at Division but got no answer. He composed an email proposing that they counteract James’s conspiracy mongering. Several hours later he got a response that Division and the Solar System Intelligence Service, called the SSIS, were tracking James and cataloguing each visit to his site. No further action was needed on Diego’s part.

  A message appeared on his screen. “Sir, your presence is requested in the TOC. Immediately.”

  Diego left his office an
d strode the hallways. He punched a code into a metal door and entered the TOC. Col. Butcher and the officers on the command staff were all looking up at the big screen. Displayed on the screen was a Titan News Network news anchor.

  “I have to warn our viewers that the footage we’ve just received is shocking,” the anchor said. “You may want to avert your eyes.”

  A video played on the screen. A man in black armor stood in an empty cell. Behind him on the wall was a red flag centered by crossed rifles. The man removed his helmet.

  “Robodan,” Maj. Mangal said.

  Col. Butcher watched the screen intently.

  Amad Robodan had black, shoulder-length hair and a beard that was going white on the sides. A scar cut across his forehead. The face was well known to everyone in the room and to nearly everyone across the Solar System.

  “Neo-Fascism is not defeated but is growing stronger in the hearts and minds of the oppressed,” Robodan said in his deep, raspy voice. “Our brothers and sisters are right now driving the Solar System Federation Army from Callisto and Ganymede. We are bringing the fight to the oppressors here on Titan. We will not rest. We will not falter, we will not quit, until the last jackbooted thug is driven back to Earth. Or killed.”

  The view widened revealing a man in an orange jumpsuit seated on a metal chair.

  “Moxley,” Diego said.

  Moxley’s wrists were bound behind his back. His ankles were tied. Robodan walked behind him and grabbed him by the hair. He then unsheathed a large knife from a scabbard on his hip. He placed the knife on Moxley’s throat.

  Moxley’s eyes went wide.

  “Death to the Federation. Death to the Army. Death to Imcels. Long live Neo-Fascism. Long live the Republic.”

  Robodan then sawed into Moxley’s neck.

  The scene cut to the news anchor who was visibly shaken. “We had to cut away there due to, as you can imagine, the graphic nature of the video.”

  “Marvin,” Col. Butcher said. “Do you have the full video?”

  “Not yet, sir,” Maj. Mangal said. “It was released to Titan News. I’ll acquire it from them.”