The Eternity War: Pariah

by Jamie Sawyer

  “…joined today by an increasingly important figure in the galactic political arena. Thanks for speaking with us, Senator Lopez.”

  “It’s no problem. I only wish our meeting could’ve been in nicer circumstances.”

  Smooth-skinned, ink-haired, and charismatic in the extreme, Senator Lopez wore a dark suit, open at the neck to reveal a muscled chest. Quite handsome, really. The family resemblance was obvious: he had the same nose and cheekbones as Gabriella Lopez. Whether that was genetic, or as a result of the family surgeon, I couldn’t say.

  “I’m sure that’s a sentiment with which many viewers will sympathise. You’re referring, of course, to the tragedy on Daktar, to the loss of the Science Division facility stationed there.”

  “I’m referring to the loss of the Alliance staff stationed there, Roseti. There were one hundred civilian staff on that station. Questions are already being asked about the involvement of the Army in this fiasco. Specifically, the Simulant Operations Programme…”

  “Here we go,” I whispered, leaning in to focus on the feed. “And the figure was one hundred and six, if we’re keeping count.”

  “Care to expand on that?”

  “We’re at a crossroads. We’ve never had it so good. The universe is changing—has changed—and for the better. The Krell threat is over. We’re finally at peace with the only other alien race that occupies this corner of the galaxy.”

  “You say that, but what about the Shard? Isn’t the existence of the Shard Gates evidence of their continued danger to Alliance security?”

  “No one has heard from the Shard in over five years. That’s a long time. We can’t build military structures to protect against an enemy that is, by all accounts, dead. I don’t call that good economics.”

  All shit arguments, but when you’re sitting on one of the most profitable rocks in the Core Systems, they were easy to make. Senator Lopez had probably never been to the frontier and he certainly hadn’t seen the things that I had. Hell, he hadn’t seen the things that his own daughter had seen … For a man with his clearance level, I hoped that he’d read about them though. Which made his attitude all the more surprising.

  “So what are you suggesting is the solution here?”

  “Yeah, Senator, what are you suggesting?” I mimicked.

  “Daktar was a disaster, and I place the blame on the Simulant Operations Programme. It’s a relic of a past age, populated by warmongers and veterans who still think that we’re at war with the Krell. It’s time that we started dismantling the old structures, started looking to the future. We’ve built super-soldiers out of these men and women—given them the power to ignore death, to be reborn again—and yet, when they start throwing their weight around, being careless with their guns and their bombs, we’re surprised that innocents get killed. It’s not hard to see how this situation arose, and it’s not hard to see how it will happen again.”

  “Isn’t your own daughter, Gabriella Lopez, a serving operator with Sim Ops?”

  “I can’t discuss her deployment. She’s serving a compulsory term of military service, as is required by Proximan planetary law, before she can be considered for a political post—”

  “There have been reports that Gabriella Lopez was involved in the Daktar disaster. Can you confirm that?”

  “I’m not confirming anything. Her military deployment is irrelevant, and I’m not here to talk about her.”

  “Please…” I said, shaking my head. “This man is a hack.”

  “They say that he’s going to be the next Secretary General.”

  The only other occupant of the room was an officer sitting over at the security checkpoint into General Draven’s office. I’d almost forgotten about him, having been so engrossed in the newsfeed.

  “They also say that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness,” he said.

  “So the voices keep telling me,” I replied. The holo continued with another news segment on developments in the Asiatic subsector, and I tuned out. Famine, shattered nation-states, clone containment atrocities: blah, blah, blah. Same old story.

  “Was she there?” the officer asked.

  “Is this a test?”

  “Just filling time,” he said.

  “She was. She’s on my squad.”

  “That must be quite some responsibility.”

  “You haven’t seen the rest of my team,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s the least of my worries.”

  “They say that Senator Lopez is a very powerful man, now,” the officer said. He placed emphasis on “now” in a specific way, because everyone knew Senator Lopez’s story of Venusian immigration to the Proxima Colony: how he’d apparently clawed his way up the ladder to become an authority figure in a notoriously power-hungry political environment. “I shouldn’t imagine he’d be very impressed if his little girl didn’t come home.”

  “I don’t think that she’ll be my problem for much longer.”

  The officer continued, “Did you know that Senator Lopez controls funding for this whole station, and they say his role on the Senate Committee will soon expand to cover responsibility for Sim Ops funding?”

  “I had heard,” I said. “And maybe his daughter will be something someday, but I’m not putting money on it.”

  “It’s surprising that she’s on Sim Ops, given that Senator Lopez seems to hate the Programme so much.”

  I sighed. “She requested the assignment, apparently.”

  The officer stood from his desk, perhaps responding to a silent alert somewhere. “The general will see you now.”

  “Marvellous.”

  I followed him through to General Draven’s office.

  General Enrique Draven stood before a large open view-port that overlooked Unity Base’s main docking facility. The window controls had been adjusted so that it was half-opaqued, the glare of the local star just visible through the smoked plasglass, the occasional flare of a starship thruster muted by the effect. He continued to stare intently at the view as I entered the room.

  “Lieutenant Keira Jenkins, as you requested, sir,” the aide said.

  General Draven didn’t respond, but the other officer briskly withdrew, raising his eyebrows in a good luck gesture as he left.

  I stood in front of Draven’s desk. Got a jolt of déjà vu: it had been in this very room that I’d been given my command. Now, I threw a salute, simply because it seemed like the right thing to do. Draven ignored me. Just went on staring out of that port, his reflection visible against the glass. I let the salute drop after a few seconds of inactivity.

  Just when the silence in the room began to border on excruciating, I went to speak. “Sir, I—”

  “I fought alongside your father,” General Draven said, speaking slowly and patiently, his voice a deep hardwood bass. “During the Deimos Campaign.”

  “I am aware of that, sir.”

  “Your old man ever talk about it?”

  “Occasionally, sir.”

  “We were fighting the Directorate in those days,” Draven said, still staring out of the port, hands clasped behind his back. “It was a dirty little war, Lieutenant.” He paused, then repeated: “A very dirty little war.”

  “I’ve fought the Directorate, sir,” I said. “I’m aware of the tactics they employ.”

  Draven continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “The enemy wasn’t honest, but we knew them. We knew who we were fighting, and why. We lost good men and women in the tunnels on Deimos, and the Directorate made us pay for every inch of territory. But no matter the losses, we kept going. Do you know why?”

  “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “Because General Theodore Jenkins was the best commanding officer that I’ve ever served under.”

  Draven let that hang. The silence became uncomfortable again.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, just to fill the quiet. “I understand.”

  “Do you, Lieutenant?” Draven said. He turned his grey-eyed stare at me, fixed me with it. “Because I do
n’t think that you do.”

  Draven was a tall, bulky man. Well-muscled in a way that only a regular rejuvenation regime could explain, his age tended to show the longer you were in his presence. The pressure of responsibility was revealed in the wrinkles that collected around his eyes, the back of his hands. The moustache that had probably started as a shield behind which the younger Enrique Draven could hide had become walrus-like and silver, and was seen as his defining characteristic among the Army units under his command. Which, it had to be said, was pretty much all Army-affiliated Sim Ops teams. Draven was the man so far as the off-world Sim Ops Programme was concerned: chief coordinator of the military efforts in the Maelstrom sector.

  He pulled a chair from behind his desk and sat, leaving me standing right in front of him. Pinched the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. “You caused the loss of a hundred and six human lives—”

  I couldn’t take this any more.

  “There were mitigating circumstances!” I said, speaking over Draven.

  But he kept going, raising his voice until I fell silent. “…as well as the loss of six senior military officers, who are now in the hands of the largest terrorist organisation in Alliance history.”

  Draven stared at the surface of his smart-desk—piled with data-slates and other administrative tokens of his command—and shook his head.

  “Captain Heinrich tells me that your squad wasn’t even supposed to be in Tower One. Isn’t that right, Captain?”

  I heard a low cough at my shoulder, and turned to see Heinrich standing beside the hatch. Though his face was a picture of neutrality, his eyes didn’t lie. He looked more than pleased with how the situation had developed: that this mess had been dropped in my airlock.

  “As you can see from the mission plan, sir,” Heinrich said, “Lieutenant Jenkins’ squad was assigned to Tower Three. They were on reconnaissance duty. Captain Ving’s team—Phoenix Squad—was assigned to Tower One. The mission plan specifically accounted for the fact that Tower One, and the rest of the outpost, might be rigged for detonation.”

  “The briefing packet didn’t make that clear,” I argued. “There was a lot that we weren’t told about the operation.” If Heinrich was going to hang me out to dry, then I had something to say about him as well. “For example, I wasn’t briefed on the Krell’s involvement in this mission.”

  Heinrich sighed condescendingly. “That information was restricted. I gave an oral briefing before the drop, sir. Lieutenant Jenkins was late to the SOC. She missed the warning.”

  I bit my lip. It was all true, but given the significance of that piece of information—that we were requesting backup from the Krell—Heinrich should’ve made damned sure that every simulant team was aware of it.

  Heinrich went on, “Sergeant Campbell, the Jackals’ intelligence handler, was fully aware of the circumstances of the joint deployment.”

  Cold realisation seeped into my bones. Zero had been trying to tell me something before we’d made the drop to Daktar. I now knew exactly what that had been: that the Krell were assisting with the mission.

  “As a direct result of Lieutenant Jenkins’ actions,” Heinrich droned on, “the mission’s priority target—the enemy asset codenamed ‘Warlord’—was lost.” He rolled his head in another patronising gesture. “We had a clear shot at him, sir. If Captain Ving had been allowed to get into Tower One, with the support of the Krell assault shoal, I’m sure that we could’ve taken him.”

  “Please download my debriefing,” I said, exasperated. “As I’ve already said, the Jackals were the only ground asset in Tower One. We had no comms. What were we supposed to do?”

  My outburst had the desired effect. Colonel Draven looked up sharply from his desk.

  “Are you quite finished, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “I did what I thought was best,” I said. “But yes, sir. I’m finished.”

  Draven’s eyes shifted from Heinrich to me and back again. His expression remained stony and cold. “Continue, Captain.”

  Heinrich nodded. “We had intelligence, prior to the deployment, that a target of specific interest was present on Daktar.” Heinrich leaned over the desk, and slid a plastic image across the surface. Even though it was a low-resolution capture, I immediately recognised the Spiral’s leader: the man in the exo-suit. “I considered that deployment of a veteran team, such as Phoenix Squad, would present the best chance of both recovering the hostages and capturing the target.”

  “For your information, Lieutenant,” Draven said, “Warlord is believed to be a member of the Black Spiral’s ruling council. He may even be regarded as a leader of sorts. Given the disparate nature of the Spiral’s organisation, I’m sure that even you can appreciate the importance of his capture.”

  In the picture, he wore a helmet, and beneath that his face was cloaked with filthy grey rags: bandage-like, wrapped tightly so that only his eyes were visible, but the armour was easily identifiable. I took in what detail I could from the image. I was now more sure than ever that the exo-suit was military-grade. An older pattern, for sure, but Alliance-issue. Powered armour was hard to come by, even for a well-organised terrorist outfit like the Spiral.

  “Warlord is suspected of orchestrating dozens of attacks on Alliance holdings within the last year,” Draven said, “many of which you’ve probably heard about.”

  One wall of the general’s room was occupied by a wall-to-floor view-screen. He jabbed at a control on his desk and the wall became a monitor. A list of known operations, of other sightings of target Warlord, appeared there. Draven was right: I had heard of many of the locations and incidents. Whoever Warlord was, he certainly had blood on his hands.

  “He was your real objective…” I said, looking up from the images. “Warlord; that was what the Daktar operation was all about, wasn’t it?”

  Draven and Heinrich and the rest of Command didn’t care about Daktar or the civilians stationed there. They had wanted Warlord.

  “As of right now,” Draven rumbled, cementing my opinion, “that man represents the biggest danger to the security of the three hundred Allied worlds. So yes, I make no apologies for telling you that Warlord was our real target.”

  “It would’ve been nice to know in advance,” I said. But even as the words left my mouth, I was very much aware of how ineffectual they sounded. That wasn’t how the universe worked, and that certainly wasn’t how the Alliance military worked. I added, hollowly, “I was using my initiative, sir. I didn’t know.”

  “You can’t do that any more. When I gave you command of the Jackals, you told me that you wanted to lead. That you wanted to make the Jackals into something better.”

  “I remember,” I said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that day.”

  “You’re going to have to learn to lead that squad,” Draven said, “and I think it’s best that you go off-grid for a while. I’ve discussed the situation with Captain Heinrich. We, and Sector Command, feel that you should keep a low profile.”

  I could feel Heinrich’s smile beside me, even if I couldn’t see it. He radiated smugness like a breached energy core shedding rad particles.

  Draven tossed a file of papers across the table. “Fieldwork is what you prefer, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Draven tipped his head in the direction of the hardcopy file. “That’s your mission packet. The mission isn’t glamorous, but it’s all I can offer.”

  Any sense of relief I’d just felt that Draven hadn’t stripped me of my command was quickly vanishing.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s all in the briefing. Read it for yourself.”

  Reluctantly, because to pick up the papers felt as though I was accepting the mission, I took the briefing. It was slim and light: a manila envelope sealed with the Alliance Army badge.

  “You’ll be gone for a while,” Heinrich pitched in behind me, “and as such you’ll be out of my direct command.”

  “Which should suit yo
u fine, given your predilection for ‘using your initiative,’” Draven muttered. “You’re being assigned to the UAS Santa Fe.”

  I opened the packet and stared at the printed cover sheet. There was an awkward silence in the room as I read it. The words started to become jumbled after the first line, and my legs felt weak beneath me.

  “You have twelve hours to get your business together,” Draven said, as I looked up from the briefing.

  “What’s the destination?”

  “The Maelstrom,” Draven said. “But I’m sure that your new commanding officer will explain everything once you’re aboard the vessel. As I understand it, your objective is to escort said military officer to designated coordinates, and remain on-ship for as long as required.”

  By assigning the Jackals to a starship, General Draven was writing a blank cheque. We could be gone years, with or without purpose. It wasn’t a task for Sim Ops! Starship escort was a duty for the Alliance Marine Corps. Even regular Army would be better suited to the mission.

  “This isn’t a mission,” I said. “It’s punishment!”

  Draven’s expression didn’t shift one bit. “You, and the Jackals, are to report to your assigned transport at oh-nine-hundred hours tomorrow.”

  “You can’t do this! I’ll take a court martial instead. This is so much worse.”

  “It’s not your decision to make,” Draven said. “Those are your orders. You’re dismissed.”

  Next to me, Heinrich saluted briskly.

  I left without the formalities, my face burning bright with rage. I needed to get out of there, and now.

  I left the general’s room with Heinrich in tow, and was surprised that it took him until we reached the sector elevator to comment.

  “You’re a disappointment,” he said, “and I’m damned glad to get you and your team off my company.”

  “You know,” I said, “for a senior officer in Simulant Operations, I often wonder why you hate the Programme so much.”