Awakening to Judgment

by P. R. Adams

  “I’ll have Monch work on it, Colonel,” Honig said. “All that damage, though, it doesn’t look very promising—”

  A private channel request came in from Lazovic. “Hold on, Sergeant Honig.” Rimes accepted Lazovic’s request but couldn’t look away from the woman’s face. Something about her calm demeanor bothered him, but he couldn’t put a finger on why. A shiver raced down his back.

  Lazovic looked anxious. “Colonel, please come quickly.”

  “On my way.” As he ran for the dormitory, Rimes connected to Meyers. “Heading to the dormitory to connect with Lazovic’s squad.”

  “Understood.” Meyers seemed to have gotten over his earlier anger.

  The dormitory was a squat building. The doors to its main entry had been blown off their hinges, another pointless use of excessive force. Rimes stepped through the doorway, scanned the walls of the lobby, and shook his head in disbelief at the apparently random exhibition of brute force. Bullet holes, explosives damage…there was no sign of resistance, no bullet holes in the walls behind him, no bloody smears. The gunmen had just…

  Another shiver ran down Rimes’s back at the senselessness of it all. He made his way to the door down to the subterranean shelter, stopping just long enough to guess at the amount of explosives used to tear the door from its frame. Bullet holes ran the length of the walls and down the ramp.

  Lazovic was waiting outside the shelter entry. He was as tall as Rimes, pale, with light-brown hair and pale-green eyes. He had always been stoic, taciturn, disinclined to drama, and that made the sense of distress in his voice when he had asked Rimes to join him a real concern.

  Rimes braced for the worst. He wasn’t ready for what he saw.

  The mercenaries had used shaped charges to breach the shelter doors, the first sign of restraint and professionalism. It was clean, effective work, with minimal collateral damage. The shelter was designed to withstand a seven-scale quake and to provide oxygen and air for the site’s thirty-two personnel. The shelter itself was ten meters wide and twenty-five meters deep, its walls lined with fold-up bunks.

  Inside the room, all thirty-two of the personnel lay in bloody heaps. Many were disemboweled, but some had suffered even nastier savaging before their deaths: eyes gouged out, genital trauma, fingers ripped from their sockets. The violence was inhuman, random, pointless. If the intent had been to assassinate, a few grenades and several sweeps of gunfire would have sufficed and certainly been more merciful.

  Rimes wondered how the torture had been possible in such a short window. The mercenaries had arrived just a little more than five minutes before Rimes’s team had. The torture couldn’t have been used for interrogation. It was simply brutal, cold-blooded, craven work, the sort of thing Rimes had heard of in barbaric lands decades past.

  “Why, Colonel? What make someone do this?” Lazovic asked. His face was pale, his jaw clenched. “Not military. It’s butcher.”

  Rimes nodded. He realized he was shaking; his hands were clenched. He couldn’t take his eyes from the faces. Each reflected the agony of the murder, and he imagined there was an accusatory stare as well. He’d been too slow to realize the true target, too slow to respond when they’d finally put it together, and too timid to attack a superior force.

  Could we have prevented this if we’d attacked?

  The dead stared back at him, some with bloody holes where their eyes should have been. There was no misunderstanding their judgment.

  What did you see? What happened…?

  A camera!

  Rimes looked around the room for a security camera or any other recording device that might have been active. He spotted a camera hanging from the ceiling near the back of the room and another almost completely opposite it.

  “Sergeant Lazovic, you see those cameras?” Rimes pointed to both of them.

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “I need to know if they recorded this. What happened. If so, I need the recording within the hour.”

  Lazovic waved one of his men toward the rear camera. “Cameras. Check for video.” Lazovic looked back at Rimes. “It will help, Colonel?”

  “I hope so. It’s just a hunch. Nothing I can explain. Gather the rest of your squad. We’ve got more work to do.”

  Lazovic and his squad fell in behind Rimes. As he headed for the gunships and the dead mercenaries, Rimes opened a private channel to Meyers. “Lonny, bring the shuttles in. We’re going after that last gunship.”

  8

  20 November, 2173. Sahara.

  * * *

  Sahara’s dunes and mountain ranges whipped by in Rimes’s helmet display. The belly camera imagery should have been calming, but he knew the worst of the mission lay ahead. The shuttle shuddered as it passed through turbulence, and Rimes couldn’t help wondering if that was a glimpse of things to come. Try as he might, he couldn’t shake the pointless and horrific imagery of savage torture from his mind.

  He gagged at the memory of Gleason’s ruined body.

  Why? Someone, something help me make sense of this.

  It took two long pulls from the suit’s reclamation system to get the bitter taste of bile from his mouth, but there was no washing away the shakes and cold fear. In war, horrible things happened, but there was always some agenda behind it, even if it was somewhat abstract. What purpose could have been served by slaughtering a research team?

  “Colonel Rimes?” The voice was Lieutenant Oppert’s, the pilot of One-Six-Three.

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  “Ten minutes to target, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Rimes held his breath for a moment, then blew it out fully. He gave a final glance at the belly camera imagery, and then he shifted to the feed Captain Brigston had left open.

  In the angle Rimes finally settled on, the Valdez shifted position, bringing all its weaponry to bear on one of the attacking frigates. The frigate was already heavily damaged and surrounded by a field of debris it had sloughed off, but it was still firing at the Valdez’s task force. The Valdez’s upper hull lit up as three missile turrets fired. As the missiles closed the distance to the frigate, the unidentified capital ship and the last of the gunships accelerated away. They were already several hundred kilometers above the system’s orbital plane and climbing, when the damaged frigate exploded in a brief, bright fireball. The fireball winked out just as Commander Muwafi, Brigston’s XO, connected to the existing channel.

  “Colonel? The captain will be with you shortly. He must tend to task force matters first.”

  Rimes flipped though the fleet’s cameras, trying again to absorb the immensity of what was transpiring. Debris spun in lazy circles away from the ERF task force, and brilliant white light occasionally flared in the black depths of the damaged signal ship. “I understand, Commander. Thank you.”

  With the frigate’s destruction, the space battle had been resolved. All that remained was assessing the damage done, sifting through the debris, and hoping to find survivors in the merciless vacuum of space…

  “Colonel, sorry for the delay.” Brigston sucked in his cheeks. “You saw the conclusion?”

  “Yes. We’ve just taken to the air here. Two of those gunships that came down planet-side were destroyed. We’re trying to track the third.”

  “Track?” Brigston cocked a wispy eyebrow.

  “We thought we’d shot it down when it peeled off from the others, but we couldn’t afford to follow it all the way to splash.” Rimes tried to maintain his calm, but the attack had him on edge. “It couldn’t have gone too far. There’s something odd going on here. They killed the entire research team.”

  “Did we find out who they are?”

  “No prisoners,” Rimes said. “Not yet. I can’t make any sense of these people. They didn’t just kill the researchers; they butchered them. A UN research team. The gunships were remote-piloted. The mercenaries were wearing uniforms—not security uniforms, but military, no insignia. They had high-end assault rifles. This was no rogue operation. It w
asn’t pirates. There’s serious money behind this. Those gunships alone represent a great deal of R&D. I can’t imagine the task force you faced was cheap.”

  “I’d guess not. Based off what we saw today, I get the sense those ships drew on some of our own designs but with compromises. You don’t build ships of that size without serious investment, compromises or not. I’d have to agree with you—someone with a lot of money is behind this.”

  An incoming connection request popped up in Rimes’s display. It was Lieutenant Headey.

  “I want to patch Lieutenant Headey in, if that’s okay with you, Captain Brigston. He’s out on scout for me at the moment.”

  “Please.”

  Rimes brought Headey into the communication channel. “Go ahead, Lieutenant Headey. Captain Brigston is on from the Valdez.”

  “Good to hear you’re still up there, Captain. No sign of the missing shuttle in sensor range, Colonel, but we’re picking up an odd signal.”

  Rimes’s display suddenly showed an area map and a signal indicator. His stomach flipped as he recognized the all-too-familiar terrain. “That’s the dead zone, Lieutenant.” Rimes drew a line around the known perimeter and took a snapshot of the image. “Get close to the signal source, but don’t cross that line until I give the okay. Please bring Captain Meyers up to date.”

  “Roger, sir.” Lieutenant Headey disconnected.

  Fingers shaking ever so slightly, Rimes tapped the frozen image and shared it with Captain Brigston’s channel. “It’s in there.”

  “You think so? And sensors can’t find it? Too broken up to confirm from a distance?”

  “Maybe. It’s in the dead zone, so nothing’s going to work quite right. We can’t be sure what it looks like in there.” Rimes swallowed hard. “I’m taking two shuttles in to track this signal down. If you haven’t heard from us in twelve hours—”

  Brigston quietly harrumphed, a questioning mannerism he’d picked up from Captain Fripp. “Are you sure this is worth the risk? It’s a gunship. Can’t we get whatever you need from the other two?”

  “No survivors, and I’m not sure we’ll be able to recover anything from the computer systems. I think we have a real shot taking some of these folks alive. These aren’t genies; I’m sure of it. It’s worth the risk. Right now, we just have a bunch of corpses, and no reasonable explanation for anything.”

  “Your call, Jack.”

  “Thanks.” Rimes could see they were approaching the perimeter. “Twelve hours. Rimes out.”

  He opened a channel to the pilots, Meyers, and the squad leaders. “All right, I’ve let the task force know our situation. Ensign Ribery, I want you to put your shuttle down two klicks south of this point.” Rimes indicated a spot just outside the dead zone’s southernmost reach. “Sergeant Bo, your team will deploy around the shuttle. Make maximum use of the terrain. Lieutenants Oppert and Gyan, we’re going to fly directly over Ensign Ribery’s shuttle, angling for that signal. Five klick gap. When we cross this line, your instruments are going to give you trouble. Don’t rely on them at all. You’ll need to be sharp. This could be a trap. Any survivors have had time to set up an ambush. We’ll have to assume they’re lying in wait for us. Sergeant Honig, how many do we estimate per shuttle?”

  “Forty dead at the research complex, Colonel, so twenty per shuttle.”

  Honig’s answer was crisp, exact. It was the way he operated and what made his squad important with so many unknowns. Rimes would have preferred Bo’s squad over Lazovic’s for the same reason, but Ribery was the most junior pilot they had. Lazovic’s squad would have to make up for the lack of crispness with its resolve.

  “Let’s assume full strength. They’ll have terrain and numbers to their advantage. Those assault rifles looked like good weapons systems. Captain Meyers, you and the squad leaders hash this out. I’ll want your input. Five minutes, then we head in.”

  Five minutes. Rimes listened in on the tactical chatter and watched Honig and Lazovic prepare their squads. For the planners, two minutes wasn’t enough. For the soldiers, it was an eternity. Rimes had been through the emotions they were feeling. On one level, he knew there would never be enough time to examine their options. On another, every second was torture waiting for what was sure to be a chaotic mess. They would probably have to abandon their plans the second they landed.

  That there was simply no perfect solution was one of the toughest lessons he’d had to absorb as a commander.

  Finally, Ribery’s shuttle began its descent, and Oppert took the lead position. Rimes’s BAS flickered in and out of service when they entered the dead zone. He thought back to the time he’d been on Sahara before, the days of pushing himself beyond his limits, the loss of self-control, sensing the loss without being able to stop it. So many had died then.

  The shuttle banked and changed course, and he found himself wondering if he was repeating an error, looping through some mad nightmare of mistakes. A joke came to him, the Commando training definition of insanity: repeating a mission with the exact same planning and preparation that had failed before but expecting a different outcome. Rimes tried to laugh at himself but couldn’t.

  “Visual, Colonel,” Oppert said. “One klick, I think. That crawler. It’s that crawler with the crazy pilot. And…I think I see smoke a few…” She went silent.

  “Confirmed, One-Six-Three,” Lieutenant Gyan said. His accent was thicker than most others, and it was a challenge for Rimes to understand sometimes, but Gyan was a good pilot. It was all just part of being in an international force. “Smoke, and a visual on the gunship, too. No way to gauge the distance.”

  Rimes tried to make sense of the belly gun camera, but it was pointless. “Any sign of the crawler pilot?”

  Gyan came back almost immediately. “No, sir.”

  “Set us down shy of the target then.”

  The sea of gray-brown sand rolled beneath them, and the shuttle banked and decelerated. Rimes could feel their descent. “Lieutenant Gyan, deploy one klick west. Eyeball it if your systems can’t give you a good reading.”

  “Aye, sir,” Gyan said.

  They settled to the ground with a surprisingly soft landing. Honig had his squad out of their harnesses and deployed in seconds. Rimes followed closely, eyes peeled for any sign of the mercenaries. The gentle dunes could hide a well-trained force.

  Honig called out, his voice slightly quieter than a shout. “Colonel, east of your position, two hundred meters.”

  Rimes dropped to his knees and scanned the horizon to the east. He saw it: a form jogging toward them, arms waving. “I think we might’ve found our crawler pilot. Send a scout to watch his approach.”

  Honig signaled one of his men forward. He was well-trained and competent, staying low as he jogged, shifting his gait and his vector randomly. When gunshots rang out, the scout dropped; he signaled that he was unharmed. The form jogging toward them staggered, then dropped as well. Rimes couldn’t tell if he’d been hit or not.

  Then gunfire erupted.

  Honig’s men quickly spotted the mercenary position and began laying down suppressing fire. Rimes sighted down his CAWS-5, relying solely on the analog scope. He spotted a mercenary but held fire.

  At first he’d thought the mercenary was wounded. It looked like he had rocked backwards from a gunshot, but a second later the mercenary was shaking his head and firing his gun wildly. Rimes suddenly spotted two more mercenaries, both of them sprinting away from the first. The first mercenary spotted them, shook his head again as if trying to clear cobwebs, then fired again. One of the running mercenaries went down. Rimes fired, clipping the shooting mercenary in the shoulder.

  It was tense for several minutes. The mercenaries were hidden, revealing their positions only when they had a shot. A round struck Rimes in his left shoulder, penetrating his armor and drawing blood. One of Honig’s fire team leads went down with a head wound. Just as it started to look grim, Lazovic’s squad closed on the mercenaries’ flank. Combined with inexplicable
discipline breakdowns and seemingly random shootings in the mercenary ranks, the crossfire brought the engagement to a swift conclusion.

  Seven mercenaries surrendered, dropping their weapons and raising their hands. Two others were gunned down when they tried to kill those surrendering. Rimes checked on the wounded fire team lead, calling for a medic once the wound’s severity was apparent, and then ran to join Lazovic’s squad with the prisoners.

  Along with the seven who’d surrendered, there were six dead and three wounded. Rimes walked among the dead, checking them as he had those who’d died atop the outcrop. Rimes took a moment to examine one of the wounded who’d fired on those who’d surrendered. The man was pale-skinned, probably Nordic, with ice-blue eyes and light-brown hair. His eyes were wild, unfocused. Rimes looked at those who’d surrendered, selecting from them a woman who appeared to be Arab.

  “What’s your name?”

  The woman blinked. She was young, possibly in her mid-twenties, with full lips, a strong nose, and dark eyes. Close-cut hair combined with broad shoulders to give her an imposing presence, but Rimes saw she was trembling.

  He held up his hands, palms out. “We’re not going to torture you. We’re not barbarians. You’re a prisoner. We don’t mistreat prisoners. I’m Colonel Jack Rimes. What’s your name?”

  “Waida. Waida Zayd.”

  “All right, Miss Zayd.” Rimes smiled reassuringly. “What can you tell me about this man here?” He pointed at the crazed Nordic mercenary who now glared at Zayd.

  “He’s our commander,” Zayd said. “I think he has gone mad.” She looked at the other crazed mercenaries. “I think they all went mad.”

  “When you crashed?” Rimes asked, nodding toward the faint column of rising smoke that marked the gunship wreck.

  Zayd nodded. “Soon after, yes.”