by Jay Posey
So he waited. There was an aquarium against the wall, maybe fifty gallons’ worth of water and plants and fish and rocks and the wrong kind of sand, all laid out by someone who had obviously never seen an ocean. Who probably couldn’t even imagine one, for that matter. There was even a little crab sitting on a floating island, looking about as resigned to its fate as Elliot felt to his. Elliot reached out and tapped on the glass at the crab. It responded by raising both tiny claws above its head; most likely it thought it was doing so in a threatening manner, but to Elliot it looked more like it was raising its arms in celebration.
“Yaaay,” Elliot said quietly.
The man behind the counter grunted aggressively and when Elliot looked at him, the man pointed severely at the sign above the tank, unnoticed by Elliot until that moment, handwritten in bold block letters: DO NOT TAP GLASS.
Elliot waved an apology at the man.
“Just sit anywhere,” the man said, waggling his hand at all the empty tables. A couple of the regulars glanced over and chuckled, but the other handful of people in the place paid no mind. “I don’t know where my waiter went.”
“Thanks,” Elliot said.
“You know what you want?” the man behind the counter said as Elliot passed by, gruff but not unfriendly.
“Just some tea,” Elliot answered.
“Only got green.”
“That’s fine.”
The man nodded. Elliot took a seat at a table for two, a couple of empties away from a pair of older gentlemen who were nursing pints and quietly arguing about something they’d probably been arguing about every night for the past twenty years. The place had that sort of vibe to it. A low-key neighborhood stop in, good for people who didn’t feel like going out but who didn’t want to stay at home either.
The man from behind the counter plodded over and delivered a small pot of tea along with two simple white mugs.
“Got company coming?” he asked, dipping his head at the empty chair.
Elliot shook his head.
“You want anything else, come up to the counter,” the man said. He looked tired.
“Long day?” Elliot asked.
“Every day,” the man answered, as he stumped his way back to his post.
“I know that feeling,” Elliot replied. He let his tea steep for a few minutes, and then poured a mug and spent a few more watching the steam curl and fold in on itself as it ascended and eventually vanished. For all their individual twists and turns, the fate of each wisp was the same. A brief rise, then oblivion.
It reminded him of his career.
Or rather, he was already thinking about his career, and the steam provided a convenient visualization for the inevitable. He’d played it the best he could. And now he was out of options.
That wasn’t strictly true. He actually had several. It’s just that as far as he could see, they all ended in the same place; with him dead in some shallow, unmarked grave, covered up and forcefully forgotten.
Elliot slipped his hand in his jacket pocket and fiddled with the device inside, flipping the small flat disk end over end between his fingertips. He’d made compromises before, hadn’t always played strictly by the rules. That was the job. And over the years he’d had a few deals on the side, because NID work didn’t pay all that well, particularly when you considered what they asked of you. There was surprisingly little money in protecting a nation.
Even so, this felt like crossing a line he’d never thought he’d even be close enough to see. Somehow a series of small decisions had led him to a place he’d always assumed would require a much bigger decision somewhere along the way. But maybe this was always how it happened. Good people, giving of themselves for the greater good, and eventually discovering that when it came right down to it, the greater good didn’t return the loyalty. He’d burned assets before, for the greater good. He’d just never thought he’d find himself on this side of it.
“Hey,” a voice said. One of the older gentlemen nearby.
“Hey, fella,” he said again, and Elliot finally realized the man was talking to him.
“Sir?” Elliot responded. He didn’t feel like talking, and hoped his stiff reply and facial expression communicated it. Both the men were turned in their seats, looking at him. For some reason they looked like a Bob and a Joe.
“You’re an out-of-towner,” said Bob.
Elliot wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement.
“OK,” he answered. And then looked back at the cup in front of him.
“So who would you favor, then?” Bob continued, as if Elliot had been part of their conversation the whole time.
“I’m sorry?”
“In a dust up? Earth or Mars?”
Elliot looked back and forth between the two old timers. Martian lifers from the looks of them, but old enough that they might have loyalties to the old world. He was guessing one of them did, anyway, if that’s what they’d been arguing about.
“War’s a tricky business,” Elliot said with a shrug. “Don’t think I’d favor either side by much.”
Bob and Joe exchanged a look, and then Bob chuckled.
“We’re talking about football, fella,” he said. “All-star teams, best of both worlds, head-to-head. Football!”
The look on Bob’s face was like a sun ray piercing a cloud, giving Elliot a glimpse of a distant land he’d almost forgotten existed. One where people had time to sit and passionately argue about unimportant matters, where security was so assured it wasn’t even a consideration, and tomorrow was guaranteed.
“Yeah… yeah, of course,” Elliot said, shaking his head and covering the mistake, poorly. “I just mean, you know… something as serious as football, you have to expect everyone’s going to be bringing out the big guns. No telling which way that might go.”
“A proper world war then, yeah?” Joe said.
“Count on it.”
“Didn’t answer the question though, I note,” Bob replied.
“I hate to pick sides,” Elliot answered. And then gave them a smile. “At least until I see who’s ahead.”
“Ah,” Bob said, and then he gave Joe a nod and a wink, as if Elliot had proved the point, “ah yeah, see what I told you. Too close to call, like I said.”
Joe waved dismissively. “Not with the pride of the planet on the line, no way our folks let a bunch of island hoppers get the better.”
Island hoppers. Elliot chuckled to himself at the comment. It didn’t matter how big Earth’s continents were; as far as some Martians were concerned, anyone on a planet with that much water couldn’t be anything but an islander.
“And why should it be any different for them, though?” Bob said. “They don’t have their own pride?”
“Well sure they do,” Joe answered, taking a swig of his beer. “It just doesn’t matter, because they aren’t as good.”
“There’s the one fella… goalkeeper for one of the big leagues down there…” Bob said, and the two men turned back in their seats and resumed their conversation, getting just about every Terran geographic detail wrong as they tried to remember where the goalkeeper was from.
“Of course,” Elliot answered. “I think you fellas are missing the key to the debate…”
The men looked back at him.
“Yeah?” said Bob. “What’s that?”
Elliot took a long drink of his tea, then leaned forward in conspiracy and asked over the top of the mug, “Where do you get the refs?”
The men blinked at him for a moment.
“‘Where do you get the refs?’” Joe repeated, and then wheezed an almost silent laugh. The three shared the moment, and Bob gave Elliot a long look.
“You maybe lay off the newsies a bit, fella,” he said, with grandfatherly kindness. “Wears a man thin the way they chatter all day about nothin’.”
“Good advice, sir,” Elliot said.
“Free, too,” Bob said with a smile. He tipped his pint in Elliot’s direction, and turned once more to
his old friend. The two men resumed their debate, though followed it down a side trail and argued for a while about how many Americas there were and whether or not they were all the same thing as the United States.
Elliot didn’t correct them, just smiled down into his mug. It would have been nice to have had a friend like that. A life like that. But he’d given that up a long time ago, before he’d known its value. And there was no unmaking that decision now, no matter how much he wished he could.
It’d been long enough. He reached under the table and firmly pressed the device from his pocket into place, where it held fast and would remain until his contact came to retrieve it. Once the disk was affixed to the underside of the table, Elliot leaned forward and propped his head on his fist, and absently traced a design on the table’s surface with a fingertip. The pattern was invisible to the naked eye, but would be unmistakable to his contact’s enhanced optics.
He’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of in his life. Things he’d convinced himself were necessary. This one was going to be the hardest of them all. But the first step in learning to live with himself was to stay alive in the first place.
He drained the rest of his tea, and got to his feet.
“‘Night, gentlemen,” Elliot said to Joe and Bob. Bob waved without looking in his direction.
Elliot paid the man behind the counter and walked out the front door, knowing that whatever chain of events he’d just kicked off would summon a whirlwind, with thin hope that once it had passed through he might somehow find himself still standing.
SIXTEEN
“I don’t mind the cold,” Mike said, lying next to Lincoln on the ridgeline.
The pair had been observing the research facility down below for almost nineteen hours now, and though they were a good thirty klicks away from the farthest reaches of the ice cap or so, the climate was decidedly chilly. By Martian reckoning, Second September was just beginning, which meant, if Lincoln’s elementary school hadn’t misinformed him, they were in the early days of the hemisphere’s autumn. Not that the temperature really mattered, since their recon suits were completely sealed and environmentally-controlled.
“Kind of used to it really,” Mike added.
“You’re a real trooper, Mikey,” Lincoln answered, only half-listening. There was some activity near one of the out-buildings, and he was busy trying to maneuver one of their skeeters into position overhead for a better view.
The target installation was hard-shelled, sealed off and protected from the harsh environment. Like the base camp the Outriders had set up ten kilometers away, the facility was set down in a wide crater for added protection. One central building, with four smaller ones arrayed around it. The main building and three of the outer ones sunk low in the Martian soil, a sure sign that they extended below ground, as so many early constructions did. By the time Lincoln got the skeeter in position, whoever had been moving around had disappeared again. He left the microdrone loitering, just in case the people decided to come back out into the open any time soon.
As Thumper had said, the place was clearly a few decades old. Its shell wasn’t quite fully transparent anymore, having taken on a yellowed tint everywhere, with a milky translucence forming in spots. Martian dust clung in patches to areas where the antistatic repellent had worn away. The obscuring effects of the aging shell apparently weren’t enough to interfere with the solar collectors housed within, but they had forced Lincoln and Mike to change positions a few times in order to get a better picture of what they were dealing with.
Sahil and Wright had taken the first shift, a quick eight-hour jaunt during the previous night to place a few sensors and get base stations established for the skeeters. Lincoln and his team could have run surveillance remotely from back at their base camp, but they all knew you could never really get the full picture without going out yourself. Even with haptics, you couldn’t get the feel of a place, the rhythm of it, without actually being there. Which is why he and Mike had spent most of the day lying on a little hillock on the flat expanse under a butterscotch sky. Now, the late afternoon settled in around them, as the sun slipped towards the horizon.
They hadn’t seen much yet.
Lincoln activated a mechanism through his display, and a small tube extended to his mouth from the right side of the helmet. He took a pull on it, swallowed the mouthful of nutrient-rich, calorie-dense substance the military apparently considered food. It had a consistency somewhere between oatmeal and applesauce, with a flavor like someone’s attempt at a fruit-flavored milkshake, assuming that particular someone had never actually tasted either before. There was probably a fancy name for it, but everyone Lincoln knew who’d ever had it just called it the goop. Typically, he tried not to subject himself to it, unless he was so hungry it interfered with his ability to focus. Unfortunately, on a long, boring op like this one, it didn’t take much to interfere. He took another shot of the goop, and then bit down twice on the mouthpiece to switch its feed, in order to wash it down with a drink of unpleasantly warm water from the same tube.
Both he and Mike were running their suits with added long-duration support packs, something like a backpack that locked into the frame and provided some additional functionality for longer operations. The extra bulk was noticeable, particularly compared to how sleek the suits usually felt, but it didn’t have much negative impact since they were mostly lying around anyway.
“You know, I used to think Montana was cold,” Mike continued, a few moments later. “Then after I spent a winter running all over the mountains in Hamgyong, nothing really ever seemed like much more than jacket weather to me again.”
“I didn’t know you were in Hamgyong,” Lincoln said.
“Yeah, first fall and winter of the unpleasantness,” Mike replied. “Before we had any idea what we were doing.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Nowhere, mostly,” Mike said with a chuckle. “Kimchaek was the closest city, but we spent all our time up in the mountains. Little place we just called Big Top.”
“No kidding. I was up at Big Top that following spring,” Lincoln said. “Don’t think we had it figured out by then either.”
“No way, that’s crazy.”
“Yeah, I was with 1st Group then. Did a bunch of work up in Tumangang area, then got pulled over to fill in some gaps, just for a couple of months. I guess that was, April maybe?”
“Huh. Must have just missed each other. We pulled out in uh, I guess it was early March, maybe middle of. I was still baby infantry then, pure grunt mode. We had all the ice, guess you guys got there just in time for all the mud.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Small world,” Mike said. “And chock full of people that need shooting.”
“And seems to be getting fuller by the day.”
Down below in the research facility, a door opened from one of the outbuildings, and two figures exited. The skeeter Lincoln had parked overhead was still in position enough to get a decent glimpse, and he brought up the feed. The two were bundled against the cold, so much that it was impossible to identify anything useful about them. Could have been men or women, young or old. Given the deep hoods and number of layers, Lincoln couldn’t even guess whether they were rail thin or grossly overweight. One detail he could confirm though, was that the one in the rear was armed.
He marked the timestamp, and tried to zoom in on the weapon. The two figures crossed the short span between buildings and disappeared into the main facility before he could get a good look. The weapon was slung casually, lying low and flat along the rear of the individual’s right hip. Armed, then, but not overly concerned about security. Lincoln wondered how long it’d take the individual to get a shot off with all that winter gear on.
“Heya Thumper,” Lincoln said over comms. It was about forty seconds before a response came in.
“Yo,” she answered, sounding like she was speaking through the tail end of a yawn.
“I wake you?”
; “Nah, what’s up?”
“I’m piping you a feed. We finally caught a decent look at a couple of the tenants. I dropped a marker at the interesting bit, wanted to see if you can get an ID on the weapon in the shot.”
“Sure, no problem. How’s it going out there?”
“Going on nineteen hours, and that twenty second clip is the whole take on our efforts.”
“Hate to tell you, but that clip’s only about seventeen seconds.”
“Yeah, thanks, Thump. Let me know what you find.”
“Roger.”
Surveillance work was, in Lincoln’s estimation, about one percent useful collection, six percent missed opportunities, and ninety-three percent sheer boredom. It seemed like pretty much the only time anything interesting happened was right when you’d just left your position to answer the call of nature. And since they were out in the middle of the freezing Martian expanse, there was no doing anything outside of the suits, which meant they never had to leave position. Which meant the chances of anything interesting happening were effectively zero.
“Nice to know we weren’t completely off-base,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Lincoln answered. “Guess we’ll see.”