by Richard Fox
“If only we could travel back in time to find Dotari with the right set of immunity and antibodies…” Lo’thar backed against the wall and sank onto his haunches. He crossed his arms over his knees and hung his head down.
“I delve in medicine, not fantasy,” Acorso said. “Time travel isn’t possible.” He reached for Lo’thar but stopped short of touching him. The Dotari enjoyed close proximity to each other in social settings, but not while grieving.
Acorso went back into Trin’a’s room.
Lo’thar wiped a tear against his sleeve, then looked up at a painting of the fleet that brought the Dotari colonists to Takeni. His head popped up as an idea struck him.
“We don’t need to go back in time,” he said. “We need Dotari from that time.” Lo’thar pulled a cell phone from his pocket and made a call.
Chapter 3
Hoffman observed and cataloged details as he entered the office of Captain Bradford, noting pictures of him shaking hands with Colonel Hale and other heroes of the Ember War. Compared to the broom-closet workspaces he’d shared with his fellow lieutenants, the room threatened agoraphobia. Oak paneled walls, ten feet high if they were a foot, were covered with framed company guidons. The sight of fabric stretched tightly above brass plaques gleaming in the office light comforted Hoffman and helped him brace for what was coming. To the right of the standards were Bradford’s graduation photos from the Academy, Force Recon, Strike Selection, and Basic School.
“Lieutenant Hoffman, reporting as ordered, sir,” Hoffman said as he snapped a salute.
The captain remained behind his desk, working on the controls to a large video screen. He didn’t look up or return the salute for a painfully long time. When he did, it was perfunctory and clipped.
Hoffman remained at attention.
Hoffman’s hand itched from the reconstructive surgery. Earth doctors were good, which was why they earned permanent assignments in Phoenix. He should feel grateful to be in one piece, but each time the itch flared up, he thought of the disaster at New Bastion and one important detail—his hesitation nearly got his team killed. Another item on the very long list of reasons why Hoffman stood before his company commander.
Bradford stood to face the video screen, chest heaving as he regained control of his breathing. Jaw clenched, he grunted each time the image of Hoffman appeared. Whoever filmed the New Bastion incident had flinched at the violence and screamed alien words Hoffman didn’t know but thought he understood. Alien script bordered the edge of the screen, then cut to a Shadoor standing before a large screen who warbled words Hoffman didn’t understand.
Hoffman suppressed the bile rising from his stomach. He hadn’t been demoted yet. The company commander was a famous hard-ass—high-and-tight hair and perfectly bloused combat fatigues accenting his winged Strike Marine badge—but he hadn’t killed anyone after a less-than-stellar performance. Yet.
Hoffman had been chewed out more than a few times. His father, so far as he recalled it, understood smoke and thunder to be more effective disciplinary tools than “please” and “thank you” and “let’s work through your feelings.” The Hoffman home had been…stern.
“Do you know how many members of the senior brass think I should rip your wings off and send you back to Fleet with that brute of yours?” Bradford asked.
Hoffman kept his eyes straight ahead. “Sir, the mission was a success.”
“Your mission was to eliminate a single terrorist without showing the Terran government’s hand in the operation, not carry out what looks like a cold-blooded murder in broad daylight. Do you know how close you came to causing a diplomatic shitstorm?”
Hoffman considered his options and chose silence.
Bradford slammed his hand on the desk, causing a half-full coffee cup to jump a quarter inch. “I’ve got military intelligence screaming for your head because they had to burn just about every asset we had on New Bastion to cover up the incident. Thankfully, the Shadoor can be bribed—and shamed—into compliance. That they let a known terrorist slip through their security is worse than a bunch of non-Shadoor bodies lying in the street.”
Hoffman chewed the inside of his lip. This was to be a one-sided conversation until the captain intoned otherwise.
“What did I tell you to do if you didn’t have a clean shot?”
“To abort, sir.”
“And?”
Hoffman hesitated, unsure of the question.
“And what the hell happened?”
“The presence of a hostage altered the mission parameters.”
Silence.
Hoffman saw a change in his C.O., an ominous clenching of his jaw. “You were rattled by the unexpected violence of the escape attempt, the local food, the color of the alien sky for all I care. Something made you think there was a human woman in danger.”
“She was human, sir,” Hoffman said with growing confidence. “Blonde hair, tattered naval flight suit…the Kroar had her hands bound with silver wire,” Hoffman said, swallowing hard before his next question. “Sir, what I don’t understand is why she didn’t escape with us. Why the hell would she call me a traitor?”
“No, there was no woman.”
“Sir, you have the statements from my team. She recovered my sidearm and took out the—”
“Officially, there was no woman in a naval flight suit. You didn’t see her. She was never there.”
“Sir?” Just when he thought he could ride out Bradford’s tirade, he felt a cold stab of dread through his spine. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to. We all answer to someone, and when your after-action report went up the chain, I had a visit—civilian intelligence types and a full-bird army colonel. They said your report would be redacted, scrubbed from the archives and replaced with another, more acceptable version of events. They gave me no specifics, just your new report—already signed by you—and told me to follow the new script.
“You and your team will play along too. The mission is already black. If they breathe a word to anyone without clearance, I’ll shit-can them anyway. Read your new report. Pass that to your team. Anyone ever says a word about the maiden in distress, they’ll be peeling potatoes on Mars for the rest of their enlistments.
“Frankly, that’s the only reason you’re still in charge of your team and still a Strike Marine. Play along, and there will be no consequences from what happened on New Bastion. Decide to open your yap, you’ll be thrown under the mother of all buses. Despite this, don’t think I’ll forget you had your first chance to shine and everything went wrong.” Bradford shook his head and made a low sound of disappointment in his throat before continuing.
“New Bastion isn’t exactly in our backyard. I have to trust you to make decisions in the field. Am I supposed to pop through the Crucible gate to check on you? Hold your hand? Wipe your…” Bradford exhaled theatrically. “How many of my other Strike Marine team leaders require this kind of maintenance? Don’t answer that; it was rhetorical.”
Hoffman’s face burned. “I take full responsibility for what happened in New Bastion.”
“Damn straight you do. The Strike Marines took a chance on you, Hoffman, you and that walking lump of muscle that’s been following you around since the end of the war. You survive as an officer and a team leader by the skin of your teeth. Another screw up, we’ll send you back to the fleet for garrison duty, promises from the spooks or not.”
A hollow feeling, like holding his breath and getting an oxygen treatment at the same time, spread through Hoffman. It was like his first public-speaking class multiplied a thousand times. He needed to either calm down or start shouting. The internal tension in his core was intolerable.
Bradford’s next words came slowly, barely loud enough to be heard. “There’s an extended-duration mission available.”
Hoffman stared straight ahead, realizing after several heartbeats that the captain was waiting for an answer. “Sir, my team and I would be glad for the opportunity.”
<
br /> Bradford’s pause was shorter this time. “Good. Now get out of my sight.”
Hoffman saluted, turned, and marched smartly from the office. He’d been prepared to dismiss Bradford as an overzealous ladder-climber whose most impressive accomplishment in the last five years was tightly rolling his sleeves to the perfect curve of his chin-up-enhanced biceps. But the truth hurt and he wished he could redo the mission and get it right. It had been his big chance to shine and prove his team wasn’t a gaggle of talented misfits who would never gel into a cohesive team.
The captain wasn’t wrong. Hoffman needed to do something to get his head straight—hit the gym or just run through the streets of Phoenix until he was too tired to keep reliving New Bastion in his head. Memories of the blonde prisoner shooting the alien crime boss replayed in his head when all he wanted was to forget she existed.
For the one-hundredth time, he reviewed the orders he’d been issued prior to the New Bastion deployment and looked for a hidden meaning. Black ops were part and parcel to Strike Marine duties. He understood direct-action missions and, despite Bradford’s claim, had performed well until now. Having his report changed without his knowledge was confusing, something he’d never experienced before, suggesting a deeper level to the dark abyss of Special Operations than he thought possible.
Something was wrong with the mission before his team stepped foot on New Bastion. Need-to-know was an expected limitation of black ops, but this felt sinister.
What had he been thinking? Not only had he hesitated, he’d lost the respect of Gunney King, a competent NCO who knew what he was doing and had the intestinal fortitude to make hard decisions. What little control he had over his team was gone. He considered resigning but couldn’t imagine life outside the Terran Strike Marines. What was he supposed to do, go to bartender school and learn to make mojitos?
As the doors to the captain’s office slid shut behind him, Hoffman heard something fly across the room and slam into the wall. His boss wasn’t just putting on a show. Hoffman had never seen an officer so angry.
****
Hoffman moved steadily through the Mercy Convalescent Center, reminding himself there was no tactical emergency and no reason to visually scan three hundred sixty degrees for threats. The air was both too warm and too cool, the hallways too spacious and too closed in. He remained aware of his environment but dialed his combat readiness down a notch, which made him anxious for reasons he couldn’t articulate.
Memories lurked under the surface of conscious thought. New Bastion wasn’t the definition of his career, despite Captain Bradford’s opinion. Things could go wrong during any mission. The residents of the medical center were the proof of that.
Down a hallway to his right, he saw an orderly moving a cart full of clean linen, her careful stride almost concealing the limp caused by her prosthetic lower leg. “Good day, sir. Can I help you?”
“I know the way. Thanks.”
Hoffman continued to the edge of a commons area, watching a dark-haired woman, a pilot he guessed, laughing with two ground-pounders. She spoke like an officer and a pilot and had that cocky stance unique to the profession. The men struggled to keep their language clean, sounding like grunts no matter how hard they tried to impress the woman. Her arm was in a cast while the two men had compression bandages and freshly grafted skin from recently repaired burns.
Others, in groups and individually, passed time in conversation or watching football on a video screen.
“Lieutenant Hoffman!” called a Marine missing both feet and one hand.
“How ya doing, Craig,” Hoffman said, looking the man in his eyes instead of cataloging his temporary prosthetics.
“Winning, as always,” Craig said.
“Then I’m glad I didn’t bet against you like last time,” Hoffman said.
The next section was dimly lit, cool, and very quiet. He’d spent his post-op time here re-growing his hand and sleeping. While the individual rooms were made for privacy, most of the slider doors stood open. He remembered listening for hours to the sounds of doctors, nurses, and other patients when they moved through the main hallway. Healing could be a lonely business.
Pushing thoughts of his situation aside, he worried about Opal and hoped he wasn’t causing problems, which his large, procedurally generated friend would never do intentionally. It was just that his size and direct nature didn’t always mesh with day-to-day matters. With no enemy to fight, he was obsolete and directionless. Plus, a lot of people didn’t like the mottled brown, green, and gray texture of his skin. It reminded them of what he was and how many like him had been sacrificed to save Earth.
The third section of the convalescent center was more of an open floor plan where the patients interacted according to their current abilities. A spirited game of ping-pong entertained a group at one end of the room, televisions and checkerboards at the other. Soldiers tended to gather in groups according to their injuries, as though this was how squads might be assigned.
For the second time this visit, he saw men and women with mismatched skin tones from burn grafts, and he rubbed his left arm, then the back of his neck. A nerve tingled in his regrown hand as a sharp memory of losing his hand during the boondoggle on New Bastion drove up his heart rate and sent images reeling inside his head. Sweat beaded on his forehead, but he resisted the urge to wipe it away, pretending it wasn’t there and that the memories weren’t real.
Across the room, a group was arguing over who had the better cyborg legs.
Hoffman drew a breath, held it, released it. The Ember War was over, but there were still conflicts across the galaxy. Hoffman would always have a job, even if it wasn’t with the Strike Marines. If his last interaction with his commander was any indication, he’d probably be back at Camelback making coffee for some rear-echelon colonel.
Patients and medical staff greeted him as he moved on with his thoughts, and double doors to the next area opened with the thunk of magnetic locks disengaging.
He focused on the reason he was there.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Dr. Lydia Nimms said. The woman always seemed to be the one to greet him. She stood like an officer, chin held high, everything about her appearance spotless and squared away, even though she wore only surgical scrubs and a simple lab jacket.
“Do you ever go home, Lydia?”
“I go home, Lieutenant. There is precious little rest for the wicked, and none for scientists.” She offered her best institutional smile.
“Where’s Opal?” Hoffman asked.
“Your bio-construct is in the garden. He’s taken to assisting other patients who are trying to relax and center themselves,” Dr. Nimms said.
“Is that a bad thing?”
The doctor clicked her tongue as she sought the correct words. “One of the other patients invited him but started the yoga drills by telling him to adopt a tactical posture and keep quiet.”
Hoffman waited for the grim punchline.
“Your construct took a tactical position. Right after he ripped up the rose bushes and dug a foxhole with his bare hands.”
Hoffman winced.
“Walk with me, Lieutenant,” Dr. Nimms said.
“He takes orders seriously,” Hoffman said as he fell in beside her. “It’s part of his programming.”
They stopped at a window overlooking the garden and watched yoga on an epic scale.
In the center of a dozen other patients, Opal held a wide, lunging stance to one side with his arms and hands stretched level to the ground. He stared intensely down the length of his right arm.
The instructor guided the group through breathing exercises. She spoke words Hoffman couldn’t hear, then the group twisted at the waist and extended arms straight up.
The only thing that made Opal stand out in the group was his size. His yoga technique, to Hoffman’s untrained eye, looked smooth and efficient despite his bulging muscles and serious expression.
“He seems to be doing fine now,” Hoffman sai
d.
Dr. Nimms pulled out her data slate and made notes, speaking without looking up. “Yes, Lieutenant. He is good at following instructions when clearly given.”
“How is his neural activity? Any drops below the cognitive event threshold?”
She smiled skeptically, pushing her short dark hair back over one ear distractedly. “I didn’t know neurology was a hobby of Strike Marine officers.”
“I’ve been taking care of him for a long time, long before the rest of the doughboys…retired.”
“You don’t ‘take care of him,’ Lieutenant. He’s encoded to you, responds to set commands like a well-trained dog. That he’s managed to outlive the rest of his kind doesn’t make him special,” she said. “Not like you think, at any rate.”
Hoffman pressed his teeth together to keep his jaw locked shut and regrettable words from escaping. A moment later, when his impulse to argue with a woman who wouldn’t listen to him about Opal’s true value was subdued, he selected a better question. “What about his MSE score?”
“Mental state evaluation scores are nominal. Ninety-nine percent of the doughboys that functioned during the war were removed from service within two years of V-Day. They weren’t designed to last much longer than that. Opal 6-1-9 will succumb to the same fate, despite this unique persistence. As I stated, it would be foolish to view him as somehow special or immune to the science of his construction,” Dr. Nimms said, firm but seeming to lose interest in Hoffman’s argument.
“Yes, Doctor, I know he could…degrade at any time.”
“I have colleagues who would be interested in studying it further, just in case the doughboy production facilities are ever restarted.”
Hoffman didn’t like where this conversation was going. “He’s still in active service. By the Ember War Recovery Act of—”
“Yes, I know it can’t be taken away from you without your consent. But Ibarra put that clause into the act, and ever since he vanished on some reconnaissance mission, President Garret has been steadily removing every trace of Ibarra from the government.”