Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  "You did a lot of things right, but-"

  "Yeah, you fuck one sheep."

  "What?" He asked, eyes wide open.

  "It's a joke. Forget about it. I could say, one 'awshit' wipes out a hundred 'attaboys', huh?"

  "Something like that." He nodded.

  "So, you're here to, what, hear my confession, act as my JAG lawyer, slip me a spoon so I can dig a tunnel out of here?" I pointed to the hardened concrete floor, or whatever incredibly tough substance the Kristang used as building material.

  He shook his head. "I'm sorry to say, I'm only here to show the United States military's support and concern. The Kristang don't need a confession, and you don't need a lawyer, because there won't be any sort of trial or hearing."

  "Right, why bother with justice when you can just execute people?" I waved my hand, feeling sorry for the man, who had to be in an incredibly awkward position. "Save your breath. You're going to say something about how aliens have different concepts of justice, and military discipline. I know all that. I also know that this kind of right and wrong doesn't depend on whose eyes you're looking through. It's wrong."

  Cochrane looked up at the tiny window. There wasn't anything he could say.

  "Major, you get the feeling that we're on the wrong side of this war? The more I learn about the lizards, the more I'm convinced we're fighting on the Nazi side of this one. In World War Two, the SS lined up civilians, and shot them in retaliation for their attacks on German soldiers. The allies didn't do that." I pointed to the US flag on my uniform. "We're civilization. The Nazis were not civilization."

  "The Kristang didn't attack Earth." He pointed out.

  "Major, unless you've totally had your fucking ears closed-"

  Cochrane stiffened, from anger, but I could see a lot of fear. "Watch your mouth, soldier."

  "I still outrank you, Major." I emphasized the last. "Has the Army busted my theater rank back to sergeant yet? No? Then, I'm still a full bird colonel, and unless you've had your ears closed," I left out the curse word because I didn't want him to leave, he being the only human I'd seen in days, "the Ruhar raided Earth, they hit us, to degrade our industrial capacity, so we wouldn't be quite so useful to the lizards. They didn't hit cities, they didn't even hit military bases, they just hit industrial infrastructure, power stations, and refineries. If the Ruhar hadn't hit us first, the lizards would have appeared in the sky, told us we're working for them now, and then wiped out a couple hundred thousand people to make their point. The only reason we didn't realize from the start that we're now slaves to the Kristang, is we were so grateful for them chasing away the Ruhar. The hamsters did the Kristang a favor. We humans don't mean a damned thing to either side. You've heard the rumors of what's going on back home? From the fortune cookies? Shanghai? Paris? San Francisco?"

  "Rumors." Cochrane protested lamely.

  "Rumors I believe, a lot more than I believe the censored crap our supposed allies allow UNEF HQ to tell us. What's next for me? I've been waiting here for days."

  Cochrane glanced away, then met my eyes. "Firing squad, tomorrow morning, for the remaining male prisoners."

  "Male prisoners?"

  He let out a long breath. "Male prisoners are simply shot. Women, they, you know the Kristang attitude toward females. A woman with authority over men is bad enough, but a woman who defies orders from men? The Kristang can't stand it, it drives them absolutely batshit crazy, and they're making an example. Women prisoners are stripped naked, tortured and hanged. Slowly." He looked like he was going to puke. "They made us watch, they made UNEF Command watch, yesterday."

  "Oh, shit. And you didn't do anything?"

  "Do what? Colonel," he said with emphasis, "I'm sure you appreciate that UNEF Command has limited options. We're at the end of the longest supply line in history. All of our ammo, medical supplies, all of our food, has to come here on a Kristang starship. At peak, we had enough food stocks for fourteen weeks, which was plenty, when the Ruhar evacuation was scheduled to be complete in a year, and the Kristang resupply ships were coming here like clockwork. With the Ruhar raids disrupting deliveries, we're down to about a month of food. The entire Expeditionary Force could be destroyed, by simply withholding food supplies. And our only ride home," he pointed upward with his thumb, "is with the Kristang. We can't even get off the ground by ourselves. The Kristang are only going to support our presence here as long as we are reliable allies in this fight. We volunteered to come here, and now that we're here, we have to make the best of it." He shook his head. "Look, Colonel, you, and the other objectors like you, put us in one hell of a mess here. You can call us slaves if you want, the fact is that humans are subordinate to the Kristang, however you say it. We're not used to that, especially you and me as Americans, not being completely in charge of our destinies. UNEF Command is not protesting your fate, because they're more concerned about what's happening back home than they are about us here, or about one mustang colonel."

  "I understand." I tried to put on a brave face, but in truth, I was scared shitless. I kept my hands clutched together behind my back because they were shaking so badly. Not scared about dying in front of a Kristang firing squad, I had accepted that fate, when I refused to kill the hamsters. I was afraid of disgracing myself, afraid that when the moment came, and I was up against the wall, I would piss my pants, or throw myself on the ground, crying and blubbering for mercy, disgracing my species. Just thinking about that, thinking of how disgusted the lizards would be to see a human acting so weak, put a bit of steel in my nerves. I could use that. Use that thought to turn my fear into hatred. Hatred of lizards. Yes, fuck them. Fuck their whole Nazi stinking lizard species. Fuck them straight to hell.

  "Major," I pushed myself away from the wall, and offered my right hand, which was no longer shaking. "Thank you for coming. No soldier wants to die alone. Tell UNEF Command thank you for me." We shook hands, I could tell he didn't know what to say. "If you ever get the chance, someday, tell my folks I did what I thought was the right thing."

  I didn't have long to contemplate my fate, because Major Cochrane was gone for less than a minute, when alarms sounded across the Kristang base, followed shortly by a tremendous explosion, and the floor of my cell heaved up to smack me in the face. I was seeing stars, my ears ringing. when a second explosion bounced me off the floor, and a section of the outer cell wall cracked and fell away. My head was still spinning but my body didn't wait for an engraved invitation, I was hightailing it out the busted wall before I realized what I was doing. Army training was good, and it kicked in right when I needed it. To get my bearings, I looked up at the sky, which was a big mistake. Right at that moment, a split second after I saw the familiar twinkling of starships jumping into high orbit, there was a searingly bright explosion above that knocked me to the ground, spots swimming before my stunned eyes. A replay of what happened in my hometown. The intense light had to be a Kristang ship getting vaporized in low orbit. The Ruhar were back. I crawled on the broken pieces of wall, half blind and deaf, and didn't know whether to be afraid, or happy, or fatalistic about the turn of events. The Ruhar hadn't come back to rescue the UN Expeditionary Force from the lizards, and no hamster was going to be happy to see me. As I crawled along the ground, my vision and hearing slowly returning, my mind raced. What next? Where the hell did I think I was going?

  Whether I thought about it or not, which was the whole point, my Army training fully kicked in. Assess the situation. Start with the facts I knew. Fact: I was scheduled for execution by a species that I now considered to be an enemy of humanity. Fact: therefore, considering fact number one, UNEF's authority to arrest me, and turn me over to the Kristang, was invalid, and I had no duty to follow such illegal orders. Fact: I was making this legal shit up as I went along. Fact: that didn't make my legal reasoning any less effective. We're on an alien planet, caught between two warring species, with little to no hope of getting home or even surviving another month. UNEF's overall authority was rather thin out
here. Especially since the Ruhar's surrender agreement and truce with the Kristang was apparently, let's say, subject to interpretation, depending on who had the bigger fleet in system at the time.

  My ears were still ringing, but my vision was returning, in between the spots. I was on hands and knees on the ground outside my cell, partly atop broken pieces of wall. Around me, all over the base, buildings had collapsed partly or completely. Secondary explosions were still causing chaos. We must have been hit with a hyperkinetic railgun round, closely followed by smart missiles. The Ruhar knew exactly where to hit the Kristang base, they must have launched ordinance as soon as they came out of jump. From what little I could see, the prison areas had sustained the least damage, while the main part of the Kristang complex was more than flattened, it was a smoking crater. A hypersonic penetrator round, coming in even at .05C, could do a tremendous amount of damage. My guess was the railgun dart had been closely followed by a smart missile with submunitions, to take out critical parts of the base that survived the initial strike. And my vision was good enough to see more twinkling lights in the sky, lots of twinkling lights in the sky. There were no additional explosions, which I figured meant the token force of Kristang ships had either been wiped out, or jumped away. That many lights demonstrated the Ruhar had arrived in force. As I watched, blinking, there were more lights. Holy shit. This wasn't merely another raid. The Ruhar were here, in strength, to take the planet back. This was a different ballgame now.

  If I hadn't already made up my mind, seeing signs of the Ruhar armada would have done it for me. UNEF's mission on Paradise was over, one way or another. If the Ruhar were now back in charge, all humans on the surface were POWs, sooner or later. And if Paradise was about to become a hot battle zone, our M4B1s and captured Ruhar air power would only get us caught in the middle.

  Oh, shit. It just hit me. Food. If the Kristang had lost Paradise, here would be no more incoming food shipments for humans. The fucking lizards weren't going to make any effort to resupply us if they'd lost Paradise, and the hamsters didn't have access to Earth to get human food. Would the Ruhar be generous enough to let humans continue growing our food on Paradise, on land we'd taken from them? I didn't want to find out.

  Food. The Kristang had been feeding me once a day, and I assumed feeding the other human prisoners, so there must be a supply of human food on the base, and since the lizards were ruthlessly efficient, they would have stored the food close to the prison area. I needed to find that food, before I did anything else.

  My vision was recovered enough to see where I was going, hearing was iffy, I couldn't tell whether sounds were reverberating in my abused eardrums, or coming from outside my head. Inside. I needed to get back inside. Food storage would logically be inside, not out where I was. Against instincts, I stepped gingerly back inside my former cell and tried the door. It was busted, and jammed at an angle, but it wouldn't budge. Back outside, hurrying because I was now thinking clearly, and wanted to be long gone before the Ruhar arrived, or any surviving Kristang looked for me, I scrambled along the fractured wall, looking for a way in. It was simple, there was a door, unlocked. Back inside, I peeked around the corner, not seeing anyone in the corridor. Cell doors had a tiny window just above my eye height, I stood in my toes to look in. The first one was empty. And the second. The third cell's door was partly ajar because of a large crack that went to the ceiling, and looking between the door and the frame, I could see the feet and legs of a person, a human, laying on the floor under debris from the collapsed ceiling. Getting the door open was easy, it was locked only from the inside; I pulled on the handle, and pushed it open. It took two strong efforts to get the door free from the warped frame, and once I was inside, it was clear my effort had been wasted. The legs belonged to a French officer, his chest had been crushed when the ceiling fell in. Training told me this was the time for look for survivors, not for sentiment.

  The door of the cell across the corridor was intact, but the outside wall was mostly gone. Inside was the body of a British army major. From the damage, I guessed his cell had taken a hit from a Ruhar missile submunition, it was ugly. The next four cells were empty, then the corridor took a right turn, and around the corner were the bodies of Major Cochrane and the Kristang who had been escorting him. They were both under a pile of rubble from the ceiling. Cochrane didn't have much blood on him, but he didn't have a pulse. The Kristang had a piece of what looked like metal reinforcing rod through its chest, I noted that Kristang blood was a much darker red color than human blood, and I paused to wonder if their blood had a higher iron content. It's amazing what goes through my mind at times. The damned Kristang was unarmed, I'd been hoped the lizard had a rifle, or any sort of weapon. No such luck. I had to crawl over the ceiling rubble to get past them, and through a section of corridor without doors, until I came to a cell block. After another pair of empty cells, I glanced through the window to see a human, a naked black woman. She had her back to me, trying to enlarge a crack in the outer wall, and even a quick glimpse revealed ugly scars on her back. In what I later realized was a stupid move, I scrambled back to Major Cochrane, dragged him from the rubble, and carefully removed his uniform shirt, pants and boots. It made me feel disrespectful to him, but the naked female soldier needed Cochrane's clothes more than he did, and he still had boxer shorts on. I left him propped up with his back against the wall, and hurried back to the woman. Since I knew cell doors were soundproof, I skipped yelling, and pounded on the door once, then twice, then three times, hoping the woman inside would understand that as an attempt to communicate. Then I turned the handle and cracked the door open. "You all right in there? I'm Bishop, US Army," I said in a harsh whisper.

  "Staff Sergeant Adams, sir, First MEF." She said in a voice shaking with relief. First Marine Expeditionary Force. Cochran's Marine Corps uniform was appropriate for her to use.

  Without looking around the door, I tossed the clothes in, and apologized they were all I could find. She quickly pulled on the shirt, not bothering to get it buttoned, and pulled the door open to dart into the corridor. "Thank you for the clothes, but I'd rather get the hell out of here right now."

  Shit. I'd thought of her as a woman first, and a soldier, or Marine, second. Of course she'd care a hell of a lot more about getting out of her cell, than about whether some other soldier saw her naked. She looked at me, then at my rank insignia, momentarily confused because I was too young to be a colonel, then recognition dawned in her eyes. "Oh," she managed a half salute while pulling pants on, "you're that Bishop, the colonel. What the hell is going on, sir?"

  "The Ruhar are back, and this isn't a simple raid, they have an armada upstairs. I think they're taking the planet back, in which case, UNEF is out of a job. And it's sergeant Bishop, not colonel. I was only a colonel because of the damned lizards."

  Adams gave me a look that I'd seen many times from staff sergeants. "Bullshit, sir, you don't get to do that."

  "Do what?"

  "The lizards didn't make you a colonel, UNEF did. They wouldn't do that unless it benefited us humans. Your rank is an advantage, no soldier gives away an advantage on the battlefield. Sir." There was that look again.

  "Shit." Damn it, I didn't even get to feel all self-righteous about my rank. "You're right, you're right."

  "These boots are way too big, they'll only make me trip over my own feet." She said, and kicked them off. "I'll go barefoot for now."

  I nodded and gestured for her to follow me, quietly. We both jumped as a secondary explosion boomed across the base, the sound echoing in the corridor. It happened two more times, each time less violently.

  And then a Kristang soldier came around the corner.

  On a physical level, I had no chance against the Kristang warrior; I was tired, weakened from stress and hunger, while it was larger and stronger than me, and armed with a rifle. On any other level, it had zero chance. It was at least as disoriented as me, it was completely surprised to find a human alive and outside of a
cell, and it was glancing back over its shoulder as it came around the corner. I had the advantage of a massive adrenaline surge. Before either of us knew what was happening, I ripped the rifle out of its hands, and went into a killing frenzy fueled by sheer terror. Unconsciously assuming the Kristang rifle had some sort of feature that prevented unauthorized use, I slammed the butt of the rifle under the lizard's chin twice, maybe three or more times, maybe hitting its throat, I don't remember. All I know is that in one moment, it was upright and the next moment it was falling and I was crashing to the floor on top if it, bashing the rifle butt into its skull over and over. There was a red fog in my vision that was part Kristang blood and part survival instinct. I put absolutely everything I had into driving that rifle butt through its brain. If you've never been in combat or in a car accident or thought for a split second that you were going to die, you can't imagine how fast images went through my mind; every ounce of hatred for its Nazi fucking species for what they had done or were doing or planned to do to Earth, every bit of anger for what it had done to Sergeant Adams and Miranda Collins and other women, all my carefully US Army Rules Of Engagement contained rage at the ignorant 'religious' fanatic savages who burned schools and killed children in Nigeria, every asshole who tried to bully me in high school, at my eight year old impotence while that sadistic shit Michael tortured a frog, every person who had ever cut me off in traffic, down to the coach who had berated my impressionable young self for failing to be perfect in Little League baseball games; it all went into that rifle butt until I had driven it clear through the skull of that genetically enhanced super warrior and was scraping concrete or whatever hardened material the lizards made the floor from.