by Steve Rzasa
“We are initiating an annual high threat post review chaired by the Lord Secretary of Subsector Affairs and ongoing reviews by the deputy secretaries to ensure that pivotal questions about security reach the highest levels. We will also regularize protocols for sharing information with His Grace’s Armed Forces. These actions are designed to increase the safety of our diplomats and military personnel and reduce the chances of another Basattria happening.”
—from “Transcript of the Basattrian Investigatory Panel’s Report to His Grace”
The crowd began assembling in the early afternoon. At first, it was just a few scattered young males walking past, shaking their upper appendages, baring their needle teeth, and hissing at Lance Corporal Tower and the other Marine posted outside the security entrance to the ducal consulate. As the sky darkened, their numbers grew, swelled by females with young and an increasing number of the big males, including several obvious hunt leaders. Their confidence grew too, and they began coming closer and closer to the two marines despite the powered battle armor that rendered a human more than a match for a Basattrian even without the Hydra FM-4 fusion pulse thrower attached to their right arms.
In addition to the Hydra, Tower wore a Sphinx CPB-18 at his hip and a Benelli-Mossberg ASE-5K was resting in the slot behind his left shoulder. The other marine, PFC Mike Josephs, was similarly equipped, although in the place of the Benelli-Mossberg he had a mini-rack of six Skyseeker missiles mounted on his back. Between the two of them, they had enough firepower to not only disperse the crowd, but destroy a significant percentage of the Basattrian city’s infrastructure and air traffic.
That didn’t mean they weren’t nervous, though. Quite the opposite. The consul had been perfectly clear about their rules of engagement. They were not to open fire in any circumstances whatsoever. Tower doubted they were actually expected to allow themselves to be ripped to pieces by the big, six-armed lizard people, but the stupid restriction meant that neither he nor Josephs had any idea at what point the situation should be considered an emergency or a combat engagement.
As the crowd, which Tower now estimated at about six hundred, pressed closer, Josephs decided he’d had enough. He flipped open a section of the armor under his left wrist, tapped in a code, and began establishing a perimeter with the four quarpods that emerged from a small slot in the bottom of the security door. In obedience to his direction, each settled down at four separate points that formed an arc encompassing both marines, then raised a red arc of light that shimmered an ominous warning to the crowd.
“Sitrep, Corporal?” It was Captain Hagel, the commander of the consulate’s security detail.
“It’s getting ugly, sir. We’ve seen a few alphas show up, so we established a 10-meter perimeter with the quaddos.”
“Set to what?”
Tower checked. “80 volts, sir. Enough to sting ’em, not enough to stun.”
“Carry on, Corporal.”
“No worries, sir. Any chance we can get some eyes in the sky, sir?”
“Negative, Corporal. Just hang tight. Comm links are still down, but those runners we sent out should be reaching base right about now. Until we can get the links restored, we’re limited to line-of-sight. So don’t go running around any corners, right?”
“Yessir. Any chance you can patch me through to my wife, Captain?”
“Affirmative, Corporal. But keep it short.”
Tower looked out at the loud and angry crowd. He didn’t really understand what the Basattrians were supposed to be upset about, but they had been up in arms protesting the presence of humans from every planet for five days now. Before the comms went down this afternoon, there were reports of fourteen different embassies being stormed, including the one belonging to the Ascendancy itself. Tower had just about convinced himself that the lizard people were going to leave the little Rhysalani consulate alone, thanks to the small army base not fifteen kilometers away, when the first young males began prowling the open plaza in front of the consulate.
“Hey Grave” he heard Melassa say. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, although next time I say you take that job with Intercore.” His wife was a civilian administrative assistant to the consul; she’d cashed in every favor she was owed and borrowed a few more to see that Tower was assigned to the small Marine detail charged with providing consulate security. “It’s mostly a lot of shouting and fist-shaking. They don’t have the tech to crack our shells, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Well, be careful out there,” she said. “I heard the consul say this should all blow over in a day or two, but our comms are still down. The techs think the Basattrians are jamming us somehow.”
“Don’t worry about me, baby. Between me and Josephs, we got enough firepower to take out three cities. The lizards are just mad, they’re not stupid. You keep yourself busy and I’ll be off-shift in a few kilosecs.”
“Okay, come find me as soon as you come in. I love you.”
“You too, baby.”
He cut the connection. Josephs glanced in his direction.
“Well?”
“The consul won’t let us put up any drones. Thinks it might be seen as an aggressive gesture.”
“Screw that. How we supposed to know what’s really going on out there when we can’t see nothing?”
The red neuro-electrical shield flared as one particularly bold, or unusually stupid, young male tested the red lines. He roared and leaped away, making a gesture with his middle arms that one didn’t have to be a Basattrian to understand. Tower resisted the momentary urge to respond in kind. The crowd had continued to swell, and with darkness falling, fires were being set in the plaza.
“So much for the cavalry,” he heard Josephs say. He didn’t understand at first, until he saw a group of roaring Basattrians pushing their way through the crowd toward them. They were shoving one Basattrian before them and carrying another above their heads. They hurled the one they were carrying down and Tower could see it was dead from the way it slumped bonelessly on the ground. Tower didn’t know much about Basattrian expressions; he and Melassa had only been on Basattria for five rotations, but he could see the live one was terrified.
“I know that one. Those are our messengers,” Josephs said grimly. “What are we going to do? We can’t just let them kill him.”
“Captain, we have a situation,” Tower told the security commander. “The two messengers we sent were captured. One is dead, the other one is captured. It looks like they intend to kill him right in front of us. Request permission to rescue the local collaborator, sir.”
“Negative, corporal. Hold your fire. Do not intervene. Repeat, do not intervene.”
“But sir, he’s one of ours!”
“Corporal Tower, I have given you an order. Do you copy?”
“I copy, sir. Hold fire, do not intervene.”
The Basattrian made a noise Tower didn’t even realize the lizards could make. He didn’t have to be a xenobiologist to recognize it as a scream. One of the big alphas was holding a burning piece of something to the captive’s scaled belly.
“Tower, they’re going to kill him,” Josephs said.
“Captain says we got to hold our fire and stay out of it.”
Between the bestial roaring of the Basattrian crowd, the screaming of the lizard being tortured and the growing number of fires dancing in the dark, it was a perfect image of Hell. But when the lizard’s cries didn’t provoke either Tower or Josephs into action, his torturers finally gave up and began to drag him away into the crowd. Burned and injured, the lizard didn’t even attempt to resist.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Josephs said, almost under his breath, and he began to run forward.
“Mike!” Tower shouted. “Stop, Mike! Come back.”
“Private Josephs, you will return at once!” Captain Hagel shouted. “That is an order, private!”
The Basattrians closed on Josephs at once. He smashed two of them aside, but then a large alpha sprang a
t him and knocked him off balance. The marine staggered under the blow and nearly went down, but somehow managed to keep his feet. He dropped the alpha with an armored elbow and booted a smaller lizard out of the way. Then he was moving again, through the dark sea of green scales, and Tower had to boost his IR to see him. Josephs stood out like a bright red-and-yellow light amidst the cool light blues of the cold-blooded lizards, but despite his powered battlesuit, the weight of the Basattrian numbers slowed his advance almost to a halt. He stubbornly punched and kicked and shoved his way forward, until he was nearly fifty meters away from the consulate and all but invisible.
Tower didn’t know what to do. Adrenaline surged through his body and every last vestige of his training urged him to go after his fellow marine, but now the consul was linked in and he was screaming furiously in his earpiece about court martials and dereliction of duty. Tower froze, unable to move, or to speak, he just stood and watched Josephs methodically smashing his servo-powered way through the masses of Basattrian bodies in pursuit of the captive.
Then a red beam lit up the darkening sky, a bolt from a laser fired from a building on the far side of the plaza. Tower saw Joseph’s suit flare red and knew that he’d been hit.
“Captain, we’re taking fire! Permission to engage.”
“Get back in here, Tower. Back up to the door and we’ll let you in. This is getting out of hand. Come inside now.”
Then a second laser was fired, and a third.
“Mike, they’re telling us to come in. Get back here, man!”
“I got the guy,” he heard Josephs panting. “I got him, but you’ve got to cover me. There’s too many of them! I can’t fight them off and drag him at the same time!”
“Leave them, Tower! Come inside now. We’re going to lock down.”
Tower made up his mind. He was a Marine, and Marines don’t leave men behind, even if the men are lizards.
“Hold on, Mike, I’m coming!”
He charged forward, knocking lizards down left and right as he ran. One big male snapped at him and he punched it, shattering its jaw with the augmented power of the battle armor. Having caught the Basattrians entirely by surprise, he managed to reach Josephs in a matter of decaseconds. Two more laser beams tore up the bricks around them, but Tower lifted his arm and fired back with a brief pulse of fusion hellfire that blew out the upper section of the building where the snipers were located. That not only put an end to the incoming fire, but caused the lizards that were pressing in on them to shriek in outrage and fall back, terrified that the two Marines were about to open up on them.
Then his armor beeped an alert. There was an unidentified aerial object approaching the plaza, and it was coming in low and fast. Was it the Navy? It was coming in from more or less the right direction, but why didn’t its transponder register? A moment later, he had his answer. A Unity MA-33 Turmfalke, a ground attack craft that was a good five tech levels higher than legal on this TL-13 world, was hovering above the plaza to the south.
“What is that thing doing there?” Mike shouted.
But Tower knew. The Turmfalke was how the low-tech lizards had broken into all the human embassies. That explained why they’d even dared to attack the Ascendancy. And that was how, and why, the consulate’s communications were being jammed.
“Bring it down,” he shouted at Josephs. “Captain, get everyone into the shelter now!”
He didn’t know what weaponry an MA-33 carried, but it wasn’t big enough to be carrying daisy cutters or tunnel worms. It was a hunter-killer designed to kill ground troops and take out lightly fortified positions, not destroy armored bunkers. But he was pretty sure it packed enough punch to crack open the consulate like a sledgehammer cracking an egg.
“That’s not possible,” he heard Captain Hagel say.
Tower didn’t bother to ask for permission, he raised his arm and fired the FM-4 at the warcraft hovering overhead. It was a useless gesture; the beam splattered against the MA-33’s invisible shields in a harmless purple explosion. A moment later, two missiles jetted out from underneath the Turmfalke’s curved wings.
Tower screamed in futile anguish as the huge double explosion lifted him off the ground and hurled him away from the building. He was rising, rising, and then he was falling, tumbling head-over-heels toward the rapidly approaching ground…
“Tower!”
It was a dream. It was a nightmare. No, it was worse. It was a memory. He shuddered at the recollection, at the memory of rising from the stone plaza and seeing the sight of the smoke and flames rising from the shattered wreckage of the consulate.
“Tower!” Baby’s repeated barking finally claimed his attention. “We’re back in Trans Paradis. Detector Hildreth asked you to contact her when you returned.”
Tower didn’t reply right away. He was still trying to deal with the ocean of emotions that surged within him, the wave of madness threatening to tear him away from the pier of sanity to which he clung. He ran through the color program his neurotherapist had given him. Despair was grey-purple. Loss was the sickly yellow-green of vomit. Rage was dark red, the scarlet of a high-powered laser or the oxygen-rich blood that spattered his armor as he wreaked vengeful havoc upon the unarmed Basattrian civilians. Black, the bottomless black of deepest space, was hate. It was hate for the lizards, for the Unity, for the bureaucrats who dropped them in the soup and left them there to die, and for every cursed xeno, human or alien, in the galactic spirals.
He took a deep breath and envisioned the colors swirling about him, engulfing him, bathing him in their reeking, burning foulness. And then he pictured a white light, a pure, unadulterated white that was not the absence of colors, but the fullness of every color there had been, was, or one day would be, burning the foulness away from him. The image was so real he almost screamed as he pictured the steam rising off his naked body, cleaned and purified by the perfect light.
He took a deep breath. He was sane again. He was whole again. He opened his eyes.
“What time is it? You said Hildy wanted to get in touch?”
“Are you all right, Tower? Your vital signs were showing unwarranted indications of physical distress, which given your history can be an indication of psychological aberrations.”
“I’m fine, Baby,” he reassured the augment. “Don’t worry about me. Did I sleep all the way from Rhys City?”
“If you can reasonably call anything that involves that much thrashing about and mumbling sleep, then yes, Tower, you were asleep. It’s zero six ten.”
“I should have had you read that paper to me again. If Pfiffner could figure out how to turn it into tablets, no one would ever miss out on a good night’s sleep. Why don’t you see if Hildy’s up.”
She wasn’t, but she took the call, answering it in a sleepy voice.
“Hey Tower. You back?”
“Just. What do you think, your place or mine?”
“Yours. I think we’re going to need your access to records that are out of my reach,” she said. “No, go back to sleep, tell McCandless I’ll be at MCID all morning.”
Tower froze. He felt as if his heart stopped. She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to someone else. Someone else who worked in the Trans Paradis Police Department. Certain colors began to lazily stir in the depths of his mind. Greys and purples, with the occasional flash of red.
“Tower?” Hildy repeated. “You still there?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Sorry, just, ah, just waking up myself. Yeah, we can meet there. Zero nine hundred work for you?”
“Sounds great. See you there, Tower.”
She broke the connection. Tower laughed grimly. Her personal life was none of his business. There was nothing between them, they were just two cops working on a case together. It wasn’t as if she’d broken his heart. He didn’t have one left to break.
All the same, the sun that was still rising in the brilliant morning sky left him as cold as if it had never risen at all.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The revolution represented the majority of the planet and the most essential interests of the majority of the Morchardese population, therefore its violence was progressive rather than systematic. The monarchy’s violence was systematic and systematically arbitrary because it represented a minority destined to disappear. It is most probable that the revolution too will find itself forced to resort to similar, and perhaps even more extreme, forms of violence, but as a transition, and with the certainty of historical justice to justify it. The difference is that the monarchy represented the minority of the planetary interests, while the revolution represents the majority.
—from “A History of the Revolution on Morchard” by Graham Eccles-Hamlin
Hildy was entirely normal, greeting Tower with a smile and a friendly kiss on the cheek as if nothing had happened a few kilosecs ago. Tower felt as if the expression he forced himself to wear was as artificial as a clown’s broad, red-lipped smile, but once they got past the initial pleasantries, he was able to focus on the task at hand. He did his best to forget where that lithe, sweet-hipped figure had been the night before, and what lucky bastard had been running his hands over those lovely curves.
“Here are the three Morcharder agents.” When she looked blank, he explained. “The corporatists call themselves Morcharders, as opposed to the royalist Morchardese. It’s a part of their whole new start theme or something. Anyhow, one of them was supposed to make the move, only they didn’t, because Willem Daendels, the control who was running them, decided the revolution was insufficiently impure and threw his lot in with the Crown Prince.”
“He switched sides?”
“Yeah, he even met twice with the prince at Tanabera’s place. Baby confirmed his account last night.”
“You buy it?”
Tower nodded. “Yeah, he is a serious piece of work. Academic, writes manifestos and treatises the way your average citizen watches the screens. He had whole walls of old-style books and Baby said his revolutionary group had a body count of around five hundred. My take is that he’d execute his own mother if he decided she was insufficiently loyal to the revolution.”