by J. N. Chaney
And from his gestures, the man had a lot to say.
“Don’t know. But let’s cross the street,” Rev said.
No one had yet to give them a second look, but there was no use taking chances. They were only four blocks from their AO, and he’d feel much better off the streets and under some sort of cover.
Tomiko put her arm through his as they crossed over, ignoring the two people. Rev tilted his head down, mimicking the other people they’d seen.
“Hey, you two, come here!” the man yelled out.
Rev barely faltered his step, continuing and pulling Tomiko with him.
“Hey! You in the blue jacket. I said, come here.”
Rev didn’t have to look to see that he was the only one in the square in a blue jacket. He turned slowly to look at the guy, who was standing officiously, hands on his hips as he glared at them.
Twenty meters away. I can close in a second.
“Don’t even think on it,” Tomiko whispered as if she could read his thoughts.
“What do you want?” Rev asked.
“What do I want?” the man asked as if surprised at the question. “Who are you to question me? I said, come here.”
Rev bristled, but Tomiko’s arm in his acted as a governor. He forced a smile and with her started across the street again.
“That’s far enough,” the man said when they were halfway over, holding out his right hand, palm out like an old-time traffic cop. And as he did, Rev saw the insignia on his armband: a star and halo.
Angel shit!
Rev knew that the Children of Angels were not a New Hope phenomenon. He knew they were everywhere, but still, he hadn’t expected to find them here. Not only was the guy standing in front of him an angel shit, but he also acted as if he had some sort of authority. Rev should have put two-and-two together from the armband even before he saw the insignia, but back on New Hope, they wore white headbands.
“I don’t recognize you. What’re your names?”
“Leona Galdós,” Tomiko said before Rev could do something stupid.
Just go along with it, Reverent.
“Hansel Minik.”
The man’s eyebrows pursed together as he seemed to think about it before asking, “Where are you from?”
“Polanco,” the two said together. “We’re just going back now.”
“Polanco? Then what are you doing here? You’re out of jurisdiction. I’m calling Manny.”
Rev tensed his legs to spring into action, only to stop dead when the man pulled out a slap-freeze and drew down on him. In his PC-5, the small weapon would have no effect, but he wasn’t in his battlesuit. If he was hit with that primitive self-defense charge, he’d fall, and it would be hard. He’d be helpless. Tomiko could probably get the guy before he shifted his aim to her, but Rev would be out for the count.
Rev was royally pissed. He was a trained Marine, and this piece of crap Angel shit had managed to get the drop on him?
“We’re just trying to get home,” Tomiko said with just the right degree of plaintiveness. “Can’t you give us a break?”
“You should have thought of that before you broke cordons,” the man said as he slowly pulled his quantphone to call this Manny.
The real Hansel Minik and Leona Galdós were registered as living in Polanco, but if this Manny guy knew the neighborhood, he might know that neither had been on the planet for two years.
“How long would I be out if he shot me?” Rev asked his battle buddy as he shifted his feet ever-so-slightly to give him a better angle to push off.
“But it’s a self-defense weapon.”
“So, I’d better not let him hit me.”
He rocked slightly on the balls of his feet. He’d drop down low and hope the guy shot over his head.
“Kyle,” the woman to whom the guy had been talking, said.
“Not now, Lima. I’ll deal with you after I take care of these two.”
“Kyle!”
His hand holding the slap-freeze never wavered, and his eyes never left Rev, but he turned his head slightly.
“I said—”
Whatever he was going to say was cut off when the woman darted forward and drew her arm across Kyle’s throat. Rev was already in motion, surging across the intervening distance, but all for nothing.
Kyle, a surprised look on his face, fell to his knees as blood fountained out, spraying the pavement. He gaped as Rev stood over him before he fell over, kicked twice, and lay still.
“Come with me,” the woman, Lima, said, as she slipped the ceramic blade into her pocket, then took Rev’s hand and tried to pull him along. Rev resisted, and she said, “We don’t have much time before the Cents get here.”
That was enough to galvanize the two Marines. The three bolted down the side street, then into a building halfway down the block.
“You don’t see us, Jen,” Lima said to a young, wide-eyed woman sitting on a beautician’s chair.
The woman drew her legs back under her, but she said nothing.
Lima led them to the back of the shop, through a door, then down two flights of steps. The door at the bottom opened into a tunnel, and Lima hurried down, urging the two Marines to follow.
Rev’s navigation worked underground just as well as aboveground. He knew they had crossed back under the square and past the block on the other side. Lima was huffing and puffing, and he could imagine he could hear her heart pounding. Finally, in a side tunnel, Lima stopped and bent over with her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.
She was trembling, and with each breath, she gave out a tiny cry, almost like a kitten. Tomiko pursed her lips and stepped past Rev to put her arm around the woman’s shoulders.
“It’s OK,” she said.
It was dark in the tunnel, with small lights every fifteen meters offering minimal illumination. Here in the side tunnel, there wasn’t even that. Rev’s augmented eyes could see the woman well enough, but she would be mostly blind.
“Fuck. I can’t believe I did that,” she muttered as she slowly straightened her back. “Kyle, you ass.”
She turned toward Rev and Tomiko, took a deep breath, and squared her shoulders. “You’re not from San Cristobal. I’m guessing you’re not from Tenerife. So, who the hell are you?”
Rev exchanged looks with Tomiko. The success of their mission depended upon secrecy. If they were compromised, their mission would fail, and that was the best-case basis. Worst case, it would tip off the Centaurs, and that could spell doom for the assault and the citizens of the planet.
Each team was given the authorization to do whatever they had to do to maintain that secrecy. Whatever.
But this woman, Lima, had just killed a man to protect them. Their mission was to save the population of the planet, and that didn’t jive with taking a citizen’s life. Beyond that, it just wasn’t in Rev to kill a civilian, even for a greater good.
“Corporal Reverent Pelletier, Union Marines, ma’am,” he said automatically, ditching the Hansel identity.
“Oh, thank God,” Lima said, flinging her arms around his neck and collapsing on his chest. “You’ve come to save us!”
3
Rev sat in silence for a moment, digesting what Lima Rey had told Tomiko and him. When given their operations order, the S2, Lieutenant Greci-Won, had presented to them several scenarios of what they thought civilian life was like on Tenerife. She’d been right in some ways, but she’d missed a major factor.
There were Angel shits on the planet, and they’d not only welcomed the Centaurs but were actively serving them as quislings.
This seemed like a pretty big thing to miss, in Rev’s opinion. Yes, they had no direct communications with the citizens of the planet, but Omega Division and the military had assets that could surreptitiously gather the data needed to develop intel.
“So, that guy, Kyle, you k
new him?”
“Went to school with him,” Lima said matter-of-factly.
Rev understood death, and he understood killing. But he’d killed Centaurs, not fellow humans. To see this middle-aged, somewhat-dowdy woman, who might look at home at the local school board meeting complaining about her son’s biology teacher, just shrug off cutting a man’s throat—a man she’d known for years—like it was nothing was more than a little unnerving.
“Well, thank you,” Tomiko said.
“I couldn’t very well have him ask Manny Orinda about you, now could I? If he found out you were lying, he’d have turned you over to the damned Cents.”
Slap-freeze notwithstanding, Rev wasn’t so sure that Kyle would have been able to do much, but yes, it was good that the other angel shit had not been warned that there were outsiders in the area.
“He’s an asshole, anyway,” Lima said, spitting onto the floor of the apartment to which she’d led them. “I guess he was, now,” she added, this time with a little less venom in her voice.
Rev wondered what their history was, Lima and Kyle. Where she was full of righteous anger before, there was just the slightest glint of tears forming in her eyes now.
“Do you know how many of these . . . kapos there are?” Rev asked.
“Not really. We don’t know much of what’s going on outside our cordon. We’ve got Kyle’s family. They’re all quislings, but only he and his daughter are kapos. At least they’re the only ones who wear the armband. Ti Santorum, she’s a kapo. All told? Maybe half-a-dozen. But that’s enough. They’ve got the Cents at their beck and call.
It had taken Rev a few moments to understand the difference between quislings and kapos, two terms Lima had thrown around. He knew what a quisling was, someone who cooperated with the enemy. But he’d had to ask his battle buddy what a “kapo” was. It was an old Twentieth Century term for a prisoner who became the enforcer, the guards working for their enemy. According to Punch, back on Earth, they’d been noted for being crueler than the captors themselves.
Rev and others had known their mission would be difficult, but he’d never imagined that one of the obstacles would be fellow citizens. He’d always thought that the Children of Angels were flat-out crazy. A group of them had even tried to take over Camp Nguyen—which was full of thousands of Marines at the time. That was the very definition of crazy. But he’d never considered that they would be actively helping the enemy.
“What happens to people who run afoul of these kapos. You said that Kyle would have turned us over to the tin-ass . . . the Cents, if he’d have figured out we weren’t citizens here. What happens then?” Rev asked.
Lima’s eyes hardened, and she said, “We don’t know. None have ever come back once the Cents take them away.”
Whatever remorse she might have felt there for a moment disappeared in an instant.
“Well, then, we’ll just have to make sure we aren’t taken,” Tomiko said. “That no one is taken until—”
She cut herself off.
“Until what? Why are you here? What’s going to happen?”
The Marine assault was going to initiate in just over thirty hours. The teams on-planet didn’t want to give the Centaurs any advance warning, so that knowledge wasn’t to be widely disseminated until closer to H-Hour. With the Children of Angels thrown into the mix, the chance for that seemed much higher than they’d anticipated. They needed some help from the local citizens, however. They couldn’t just spring this on the people at the last moment.
Tomiko gave Rev a quick glance, and when Rev nodded, she continued.
“We’re coming to take on the Centaurs. The Marines.”
“And us? What’s going to happen to us while you’re doing this?” Lima asked, her voice low, but the stress evident.
“That’s why we’re here. We’ve got to implement an evacuation of the population,” Tomiko said.
“You do know how many people we’ve got here, right?” Lima asked.
“Before the tin-asses came? You had close to half-a-million here in San Cristobal. One-point-three billion planet-wide,” Rev said.
“I don’t know about the rest of Tenerife, but here in the city, three-quarters of us are probably still alive.”
Which was one of the things they were supposed to find out. That was more than most of the estimates. Normally, the Centaurs exterminated all or most of the human populations of the planets they took.
“I see two Marines,” Lima continued. “I’m happy to see you, and I’m overjoyed to hear a rescue force is on its way, but how can you two save all of us here?”
Rev hesitated, not sure how much he should tell her. But they needed help, and her willingness to kill an old friend was a pretty good indication that she was up to the task.
“There are a lot more than just the two of us. A couple of thousand have arrived over the last ten or twelve hours. Fourteen more just here in San Cristobal,” Rev told her.
Lima raised an eyebrow and said, “Kinda hard to hide that many Marines. What if . . . no, what happens when one of you guys gets caught. You almost did, after all.”
This woman was sharp, Rev realized, as she voiced one of the biggest liabilities of their mission. Just the kind of person they needed. It was serendipity that they met, and Rev wasn’t going to throw that away.
“Surprise is what we need to keep Marines alive while we root out the tin-asses. But the cost to your people . . . that would be just too much. So, we have to risk losing that surprise in order to save lives.”
He could tell that answer was unexpected. She drew back slightly, then nodded her understanding.
Time to pounce.
“But we need help. We don’t know your city, we don’t know your people. We’ve got a list of people we’re to try to contact as go-betweens that the Omega Division provided.”
“Did the OD have me on that list?”
“No, they didn’t.”
Her disappointment was evident as she slightly deflated.
“But, Corporal Reiser and I think you’re a perfect candidate.”
He hadn’t actually discussed it with Tomiko, but she nodded her agreement as he said it.
“Would you be our contact here, to help us get your people ready?”
“Me? Damn fucking right, I would,” she blurted out. “What do you want me to do?”
That’s a relief. We’ve made contact.
They may not have tracked down any of their potential contacts, and they weren’t holed up in any of the suggested safe houses, but this place, and Lima, would do. They were in a different neighborhood than they had planned, but it was still in their AO. With the added threat of the Children of Angels, this was their best option.
Time was ticking away, but the two Marines needed a better picture of what was going on. Until they had that, they couldn’t finalize their plans.
“Right now, we need information.”
“Shoot. I’ll tell you whatever you need to know.” She stood there, eager to help.
Rev had a list of questions he’d been given to ask, but one stood above the others, so he decided to get right to the heart of it.
“Why have the tin-asses kept you all alive? They don’t usually do that, and if we know why they value you, that might help us get more of you out of this in one piece.”
That took Lima by surprise. “You don’t know?”
Rev and Tomiko exchanged puzzled looks, then Tomiko said, “No, we don’t. No one does.”
“Well, given what’s happened over the last hour, I was going to skip it, but I’m supposed to be on shift in about forty-five minutes. If you’ve got big enough balls, you can come and see the answer for yourself. So, Marines, are your balls big enough?”
“Huge, Lima. Our balls are huge,” Rev assured her. “And if you can answer that question, we’ll follow you anywhere.”
“I don’t get it,” Rev said as he watched a steady stream of people entering the old terraforming plant. “That thing hasn’t work
ed for more than a century. It can’t be in good shape.”
“But that’s what we’re doing,” Lima said.
“What records do you have about the place?” he subvocalized.
“Could it work?”
It didn’t make any sense. The planet’s O2 level was twenty-one percent at sea level, a touch more than back on Earth. The only reason the plant was still standing at all was that it was probably more trouble than it was worth to demolish it, and like many planets, the stacks were often kept as memorials to the pioneering spirit that populated this corner of the galaxy.
Rev knew about the plant, of course. It was one of his and Tomiko’s possible assembly areas. What Intel hadn’t realized was that people were working there, which was a rather major omission.
“And you said other humans were being put to work?”
“Like I told you, I haven’t been out of our cordon. But the food is still being fabricated, the water is still running, and . . .”
“And what?”
“Well, this is all rumor. I don’t know for sure, but Kyle said that the Cents have more of us being forced to work for them. Like at Kreimer.”
It was evident that the Centaurs were not just ignoring the humans, letting them live instead of exterminating the population. They were using them for slave labor. But why? It didn’t seem that efficient, and more than that, Tenerife was well within the borders of human space. They had to have foreseen a human response.
It was almost as if they were settling in for the long haul.
Tenerife had been a Class B (+) planet when discovered. It had native life and an O2/N atmosphere. It had only taken fifty years to bring it up to human standards and certified for colonization. With heavy metals and resources humans prized, it had been an obvious jewel, and the bidding war for the rights had been lively.