by Tammy Salyer
Quantum’s features flatten out into what I think he must assume is a neutral expression, but it only makes him appear as calculating as I know him to be. Not really what you look for in a diplomat.
“Think about it,” he says. “Bogotan has a manufacturing plant, a functioning city power grid with municipal water, and an untold number of experts in everything we lack. Right now, we fight nature just to keep the desal plant running. If we lose that, we are done. The time to form alliances is before time runs out, not when we are desperate.”
“Dr. Kittinger keeps the desal plant running fine,” Vitruzzi cuts in from where she stands next to Brady.
Quantum shifts his gaze to her, the same calculating expression still fixed. This isn’t going well for him at all. Much as I don’t like the man, though, I see his point.
Covering a yawn that threatens to split my skull in two, I start inching toward the exit. I already know this is going to end in another stalemate, and I’m too tired to give it more than a minimum of my attention. This is the third town hall in as many weeks, a brainchild of Brady’s to help bring order to the colony’s slowly expanding population. Obviously, he’s well suited to the task after leading Agate Beach for several years, and his own mining crew somewhere on the Spectras before that. Despite few resolutions or social ordinances getting past the discussion stage, I have to admit that the spiking curve of disorder and dis-ease that’s been growing among the settlers has at least leveled off because of Brady’s lead-taking. Or it seemed to have, but part of me wonders if tonight’s meeting portends an about-face in the relative calm of things.
Dusk is falling and some of the air’s constant humid saturation is easing off. My shift in the Andromeda’s med-bay starts in a few minutes. We have only a few sick and wounded at the moment, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to convince whoever I’m partnered with tonight to trade sleep rotations with me.
Karl and David have been out for three weeks on a salvage run—which always makes my nerves sizzle like a slow-burning fuse until I know they’re safe again—and are expected back any day now. I didn’t go with them this time thanks to a flare-up of what best might be termed acute gastrointestinal distress—of the extreme variety. A lovely side effect of using myself as a testing ground for some of the questionable salvage we find. Once that “passed” I reverted to my constant focus on staying busy, despite difficulty sleeping, just to keep my mind off all the possible things that could happen to them. Regardless, I’m about ready to fall into a walking coma, and tonight’s shift is just the chance I need to catch up on sleep after the last two days on the platform doing maintenance.
Bidding an unfond adieu to the bickering, I drop to the back of the crowd, catching a suggestive wink from Desto, and start the short walk to the Andromeda, surprising myself with the realization that even I’m undecided about whether or not Quantum should get what he’s asking for.
THREE
THE WAR, SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER
“The Corps Loyalist cruiser is down and the last of their air forces are neutralized.”
The voice belongs to Lieutenant Steward, the OIC of this operation. At first glance you wouldn’t think much of the slight, pale at-one-time career Corps officer, but his mind for strategy has led to the decimation of at least half the enemy we’ve come across since the war started. Between him and Medina calling the shots, and strong fighters like my brother and most of the rest of the crew of our cruiser, the Celestial, I don’t see how this war could go on much longer.
The enclave of Corps soldiers we’re here on Iso Umm, a moon off Spectra 5, to mop up has dug into a substantial weapon cache hidden in an old Admin mine. It had taken almost a week to neutralize their air defenses, and another three days of constant assault on the ground to breach their bunker. David and I are here with the other 247 fighters from Ground Squadron 8, 90 percent of us former Corps.
Steward continues, “The only thing left to deal with are the remaining Loyalists at your location. Can your unit handle that?”
The question is rhetorical. He means he’ll send a transport to bring us back to the Celestial after, and only after, we’ve handled it.
David gives the affirmative, clicks off his satcom channeler, and leans his back against a black, smooth boulder, the same as the kind that makes up almost the entire surface of Iso Umm. “Fuck,” he says.
“No more than another day, tops,” I try to reassure him and dig through the remaining containers of liquids our platoon has piled behind our frontline berm. Pulling out one labeled PASSION FRUIT, I squash the urge to celebrate like I’d just won the lottery. Everyone loves this flavor and the passion fruit always disappears first. Sure, it may taste a little like someone tried to mask the flavor of sulfur with asbestos dipped in sugar, but that’s just the vitamins (they tell us). Besides, the flavor is better than the rest, which taste more like toxic waste dipped in monkey piss, and I can’t believe one got overlooked. I pull off the cap and take a swig, then wave it toward David. “Want a drink?”
He nods and I pass it over. Tilting his head back, he takes several deep swallows. Before he can finish the whole container, I swipe it back with a disgusted “Yeah, you’re welcome. Don’t mention it,” then drain it and go back for a second. Monkey piss it is.
After settling down against the boulder beside him and finishing the drink, I start to nod off when he says, “Christ, what’s that stench, Aly?”
“Dunno,” I mumble without opening my eyes. “You’ll get used to it.” He’s referring to the cloud of cheap-smelling cologne wafting from my body armor. Some practical joker made me their target. And they will pay.
I hear him scooting across the loose gravel to get some distance from me, then nothing for a few blissful minutes.
But that’s all I’m going to get. Being a soldier in a war whose outcome matters to oneself makes sleep both a commodity and a distraction. My eyes jump open again soon, almost as if they’re linked to some internal timer. The rest of our platoon, fifty or so dirty, dust-covered troops, encircle us, leaning against boulders of their own with their eyes closed, also trying to get something approximating sleep. It’s the first break we’ve had in forty-eight hours of pushing the last of these Corps Loyalists underground. Third and Fourth Platoons group together nearby, inside perimeters of their own. David took charge of the whole company twelve hours into the ground assault after our CO, a guy from Obal 8 whom I’d liked and respected, got himself incinerated trying to take some of their fighters as captives. All of us now are just waiting for David to give us the final green light to end this operation.
“We could just starve them out,” David says, his voice low enough that I can tell he’s talking to himself. “They’ll come out eventually if they know they’re not going to get any reinforcements or supplies.”
“Sure,” I comment. The thing I don’t mention is we’re not getting any help either if we don’t finish the job. But he’s right, and that’s the hell of it. It would really be that easy. “What do you think Medina’s pushing us to attack for?”
“She wants the weapons.”
“And if we leave them in there too long, they could start to sabotage them.”
“Exactly.” He clicks on his com and links to the other platoon leaders. “Henderliter, Joy, what’s your status?”
Henderliter: “We’re all green. Ready for go. Over.”
Joy: “Ready on your mark, Erikson. Over.”
David stands, runs his eyes and hands over his gear in a routine check that’s been practiced hundreds of times, and calls out, “Second Platoon, at the ready!”
Fifty-plus soldiers get up with no hesitation. I follow, running my hands over my helmet, body armor, utility vest, ammo belt, and weapons in the same obsessive check, ensuring all straps are secure, all connections are closed.
He clicks on the com and gives the attack command. In a perfect military maneuver, our three platoons infiltrate the remaining thirty Loyalists’ bunker and neutralize them in one hour-lo
ng push.
Sometimes a firefight is just that. Other times, it’s a massacre.
* * *
Scraping the crust of dried blood and dust off my face and arms and out of my hair is going to be a full-time job tonight. By my estimate, about two hundred of us came back. But none of the Admin Loyalist soldiers are going anywhere except back into the dust—and down the drains aboard the Celestial.
“Hey Erikson!” someone yells, and both David and I halt our trudge toward the showers and turn. Potts, a dark-haired ex-citizen, one of the few aboard, continues, “Uh, you, David—Medina wants you on the bridge.”
“Can it wait?”
“Guess you have to ask her,” he says and hustles past us on some other task.
“Must be something important,” David mocks.
I nod. One thing about these ex-citizens working aboard a fighting vessel, they seem to always elevate whatever task or duty they’re on into some kind of overdramatic life-or-death status. As if Command General Medina would entrust anything more essential than cataloguing gear or indexing data to these militarily clueless pinheads. Sometimes we get a laugh at their self-created grandeur. Other times, like when we’re covered in gore and haven’t slept more than a few hours in days, we have a hard time not strangling them.
“Come on,” I offer, “I’ll go with you.”
It’s strange to be walking these pristine, gleaming passageways, which are the hallmark of a fleet cruiser. There’s no dust in space, and ship environments are as hermetic as they come. Before the Soldier’s Rebellion of 2719 and our subsequent desertion, when David and I had still been in the Corps, every reentry of a fleet craft after a planet-side chit included twenty-four hours of quarantine to examine soldiers for new or infectious pathogens we may have picked up. This was after the full-body scrub down, of course. For a soldier, privacy is a myth, and being turned into the focal point of multilevel tissue and cell scopes was never really a big deal—even our bones and guts got more attention from ship doctors and medical analysts than most children get from their parents. We’d been held inside a decontamination airlock until every last speck was scrubbed, sucked, or sponged from our bodies and gear—and the truth is, soldiers looked forward to the observation period simply for the time it gave us to rest.
But because reentry processing took a squad, a platoon, or sometimes a full company out of rotation for so much time, our tours planet-side tended to be as long as, and often longer than, needed. I’d gone from periods of days to months stuck on scattered rocks throughout the system, with nothing better to do than learn new ways to gamble and lose my pay, or collect new recipes from the population for cooking up whatever edible local flora and fauna were around. Populations that were friendly, that was. Which weren’t all of them.
We didn’t spend time patrolling backwater planets for nothing. We were there with a purpose, usually to quell potential rebellions or uprisings. Someone in the Corps monitoring stations would read suspect satellite message packets or overhear key terms while listening to planet radio coms that would send up alarms. Or an analyst would simply do math on variables such as age spectrum, resource and equipment quality or lack thereof, mortality rates of the population, and a number of other factors, and come up with a higher-than-average probability of rebellious activity, and in we’d go. Mission: keep the locals in line.
In line. There was a term of such extreme vagueness that even the most unimaginative soldier in the system—and that’s saying something—could come up with some kind of plan of action or mission goal. I’d seen the words come to mean everything from helping to restore derelict factories to shooting on sight any person or group that was considered a threat.
And what exactly had we considered a threat? That all depended on who would be filtering and evaluating the after-action report. If it was an officer known for their hostility toward non-cits, a threat could be as simple as a fist shaken in anger or a warning to soldiers to leave them alone “or else.” If it was an officer with a conscience, our platoon leaders had to keep it civil. We were, after all, the Capital Military Corps of the Advanced Worlds.
Advanced. The word is almost a punch line.
But the situation now is a little different. Medina hasn’t quite been able to reconstruct all the prewar protocols that used to be in effect, and David and I reach the bridge without even a second glance from the onboard protocol monitors.
Activity on the bridge isn’t as frenetic as I’d expect after such a large-scale assault—the annihilation of a Corps Loyalist fleet cruiser is the biggest success, and biggest operation, in our strategy—but that’s how Medina commands. Order and efficiency rule everything she touches, and there are rarely any moving pieces that aren’t comparable to precision clockwork. Sometimes I try to imagine what she would look like panicked, but my mind can’t seem to dredge up anything that fits. The closest I get is an image of a cartoon caricature of a freaked-out cat, with its back arched, fangs bared, and fur bristling.
“Commander,” David says, approaching the bridge’s command booth where Medina stands in discussion with her first lieutenant.
She turns around gracefully, her face alert and slightly predatory. David’s quiet approach must have surprised her. I’m again reminded of a cat. One that’s about to pounce. Then her features smooth out and she says, “Erikson, thanks for coming. I know you must be ready to take a few hours off, so I’ll get right to the point.”
I can hear her just fine from where I linger, waiting at the rear of the bridge, another indication of how orderly and smoothly everything on the fleet ship Celestial runs. The fact that I’m on the bridge at all is something that would have been completely unheard of in my days in the Corps. I’d been an enlisted navigator for surface-to-orbit troop ships, but never on these cruiser-class ships. And only officers worked the bridge.
Medina runs things with more transparency, a quality that seems to have endeared her to more than an expected number of followers and fighters. The Admin’s underhanded duplicity and lying is what led to the war in the first place, and I assume Medina wants to make sure no one thinks that way of operating will continue. She’s fond of the phrase “unity through trust,” which has been a necessary philosophy for helping blur the dividing lines between the citizens, non-citizens, and now ex-Corps soldiers who have been fighting together on the anti-Admin side. Since before people began inhabiting the Algol system, a classist mentality had typically set these three groups at odds, theoretically if not physically. Even the Capital Military Terrestrial Corps and Capital Military Stellar Corps had maintained a vibrant sense of competitive contempt for each other before this war changed everything. The Terrestrial Corps ranks, as David and I had been, called ourselves the “Fight” soldiers and the Stellar Corps the “Flight” soldiers to differentiate ourselves, taking pride in the fact that we spilled our blood in ground combat and didn’t have the opportunity (or, presumably, desire) to fly away when things got sticky.
Medina’s doing what she can to erase that dividedness and listens to what David has to say about our mission on Iso Umm without a hint of rank bias. As the equivalent of a company commander, and having spent a good share of his time outside the Corps participating in non-cit life and using real-world fighting tactics as a deserter, David’s experience and leadership are qualities Medina highly values. His utility to her, and by extension mine, is uncomfortably reminiscent of the reasons Rajcik had hired us on after we deserted the Corps during the Soldier’s Rebellion. But I don’t let it keep me up nights. Given that every other week since the war began has seen fighting conditions similar to the last few days, I’ve continually been too overworked to let anything keep me up at night when I’m back in garrison.
“How did things look out there?” she asks.
David leans against the control bench. “Same as things always look on these moons. Like God bleached the color out of everything and decided it would be fun to litter the ground with rocks that rip through your clothes like ra
zors.”
That’s my brother. A poet at heart.
“Did you capture any Loyalists for interrogation this time?”
“None of them seemed willing to live long enough to be taken prisoner.”
She scowls at him. Intel has been the hardest commodity to get since the Admin had the Corps wipe out communications system-wide by destroying all of their satellites. System assets have permanently lost telemetry, as the saying goes. With the latest mission’s success, we know of ten fleet cruisers that have been knocked out of the game, and, last we heard, our side still had four others working with us. But that leaves eleven unaccounted for, and of those, six Admin and Corps Loyalist fleet cruisers remain the biggest threat we face.
“David, you’re one of the most experienced ground soldiers I have. Which means you know that anything you can do to get us more information will help us win this war. The sooner we win it, the sooner we can start putting the pieces back together.”
“Roger.”
From where I stand, Medina’s scowl almost looks like it’s hardening into stone. David’s lack of military decorum has to be like sticking hot needles into her eyeballs, but what can she do? We’re not an army, this isn’t the Corps anymore, and there’s no such thing as a code of military order and discipline. What chain of command we have exists because there’s no other way we could keep the ship in the sky, or even survive, without some kind of functioning system. But Medina learned quickly how to toe the line with those of us who deserted after the Rebellion. We lost a taste for taking orders long before she came into the picture. And it doesn’t matter that the Admin is a common enemy; David and I, and others like us, will never willingly accept a reversion to old Corps standards.
“Anything else, Medina?”
Her scowl gives way to her regularly composed, yet stern, expression. “Just a heads-up that one of our scouts has reported activity near Broon, off Spectra 6. We’ll be moving in to investigate in a few hours.”