by Tammy Salyer
FIFTEEN
THE WAR
I just came off my last rotation at the nav bench in the latest six-hour on-duty–off-duty cycle and head for the squad’s utility closet. First order of business: get even with Desto for the nauseating stench he doused my body armor in. I’ve sprayed at least a bathtub full of degreaser and caustic cleaners on the plates, yet the odor of cheap cologne still hits my olfactory bulb like a haymaker when I take a deep breath, but now with the added infusion of cancer-in-a-bottle chemicals. My turn. He’ll know exactly what I mean the next time he puts on his combat suit liner and has to suck in lungful after lungful of the cleanser they use in the galley ovens. Nothing like spending a few days trapped inside a bubble of odor that smells exactly like singed hair and burned grease. Unoriginal as the plan may be, the beauty of it is that Desto’s size will make it hard for him to find a replacement at the last minute before going out on an operation. I shake the bottle of liquid with glee just thinking about it.
On the way back to my unit’s berthing area, I decide to pass through the med-deck to check on Dan Hoogs, who I’ve become quick friends with since being on the Celestial. He took one in the shoulder on our last excursion, but it’s healing fine. In a few years the ghost of that impact will sink into his bones deeper and deeper until, in his old age, he’ll feel like the bullet took up permanent residence. My own shoulders ache in sympathy. I’ve hit the deck enough times in my life—in firefights, escapes, life-and-death two-steps—using my hands and knees to break my fall, that pain and my joints are on a first-name basis. The likelihood of either of us living to be old enough for it to matter, small as it is, serves as a tiny—scratch that, nano—comfort.
While I pass by the chief medical officer’s station, the sound of familiar voices raised in an exchange best described as heated stops me short.
“It was a goddamn massacre, Medina.” No doubt that’s Vitruzzi, and she is clearly pissed. “And you intended it to be from the start. They were nothing but civilian and military casualties, not an organized fighting force.”
I hadn’t heard the outcome of the operation on Broon, but I’m sure it’s what they’re discussing. Last I knew from the discussion I’d overheard on the bridge it was supposed to be a surveillance mission to establish the outpost’s status.
Medina: “They were potential combatants. This is a war. Do I have to remind you?”
Vitruzzi: “That’s bullshit! They were noncombatants. What you did was murder wounded people and take their supplies.”
Medina: “They were Admin Loyalists and sympathizers, which makes them enemies. We give no quarter to enemies.”
There’s a long pause, then Vitruzzi continues: “No. I am a doctor. I won’t allow you to do this. Not again.”
Medina: “Dr. Vitruzzi, what you are is an asset. When you stop being an asset, you become expendable. Have I made myself clear?” There’s an extremely loaded pause, then Medina continues, “One more thing. Before you and your previous crew decided to blackmail the director of the Ministry of S&E, we had a plan for hollowing out the Admin from the inside. An organized rebellion under my command might have been able to accomplish the goal of a newly formed system peacefully. But you chose an arrogant and absurd vigilante approach, and this war is the result. Maybe you don’t like it, but you can’t deny that we are in this situation because of you, and someone has to finish it.”
I don’t have time to get the hell out of there before Medina walks through the doorway, nearly coming nose to nose with me.
“Erikson,” she says, her face unreadable.
What is there to say? She pushes by me, and I swing aside to let her pass without a word. As I turn back, Vitruzzi is already on her way out.
“Aly.” She stops, the heavy vein that descends from her hairline to between her brows prominent, and seems to consider something deeply before continuing. “Do me a favor, get Karl, Desto, Venus, everyone from the old crew and meet me in Brady’s and my bunk in twenty minutes. We’re leaving.”
* * *
The discussion was brief. Not one of us had the stomach to continue fighting Medina’s style of warfare. Brady recommended we bail and join the group of original Agate Beach colonists who’d stayed put at Keum Libre when the war broke out. Others from the Beach had joined the scattered anti-Admin fighting forces or tried to make it back to Spectra 6, their home. We didn’t hold out much hope of seeing many of them again, but we’d all had to make our own choice.
By that week’s end (six months ago), the plan was in full swing. Medina hadn’t so much been consulted as informed of our imminent departure. Vitruzzi, Desto, Brady, Doug Mason, Karl, David, Venus, Jeremy La Mer, and I were splitting off with a few months’ worth of supplies and materials and going our own way. No one who knew the plan—though we’d tried to keep it as quiet as possible—had dared to stop us. Not even Medina had tried, but then, how does the unelected commander of a no-longer-military vessel declare a mutiny? Allegiances in any war only run as deep as the fighting force’s beliefs; and this war, this large-scale slaughter of the very foundations of our system and civilization, hadn’t left much to believe in beyond survival. Medina knew it. And she’d known the second she tried to curtail the rights of anyone on that ship who had fought alongside the rest, the slaughter wouldn’t be in the air or on the ground. It would be at her feet.
A handful of our closest friends had joined us at the last minute, including Dan Hoogs. To everyone’s surprise, Quantum had elected to join us too. My own reservations about bringing him—the guy, after all, had once kidnapped me and threatened to kill me—didn’t amount to much. Someone with his wire-rat skills, as well as the ability to pilot many types of crafts, was an asset we couldn’t pass up. And so he came with us. And so…
SIXTEEN
My disclosure of what Quantum and I had talked about on the ’Bo is met with all the warmth of people being told they’ve been selected to test a new enema probe. Not surprising, given the already nonexistent feelings of affection for the wire-rat, despite the fact that he’d helped us get the upper hand on the former director of the Ministry of Science and Engineering, before the war.
“So we’re going to Obal 6 to get the ground-down piece of shit,” Desto states, rubbing the back of his neck and preparing to leave the bunkroom. “And then I’m going to tear him fifteen new assholes.”
“It’s not that easy,” I say, trying to take him by the wrist and slow him down. Though direct action is my usual course as well, the issue isn’t as simple as flying in with guns blazing.
“Aly’s right,” David says. “Our food and water might be enough to get us to Obal 6, but then what?”
“Then what? Then we stomp that conniving bastard into bone powder.” Desto glares at each of us in turn. “Since when does this crew decide going after one of its own is too difficult?”
I continue, “I’m not saying we don’t go after Zeta. I’m just saying we need to think this through. All we know about that colony is that they’re buttoned up tighter than the Fortress, they’re armed, and they’re not friendly to anyone who can’t offer them something better than a hungry mouth to feed or another body to protect.”
“The big question is what Quantum plans to tell them. Yeah, he has the—what did you call it, Aly? Seed sequencer? They’ll see the utility of having it,” Karl says. “But what will he tell Obal 6’s colony leadership about Zeta?”
I give him a sharp look to warn him that following that train of discussion isn’t going to help right now, but it’s too late. He’s scowling like he’s just swallowed a squirming insect and avoids looking in Desto’s direction. What would any unscrupulous person who’s kidnapped someone and forced her to fly a stolen ship to a potentially neutral, but definitely not co-conspiratorial, colony do to cover up his crime? Easy: kill her and make it look like an accident before she ever gets a chance to out you.
To Desto’s credit, he takes it in stride and responds calmly, “That’s exactly what I’m saying. We h
ave to get there before he does, or we’re writing her off. And my kid.”
“I’ll get us up,” Venus says, turning to head to the cockpit.
She stops when Vitruzzi says, “We have other kids to worry about now.”
“What?” Everyone’s face shows the same shock as mine. “What are you talking about?”
Vitruzzi slumps against the wall—when had her posture turned into an S with a broken back?—and won’t look at anyone. “These four kids only have us. We have an obligation—”
“To help our crew!” Desto nearly yells.
“Yes, Desto”—she straightens and looks him in the eye—“we can go to Obal 6. We can try and convince them we’re the good guys and Quantum is the bad guy. Maybe they’ll believe us. Then what? We have no more food, no more water, so we give them everything we have in the cargo bay to buy enough to get us back to Keum Libre. And we’re back to where we started. Barely holding on, resources dwindling. For all we fucking know, Keum Libre isn’t even there anymore. Some other scavs could have gone in there and wiped it out.” Her voice starts to shake, and she takes a deep breath. “Don’t you get it? We’re fucked. The whole goddamn system is crumbling. We might be too stupid to lie down and die with it, but maybe that’s exactly what we should do.”
Karl scrambles over to her and puts a hand on her shoulder, soothingly, an old friend trying to offer support. She shrugs it off. No one speaks as she looks around at our faces. I’ve seen people crack before. The dark shadows from being too strung out to even sleep anymore that crowd into the hollows under her eyes, the way her 1.8-meter frame can barely hold the meat that hangs from it, the edge to her voice when she speaks, like the fading scream of a jumper before they hit the sidewalk—Vitruzzi is a walking case of nearing the terminal breaking point.
As if someone’s drawing a curtain away, I’m suddenly thinking back to PCA Thor’s Hammer, a long-range patroller tasked with joining a convoy of gunships sent out to suppress mutiny on the PCA Frontline a week after the Soldier’s Rebellion broke out in earnest. I remember his eyes the most—my squad’s heavy gunner, Enlistee First Class Tollhut—the way they had darted around the bunkroom like a mismanaged marionette. “We can’t board her, not a fleet ship!” he’d said. “We can’t fire on our own people!”
I’d been called out of the navigator’s seat down to the armory bay to help calm him down. We’d gone through the Academy and boot together and had served in the same company for the prior two years on the Hammer. He trusted me, and more importantly to our command, I was the only one who could fit through the narrow opening between the bunks and cargo bins he’d piled around himself like some kind of last-man-standing barricade.
“What’s going on, Tollhut? What’s with the drama?” I may be good at fitting into small spaces, but I’m no psychologist when it comes to talking someone off the ledge. Which was rammed home that day.
“That’s one of our ships, Erikson. They want us to shoot our own brothers.” He stood near the back of the bay behind several hanging racks of bugsuits. I caught glimpses of him moving around and heard clicks and bangs while he spoke, but I couldn’t tell what he was doing. “You’re always talking about it; can’t you see? This is where the line is drawn. This is what separates the humans from the monsters in Corps uniforms.”
Yeah, I’d known exactly what he was talking about. The story they were feeding us was the Rebellion was a bunch of disgruntled soldiers taking over a few scattered ships. But then it became more than a few ships and more than a few soldiers. Fighting was breaking out on several stations, even on the Obals, and despite how hard our COs tried to keep us from knowing all the details, the stories poured in with every transmission we received and every port we docked at. Something big was going down, and the Corps was beginning to fracture like an overstressed viewscreen in deep space. Tollhut wasn’t the only one who thought being asked to fire on our own Corps brothers and sisters was insane.
But what could I tell him? I hadn’t known then what to say any more than I know now. I’d rattled on about his duty to his comrades and his duty to justice, and he didn’t want to hurt anyone, did he? And blah blah blah. All the while, he’d been putting on a bugsuit—or Goldblum Squad Leveller suit—the heavy-fire body weapons we used for urban terrain seek-and-destroy missions.
When I heard Tollhut say “Switch to full-auto,” I jumped behind a crate. When he fired a cement-mixer explosive through his barricade, I’d been knocked unconscious. I’d woken up with David screaming into my ear that we had to get off the ship, we were going down. The Hammer never fired a shot on the Frontline, and besides us, I never knew how many others made it clear of the ship before it blew. And David and I had spent the rest of the Rebellion trying to stay ahead of the Corps.
Vitruzzi’s eyes look just like Tollhut’s had.
She’s as close to the edge as you can get before falling into the abyss, but I don’t know what to tell her. The doomsday shiver from just a little while earlier works its way through me again. I know exactly what Vitruzzi is going through, and I have nothing to offer her. What if she’s right? Shaking off that thought, I offer in a voice that’s barely above a whisper, “Don’t say that kind of thing, V. Yeah, shit’s hard, life’s not all bubble baths and daffodils, but we just have to keep going. Sometimes survival is as good as it gets.”
“Right,” she answers, almost accusingly.
“Eleanor, come with me. You need some time to get your head straight,” Karl says, turning aside and waving a hand toward the doorway to try and convince her to go. The room suddenly feels like it’s shrinking around us.
Finally, without looking at anyone, she pushes past Karl and walks down the corridor toward the cargo bay. No one follows her.
Desto glares after her and the rest of us exchange a knowing look. Mason breaks the cold silence with his always practical observations. “We’re going to have to dump the two fugees and keep the salvage we were going to give them.”
Nodding thoughtfully, Karl says, “This is their colony anyway, so…” I know we’re all sharing the same relief that we don’t have to ditch them somewhere dangerous or unwelcoming. Then again, we have no idea what life is like in this colony. And there’s still Ryan from the Galatea. Karl is looking at him, no doubt pondering his fate.
Before someone else does, I make a decision and turn to him. “Guess what, kid, this is your lucky day. You get a choice. We can either drop you here, or you can join the crew. What’ll it be?”
To his credit, the look on his face is more excitement than abject terror, and he only hesitates for a second before responding, “With you,” then adds hurriedly, “and don’t worry, I’ll pull my weight.”
I try on a grin that doesn’t get far, but it’s better than nothing because he relaxes a little. “You already have.”
Nodding his agreement with the addition of a new crewman, Karl says, “Venus, let’s move out.”
SEVENTEEN
“We can easily outmaneuver that flying brick, Venus. Why not just shake him off?” David comments from the rear of the flight deck.
“Yeah, I could. But the two escorts at our six are military-class scouts. They could yo-yo around us like we’re standing still.”
David pushes up closer and looks at our radar, finally seeing the tiny specks of the ships that have been dogging us since shortly after we broke into Obal 6’s atmosphere. The red glowing specks they make on our nav interface are marginally less worrisome than the equally red but much brighter power-diverter malfunction indicator on the main console telling us we can choose to land within the next couple of hours, or the choice will be made for us.
“Fuh…” He trails off, realizing what Venus and I already know. These two scouts are equipped to take out a squad of ships our size if they want to.
“Unidentified transport craft, you are in controlled airspace belonging to Bogotan. What are your intentions? Over.”
Venus and I look at each other. Finally, contact.
; I respond normally, as if anything is normal anymore. “Bogotan, we are a salvage operation from the Alpha Quadrant with an imminent system malfunction. Request your permission for an emergency landing. Over.”
There’s a delay, presumably while the scout communicates with someone else. Then: “Negative, scavs. You need to keep on moving.”
“This got hostile way faster than I expected,” I comment, already running my hand along the nav console and pulling up landscape schematics. In case we have to break for it.
“How far from the city are we?” David asks.
“Just under ninety klicks. We could be there in ten if we didn’t have to worry about getting turned into missile kabobs.”
“So we could potentially force them to fire on us over their settlement if Venus works some of her magic?”
“Yeah, I mean, we could, but…the way she’d have to fly, those kids in back might get tossed around too much—”
“You have one minute to divert, scavs, or we will take aggressive action,” the scout warns.
“We are in a situation up here, people. Get buckled in as tight as you can. Things are about to get fun,” Venus announces to the crew, then clicks on an audio autocounter that plays over the onboard intercom to give the deadline. David hustles from the cabin, slamming and engaging the cockpit hatch.
“Thirty seconds…twenty-nine…twenty-eight…twenty-seven.”
“Aly, you just let me take over,” Venus says excitedly, like a kid that just heard their shiny new bike doubles as a rocket racer. “I can handle them.”
“Sixteen…fifteen…fourteen.”
I give my harness an extra tug to make sure nothing gets pinched by a loose strap when our g-forces suddenly turn me into a five-hundred-kilo rag doll. A pinched-off boob would give an entirely new meaning to the phrase “on my tits.”