by Richard Fox
Hale shrugged. “I was there but I don’t know what I saw.”
Jared and Hale locked eyes. They’d shared a womb and hardly gone more than a day without speaking to each other since they’d learned to talk. Jared didn’t need to ask how Hale felt. He could see it on his face.
“I’ve looked at the scopes of Earth. Mom and Dad’s house is still standing. Most of the town is still there. You think there’s any chance they’re hiding out somewhere?” Jared asked.
Hale shook his head. “Everyone’s gone.”
Silence passed between them.
“Not everyone,” Jared said. “I’ve still got you. You’ve still got me. We’ve got our Marines and we’ve got our mission, whatever the brass decide it is. Right?”
Hale smiled. Leave it to his brother to know what he needed to hear. “Right.”
“What was it Grandpa used to say about fighting in Iraq?” Ken asked.
“‘Leaving a job half-done is worse than not doing it at all.’ We’ll fight this out, kick those things in the ass so hard they’ll run back to whatever hell pit they came from.”
“Shit, those things have teeth?”
“No, they have these stalks that…are you screwing with me?”
“A little,” Ken smiled. Jared looked off screen and nodded to someone. “I’ve got to go. Stay safe and save some aliens for me, capciche?”
“Capache.”
They tapped their knuckles toward each other and the call ended.
****
Cortaro opened a hatch and stuck his head into the compartment. The room was empty but for the three armor suits standing against the bulkheads in their coffin-like alcoves. Sailors and marines had nicknamed the compartment holding the armor contingent “the cemetery,” and unless technicians were there to prep the suits for combat, it was just as quiet as its namesake’s reputation.
He shut the hatch behind him and climbed the stairs leading to a catwalk that ringed the interior of the cemetery, giving easy access to the sensor platforms on top of the suits. Cortaro looked over the scorch marks across the chest of one of the suits, a pristine helmet attached to the suit’s neck coupling.
“Never. Never on my best day would I climb into one of those things,” he muttered.
He tapped at his cargo pocket. The Ubi he’d picked up from Ibarra’s city was still there, just like the last dozen times he’d felt for it. Cortaro sat on the catwalk, his back to the suit, and dangled his feet over the side.
Sitting with his feet playing in the wind always made him feel better. As a child, he’d climbed through the old wrecks of the Minneapolis tenements ruined in the Intifada. He’d climb through ventilation shafts to get to the highest vantage point and stare at the long fall. That he’d joined the Marine Strike Teams known for orbital free-fall jumps came as a surprise to no one in his family.
Most of the Breitenfeld was a claustrophobic mess, but the cemetery gave him some breathing room.
He pulled the Ubi from his pocket and brought it to life. The Ubis held petabytes worth of data on their internals, and a near-perfect copy of anything on the web that the user had ever browsed or downloaded. Getting Torni to crack it wasn’t difficult, not with her military-grade intrusion tools.
The dead girl that owned the Ubi had been a military brat and she’d had a keen interest in the fleet’s disappearance. Several of her friends had fathers, mothers and relatives in the fleet. Pawing through the private moments of the dead bothered him, but if there was something he could find….
There, a memorial website set up by one of the fleet’s many family support groups. Cortaro scrolled through the names of service men and women, most with a death date listed as the day the fleet blinked out of existence. Some were blank; most had postings attached to the name.
His heart skipped a beat when he found Jose Cortaro, his name, which had fifteen posts, more than any other he’d seen. He tapped the screen with a trembling finger.
The first post was his military biography: awards, deployments dates to and from the Australian DMZ and the Bali Incursion. It ended with MIA, Missing in Action.
“I’m not. I’m not missing. I’m right here, damn it.”
There was a video of him coming home from the Bali Incursion taken by a cousin who was in on his plan. His wife and kids sat around a holo-screen watching a Spanish tele-novella when the doorbell rang.
“Pizza!” little Immanuel said and ran to the door. Cortaro remembered hearing that clarion voice through the door and wiped away a tear.
The video showed Immanuel open the door and stare at his father, dumbstruck.
“Immanuel, hurry up and get the pizza. We’re getting cold,” his wife said.
“It’s not pizza, Mama. It’s Papa,” Immanuel said.
His kids and wife tripped over each other to get to the door and the video turned to chaos as Cortaro was swamped with hugs and squeals of joy.
There were more pictures of him with his children: Josephina, Rodrigo, Pilar, Juan and Immanuel. Birthdays, quinceaneras, ball games. His wife, Consuela, holding on to him. She’d put on a lot of baby weight and never lost it, which he always insisted he liked.
Tears fell on the Ubi screen. He wiped them away and swiped the last entry open.
A video of Immanuel played, dated to a few weeks after the fleet vanished.
“Papa…Mama and everyone says you’re not coming back. They say your ship had an accident. But you told me you’d always come back, no matter what. So, maybe you can find this wherever your ship is. Come back soon, Papa. I miss you.”
Cortaro broke down in sobs. He wished he’d been there when the drones came for them and he begged God to let him go back and hold his family for their final moments.
His crying ended when a huge metal hand touched his shoulder. Cortaro jerked away from the touch like it was a live wire, sending the Ubi flying into the air. The armor reached under the catwalk and caught the Ubi before it hit the ground.
Cortaro, on the verge of hyperventilating, crab-walked away from the armor.
“Cono la madre, Mia!”
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” Elias said.
“Hijo de madre puta de metal!”
The armor’s head cocked to the side.
“What the hell, Elias? What’re you doing in here?” Cortaro demanded. He swiped the Ubi out of the suit’s fingers as Elias handed it back to him.
The soft whine of the suit’s servos accompanied the suit’s movements as it settled back into its coffin.
“I sleep in the suit. There’s some synch loss every time we take off our armor, takes a while to get back to peak efficiency when we get back in,” Elias said.
“God damn, is there anyone else in here?”
The suit next to Elias waved a hand. Cortaro rolled his eyes and made a prayer to the Virgin Mary in contrition.
“You’d be surprised how many people come in here to hook up,” Elias said with a chuckle.
Cortaro recomposed himself. He was a Marine gunnery sergeant; he did not show weakness.
“Elias, you…you didn’t see me like that. OK?”
“Your secret’s safe,” Elias said.
Cortaro nodded and turned away, making for the hatch.
“Cortaro.”
He turned around. Elias’ suit had a single finger over where the suit’s lips would be, if it had them. Cortaro returned the gesture and left.
****
Stacey sat on a bunk, the only bunk in the small berthing. Normally, the room would belong to a field-grade officer in charge of a significant portion of the America’s crew and capabilities. The alien device in her palm made her something of a VIP, even more than her true surname ever did. With her knees tucked into her chin, she kept her hand with the alien inside of it under a pillow.
“Stacey, this is silly,” Ibarra said, his words muffled by the pillow.
“No, this is just weird.”
“I know it’s a lot to take in, but we need to discuss the next step
and what it means for you,” Ibarra said. She took her hand out and his face materialized in front of her.
“Tell me,” she said, “tell me how you did it. You knew the Xaros could control computers, so you—”
“Arranged for the world’s militaries to not trust computers, yes. It wasn’t an accident that the Chinese acquired the computing power to crack the American and allied militaries’ codes right before the Second Pacific War. Wasn’t an accident that the electronic kill screens went up around borders to fry any drones and guided missiles that passed through them. There had to be a reason why humans flew their own planes and pulled their own triggers. If my involvement was too obvious, the Xaros would have suspected something and they would have waited here for the fleet to return until the sun burned out.”
“Do you know how many people died in that war? Why didn’t you give the capability to the good guys, let them beat the piss out of the Chinese like they deserved? What they did to Darwin made the Japanese in Nanking look like…Mormon missionaries in comparison!” She jabbed a finger into Ibarra’s face.
“A single power would have stagnated. There wouldn’t have been an effort to keep up a strong military against a peer with similar strengths—no need to build an escort fleet to take a colony to Saturn.”
“You were behind everything, weren’t you?”
“There was a resurgence of boy bands in the 2030s. I had nothing to do with that.”
Stacey fought against a laugh and made an undistinguished snort.
“We need to talk about the next phase and your role in it,” Ibarra said. “I always told you how special you were. That wasn’t a grandfather’s doting. It is true. You’ve been…engineered to do something wondrous—incredible—for humanity.”
Stacey stayed quiet, her lips quivering.
“Engineered how?” she said, her voice hard.
“Once I had the capability, I changed the DNA that I would pass on to my children, and that DNA would change again with the next generation so that you could play a pivotal role in what has to happen next.”
Stacey got off her cot and looked in the small mirror by the hatch. Her bright violet eyes had always been a source of curiosity for her family; such a contrast against her straw-colored hair led most to believe she wore colored contact lenses.
“What am I, alien?”
“Partly synthetic.”
She pressed a fingernail against her cheek; the pain felt as real as anything. She took her hand away as a slow, horrifying realization came to her.
“Mom. She was one of six sisters. All my aunts, they never had babies. They tried and tried, but they all miscarried. Every single time. I was Mom’s third pregnancy…The synthetic DNA wouldn’t take, would it? Their bodies felt something wrong, something imperfect, and rejected the embryos.”
“Stacy. Listen to me.”
Stacey slammed an elbow into the mirror and pulled a hunk of mirror from the cracks, cutting her fingertips on the jagged edges.
“Do you know what that did to your daughters? Your daughters!” She brought the tip of the improvised knife against the palm of her hand where the probe resided. “My aunts looked at me with so much envy, so much sorrow, because I was what they could never have and you did it to them! Why?”
“To save us. All of us. It destroyed me to see them in so much pain, but it was the only way.”
Stacey pressed the tip into her palm, drawing blood.
“Get out of me, you monster! I don’t know what you think you’re going to do to me but I won’t be part of it.” She grimaced as she ran the knife across her palm.
The sliver of light dimmed and faded to nothing. A chill ran up her arm, across her shoulder and thrummed against the base of her skull.
She dropped the hunk of broken mirror to the floor involuntarily. The pain burning across her palm ceased and she watched wide-eyed as the cut mended itself.
“Sweetheart, listen to me.” Ibarra’s words came to her as her own thoughts.
Stacey sobbed and tried to move, but her limbs wouldn’t respond.
“Just get out of me.”
“I can’t. The Xaros would detect me outside your body and that is a variable we can’t afford.”
“You’re going to stick me in that star gate, aren’t you? Jam wires into my skull and force me to control the gate. Trap me in a tube and never let me move again. I’ll be worse than the armor pilots,” she said. She choked her tears back and concentrated on moving a single finger, railing against being locked into her own body.
“I told you it would be wondrous. And you might agree if you give me a chance to explain,” Ibarra said.
****
The Breitenfeld’s brig was a repurposed cargo hold, a bare room filled with a few cots and a chemical toilet bolted to the deck. The bars running from floor to ceiling were meant to keep cargo separated and were too far apart to be an adequate cell. Electrified slats mag-locked to the bars made the cell front look more like an irregular picket fence than a brig.
Torni stood guard over the three prisoners. As one of the few female Marines, she was of a limited pool that could watch over Chinese pilots stewing in the brig. Her shift had another two hours to go, and none of the prisoners seemed interested in causing trouble or doing anything to alleviate their shared boredom.
The round handle on the door twisted and Torni straightened up. Captain Valdar stepped into the brig, Durand a step behind him.
Valdar strode to the cell and the three prisoners rose to their feet. The tallest balled her fists and sneered at the captain. Another mumbled something undeniably rude and touched the synth-skin patch on her leg when she saw Durand.
Valdar tapped his forearm-mounted Ubi and lifted his arm toward the captives.
“Do you speak English?” he asked. His Ubi translated his words into Mandarin and Cantonese.
The tallest walked up to the bars, staying outside arm’s distance to avoid a painful shock.
“We all speak your mutt language,” she said, her voice heavily accented. “I am Sub-Lieutenant Choi San Ma, People’s Liberation Army Space Navy. We’ve given you our names and serial numbers as required per the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war. We have nothing else to say.” Valdar’s Ubi translated Ma’s words back into Mandarin before he could shut it off.
“Have you told them?” Valdar asked Torni.
“No sir, they weren’t interested in speaking to anyone until you showed up,” Torni said.
“I am the captain of the Breitenfeld and you aren’t prisoners of war.” He tapped his Ubi and the electrified slats fell to the deck. The bars pulled apart like an opening maw and retracted into their deck housings.
Torni shifted into a combat stance, ready to react if the Chinese charged. The three pilots stood stock-still, poker faces intact.
“Lieutenant Durand has a proposal for you that has my full support. Either you make yourself useful or you keep quiet,” he said. He gave Durand a pat on the shoulder as he left.
Durand stepped into the cell and looked the pilots over. Each was whipcord thin and identical strict haircuts framed their faces so equally Durand could almost believe they were sisters. The one she’d shot on the flight deck stared daggers at her.
“You’re not prisoners of war because there are no countries to fight. You need to watch this,” Durand brought up the videos from the Ubi Cortaro found on Earth and let the Chinese pilots watch. When it was over, the shortest pointed a finger at Durand.
“Lies! This is all a trick by your government to brainwash us into helping you,” she said.
“I will take you to our scopes. You can look at the Earth for yourself. It’s all gone,” Durand said.
Choi sat on her bunk, forearms resting against her knees. “If this is true, what do you want?” she asked.
Durand bit her lip before speaking. Twenty-four hours ago, she would have laughed herself blue if someone told her she was about to have this exact conversation.
“The fleet is pre
paring for an attack on the Xaros space station around Ceres. It’s an all-out assault, no reserves, no holding back. We need every fighter we can muster in the void and you three…could pilot one of our bombers.”
The pilot she’d shot barked a laugh. “What makes you think we could even fly one of your crates?”
“I’ve seen your cockpits. They’re nearly identical to ours since China stole the designs,” Durand said.
“Copied,” Choi corrected.
“Semantics aside, we’ve got time to get you familiar with our Condors before the assault. You can join us or stay in this box. I don’t know what we’ll do with you once it’s all over, assuming any of us survive,” Durand said.
The shortest, and the youngest by Durand’s guess, spoke to the other pilots in Chinese. An angry discussion followed, one Durand’s Ubi couldn’t translate from Mandarin or Cantonese.
“You want to help me out here?” Durand asked. The foreign conversation continued unabated. Durand turned to Torni and raised her hands in confusion.
Torni shrugged, “They aren’t speaking Swedish.”
“Village dialect,” Choi said. “We will fly with you,” the words came out of her mouth like they were laced with razors, “but only after we’ve looked through your scopes to Earth.”
“Fair enough. You all have names?”
“I’m Mei Ma,” said the pilot Durand had shot.
“Zhi Ma,” said the shortest.
“You’re all named Ma? You related?” Durand asked.
Choi rolled her eyes.
“There are one point eight billion Chinese in the world and only a hundred surnames. The chance that three would have the same name is pretty high, wouldn’t you agree?” Choi said.
“We’re cousins!” Zhi piped up.
Mei jammed an elbow into her cousin’s side.
“Fine. Whatever. I’m your squadron commander and you can call me ‘Ma’am.’ Let’s go,” Durand said.
CHAPTER 8
Hale pressed the battery release on his gauss rifle and knocked the battery off the top of it. He clicked the fresh battery in his hand into the slot and felt a thrum of energy shoot through the weapon. His empty hand slapped against an ammo drum on his belt and rammed it into the ammo well on the underside of his weapon. Recharging and reloading the rifle took less than two seconds.