by M. ORENDA
The young Assaulter lets the rocket fly, but it blasts into heavy fire and bursts apart on a clap of fire. Pieces rain inside the hangar.
The kid ducks under cover.
Wyatt can’t take the shot.
Petra grabs the flight stick and jams it to down-stop. The skimmer launches forward and catches a line of bullets in the side. She skates it in the air, taking tight left corner in the hangar.
The transport appears in front of her, a bloated delta wing, it’s gun barrel kicking up in her direction. The cockpit is angled, and the pilots are invisible behind clear shielding and strips of rivets. Still, they’ve got to be surprised.
Fuckers.
She blasts out of the atmosphere shielding. The skimmer shudders, blind and filled with holes, heading straight for the enemy.
It’s an instant, no time for thinking, or regrets.
She grits her teeth, and the skimmer crashes through the transport cockpit. The skimmer’s shielding busts apart. The plastic rips away, and the storm howls in, dust lashing over her.
She yells, feeling the transport flipping backward with the impact, set to pitch the skimmer high into the air.
Keep it. Keep it!
She vectors the engines. The skimmer’s overpowered by design, so it goes tail down, and hooks deeper into the transport. She swings the small craft around, hurtling the transport through the atmosphere shielding.
The big ship clips a wing on the hangar entrance and crashes onto the tarmac, ramming the wreckage already there. Petra’s skimmer is locked to transport’s cockpit, but it kicks loose on impact, jolted to the side and slammed between the old aircraft and the hangar wall.
Machines stop moving and start smoking.
Petra pulls off the mask.
The transport’s pilots are clearly dead, but noises echo from the cabin. A Bounder appears through the broken windows, dragging a bag of equipment and cursing. One of them catches sight of her trapped in her seat and raises his weapon, its muzzle squaring on her chest.
She winces.
Two pistol rounds pop off from the tarmac, and the Bounder falls away. Wyatt and his young subordinate appear from under the skimmer.
The sniper heaves himself up, negotiating the debris to her position. He reaches down to pull her out, his teeth bared with the effort, eyes squinting. “Stupid, but well done,” he mutters. “You hurt again?”
“No.”
“Stay here.”
She nods, then shakes her head. “My crew.”
Wyatt ignores her, moving toward the transport’s broken cockpit. He signals his subordinate and they drop into it together.
Shots sound inside the transport, hollow barks falling to absolute silence.
“Clear,” Wyatt says.
“Clear,” the kid agrees.
Petra wets her lips, body numb and full of shock. She finds footholds in the transport wreckage and climbs to the smashed cockpit, then pauses before looking, as if an extra breath is going to help.
Wild thing.
She ignores the dead pilots and climbs into the aircraft. “Coming in.”
“Make it quick,” Wyatt answers.
Clara.
Petra slips between debris and crawls into the cabin. It’s dark, cargo ties sprung, crates loose, a few Bounders done and dealt with.
The Assaulters are together. Wyatt’s kneeling beside a bench. “Over here,” he says, though there’s nothing she can tell by his tone.
“Clara!” she calls out, breath coming up short. “Clara!”
She steps around a pallet, and there’s her pilot, still alive.
For the love of---
The older woman blinks, clearly knocked out of better sense, and bleeding from a deep cut above her nose. Her wrists are locked in restraints, and her eyes are dulled out, but the damage looks survivable, and nothing’s missing.
Petra drops beside her, and Wyatt moves on to help the others.
“Thought you passed on,” Petra says in a rush, smudging tears away before anyone else can see them. “Heard you bitching at me inside my head when I was bleeding, and thought you’d gone to the other side.”
“What?”
“Thought you were giving advice from the afterlife.”
The pilot stares at her. “And you took that advice?”
“I did.”
“So you only listen when I’m dead? That it? Fine. From now on, we’ll just pretend I didn’t make it.”
“It was Kazak,” Petra says. “Earth Kazak. Butcher Kazak. Took us all hostage so that Voss wouldn’t shoot him out of the sky. He brought his crew all the way to Red Filter to kill Niri.”
“And your colonel stopped him?”
“From what I saw on vid.”
“Killed him?”
“Said he was going to.”
“Still the hero,” Clara sniffs. “Going to pin another medal on him, of course, though pirates with black eyes will be left off the banquet list.”
Petra frowns, lifting her gaze to focus on the damage around them. For the first time, it looks like high cost instead of hard-earned victory.
She looks away, knowing she can’t help Voss with this, though maybe she’s the one who caused the entire mess by getting herself caught. “Medals are for valor, and there’s no understanding of such here. No understanding of heroes either. Blame is what gets pinned on strong shoulders in Red Filter, blame and tickets into exile, and they don’t throw banquets for that.”
A NEW WORLD
BIOSTAT STATION
VAULT LEVEL
MARS DATE: DAY 28, MONTH 12/24, YEAR 2225
No precedent. No procedures. The Station Chief was apologetic, stammering farfetched rationalizations as if Voss had demanded them. The President has asked that we keep everyone isolated and under guard. He’s coming here to assess the damage personally, so he wants everyone to be rested by the time he arrives. And it’s good that he’s coming because he’ll see how difficult the circumstances were. Nothing was just black and white.
Voss didn’t comment. He allowed himself to be locked in a windowless examination room with two guards, two smooth-faced children who managed to emote enough awkwardness to make a small compartment seem even smaller.
To their credit, they try not to see him. There’s a hint of discipline in the way they keep their gazes averted, though it vanished the minute he unlocked his armor and began peeling off his damp uniform.
The damage caught their attention, the white lashing of old scars mixed with fresh cuts now clotted and stinging, a mass of purple bruises. Their eyes strayed from the centerline when they thought he wouldn’t notice. And why not?
What Red Filter boot could resist seeing the mythical Lt. Colonel Voss stripped of his immortality, and revealed as nothing more than a Earthbound Frankenstein, a corpse stitched together and brought back too many times, his body reeking of blood and sweat.
He’d cleaned himself up at the sink, changed into the dry uniform they provided, and lowered himself into the exam bed, settling his hands on his chest, fingers meshed. He’d expected exhaustion to take over, and it did. The mattress was hard, and there was no auto-assistant to piss him off, so sleep came easily.
He slept for days. Then the lawyers came. One for each corporation and every committee, and sub-committee. Repeat your last statement. Repeat it again. And again. And write it. And repeat it. And sign it. Repeat your last statement…
He didn’t ask for information, and he wasn’t given any. His team had survived. Petra had survived. Niri had survived. He was numb to the rest of it. He wanted to be numb, needed to be numb. He shut everything down and dropped back down on the rack as soon as the white suits left, but it wasn’t so easy to sink into oblivion after that.
The memory of the cave kept coming back, again and again, as if he’d left some glaring admission out of his reports. A feeling. Something that had no name. It had whispered as he released his grip on the knife in Kazak’s skull, coiling around him in the toxic air, resonatin
g in the glow, in the water.
It followed him into his dreams, coloring images of lost firebases, and shining in the eyes of fallen brothers as they trudged wordlessly toward him, the haze of his past now lit with a cold blue-green shimmer.
You are the Asura.
“Colonel?”
Voss blinks awake, and Logan is standing in the open doorway, his outline blurry against the hallway lights.
“Colonel,” the medic says again. “Sir, I’ve been sent to wake you, and confirm that you are in good health.”
“I’m fine, corporal.”
Logan ignores the guards as he walks inside the compartment. He stops a few feet away and salutes.
Voss pushes up from the bed. “At ease.”
Logan drops his hand, allowing his gaze to linger on Voss’s face. “Have they treated those cuts at all?”
“It’s not an issue.”
Logan swears under his breath, and it’s suddenly clear he’s worse for weat. Thinner. Less confident. Struggling. He looks away, his jaw set. “The president came in this morning. Everything’s been cleaned up. He talked to Niri, and the docs, and so he’s ready to see you now.”
“He talked to you too?”
The kid shrugs. “I get some looks my way, but that’s it.”
“Anyone giving you shit that I should know about?”
Logan looks back at him, grateful for the offer of protection though it’s clear he’s not concerned for himself. “Colonel.” He lowers his voice. “You can’t let them ship us out.”
Voss hesitates, and the medic keeps going.
“Niri, sir… she’s not gone,” he says. “She’s still with us. I don’t know if the docs understand that, and I’m pretty sure the president is complete fuckwit. I look at her, and I know I can still reach her. I know I can reach her. She’ll come back to me. She wants to. I know she does. If they ship us out, they’ll be no one who can talk to her, the real Niri, and we’ll lose her.”
Voss narrows his gaze. “Have you slept at all?”
Logan lets out a frustrated breath.
“You haven’t,” Voss concludes. “Get cleaned up. I need you fed, rested, and coherent. You can’t help me like this.”
“Niri---”
“You can’t help her like this either.”
Logan nods, looks pained. “The president wants to relieve you.”
“Until he does, you follow my orders, corporal.”
The medic frowns. “Sir.” He takes a step back, like he’s about to turn for the door, but then he pauses, and decides not to. “The president shouldn’t be allowed to say anything, sir. Not to you. He hasn’t earned that right. He’s in over his head. He has no idea what he’s dealing with here. The thing out there in the caves… It’s not just microbial life. It’s a vast collective organism. It’s sentient, self-aware. One of the docs told me that it dreams, delta, alpha, and beta wave activity. It’s been thinking, and dreaming, for who knows how long. This is something out of our experience, existence on another level, with a survival plan we can’t anticipate. No matter what fucked up things Wexler says, you have to get this through his head. They don’t understand this thing. They have to find out how it intends to survive, and Niri’s not going to tell them that. She doesn’t trust them. She trusts me.”
Voss watches him for a moment, seeing the medic’s desperation, his torment over the girl, and his belief that there’s a serious threat on the horizon.
“You’re off-duty,” Voss reminds him. “That means it’s my problem, and I’ll handle it. You get that?”
Logan takes a breath, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “Good luck, sir.”
The guards escort Voss through the corridors leading to the vault. Everything shines, no shattered glass, no blood smears on the ivory floor tiles, no broken corridor panels. Life support vents hiss with white noise. The memory of what happened here is still vivid. The exact spot where he took a rifle off of a wounded man, the path he chose along the wall to hunt down Kazak.
It gets fuzzy after that, after crashing onto tables, and through bullet cracked glass, and getting banged up on the rocks. Some images are clear. Others are not.
They lead him through two glass doors and onto the observation deck, it’s large windows replaced, debris cleared away. Color plays along the ceiling, meshing blues and greens, thickening the air as if the whole thing structure is underwater and filled with light.
Wexler is waiting for him on the lower level, his gray suit pressed to perfection, and his hands clasped behind his back. He’s thoughtful, his attention focused outside, his salt and pepper hair catching a faint blue shine. He seems to be lost in the view until one of the guards clears his throat.
The president looks back and grimaces when he sees Voss. “Jared. Please take a seat.”
“Sir.” Voss sits in the closest chair and presses his back against the seat rest, ready to take the hits that are coming his way.
“This should be our moment of triumph,” the president says, gesturing out at the caverns. “But instead, people were killed. The facility was destroyed. We almost lost the entire project. Did you think about any of that when you saw that ship coming? Did it even occur to you that this investment might come before the life of criminal? What did you think your duty was here, exactly?”
“I was presented with a hostage situation. My duty, in such situations, is to protect as many lives as possible.”
“By blowing up the ship.”
“By extracting the hostages before blowing up the ship.”
Wexler nods angrily. “Petra is a criminal.”
“And an intelligence asset.”
“Not anymore. What good is she now? She’s not an asset now.”
Voss tries to hide his irritation at that and fails. “She knows every one of your associates, and what they purchase on the grey market, and who they talk to, and where their sympathies lie. She was able to glean information from a much more dangerous criminal regarding the contract that brought him to Mars, and brought over sixty of his men here without anyone else knowing what was happening. She is an intelligence asset. She is, as far as I know, your only intelligence asset, and you have no choice but to keep her alive. You are at war. This facility was destroyed because someone in your administration is intent on sabotaging you, and bringing this program to an end. And you wouldn’t even know that much if I hadn’t saved her.”
“That’s not why you did it,” Wexler accuses, his expression harsher than he usually allows. “You did it because you’ve got some kind of relationship with her, and you’re compromised. You risked everything we’ve built here. It was your responsibility to make sure this station was secure, and you failed. You failed, colonel, and there are no second chances.”
Voss holds his gaze, and the president looks away.
“I’m relieving you of duty,” the man says finally. “You’ll ship back to Earth as soon as possible. The rest of your men will remain here until Rhys Corp brings in another team. You’ll go back to active duty Earthbound. You’ll retain your rank though your retirement may be arranged for Earth filter. Lawsuits were discussed, but I think there’s no need to bring further attention to the events that happened here, so---”
Voss is listening, or half-listening, when he catches movement from the airlock. A slip of black, a small shoulder, slender brown fingers on the keypad. The door seal pulls back, and Niri appears, dressed in a black uniform, her skin washed in the aquatic colors of the caverns.
She moves differently. She was always graceful---and quick with a knife, if memory serves---but now she seems tense, her shoulders held back, her head high, her movement forced, or… requiring concentration.
The president looks startled, his speech trailing off. “---that---Your Excellency, forgive me for lingering here. All unnecessary personnel will be removed from this station---your sovereign territory, per the treaty---but we have a three day window for that, and there are issues---”
“Where is Corpora
l Logan?” she asks.
“There is a complication.”
“I asked that he be brought here.”
“Yes,” Wexler wets his lips, searching for the most diplomatic approach. “But his team may have to report back to Earth. It’s a matter of security.”
“I want them here,” Niri says coolly, her gaze fixed on Wexler. “I want them assigned to me, as part of my diplomatic retinue. I want them to protect this station and the caverns… the areas that are my sovereign territory.”
“That may not be practical. In all honesty, there was a failure on the colonel’s part, and your attackers were allowed to land here. You were placed at risk. We can’t have that happen again.”
Niri considers this, sliding her gaze to Voss. “How many men attacked us? How many wanted to kill me?”
Voss looks at Wexler, then back, unsure of who he’s actually answering to. “There were sixty in one ship and twelve in the other.”
“And how many on your team?”
“Four, plus fifteen station guards.”
“You were outnumbered.”
“Yes.”
“And you prevailed.”
Voss hesitates because he wouldn’t exactly put it that way. “Yes.”
Niri nods, her attention moving to the large windows. “Then there is no failure. This station still stands. We were protected.”
“Ambassador,” Wexler interjects. “There was a breach of security protocol. It could have turned out very differently.”
“It did not turn out differently.”
“Yes,” Wexler concedes. “But we can’t ignore the breach of rules.”
Niri looks at Voss. “Why did you break these rules?”
“They had a hostage, a woman we work with.”
“Petra?” Niri raises a dark eyebrow. “The woman on the ship?”
Wexler stifles a curse.
“Yes, ma’am,” Voss says.
“She tried to protect us,” Niri adds. “Protecting the weak is a divine trait. Sacrificing for one another is a divine trait. Loyalty to life above profit or power, is a divine trait. These are the attributes that advance a species beyond the violent cradles of their birth. The example must start here. It must be shown. It must be respected. Our message to humanity cannot be delivered in any other context. The humans who work here must prove their divinity, and carry it with them for all to see.”