by Bobby Adair
Blair tells me, “I need to approve unit transfers.”
“Fine,” I’m not at all liking the way this relationship with her is turning out. “What’s our status? How many armed soldiers do we have?”
“What’s our status, ma’am?” she clarifies for me.
My God, back to this shit?
Standing by me now, she looks up at our three lookouts overhead, to remind me they’re on the comm line.
I try not to sound like an angry seventh grader when I ask, “What’s our status, Ma’am?”
“In addition to your platoon,” she tells me, “we’ve moved nearly sixty out. Half of those are armed with single-shot Trog weapons. Most of the others have Trog swords.”
“Disruptors.” I’d hoped for better. Only the members of my platoon who are still alive are armed with automatic railguns, the only advantage we have over the Trogs so far. “We can’t win if we fight them with their weapons.”
“I know.” She’s looking around nervously.
“Any idea where the Trogs stashed the soldiers’ guns after they captured the assault ships, Ma’am?”
Blair shakes her head. “I’ve got Sergeant Billings on it. He’s asking around, and he’s organizing a squad to search.”
“That’ll be dangerous, Ma’am.”
“We have to have those weapons,” she tells me like I don’t know it.
“Might I suggest, Ma’am,” God this suck-up, military-discipline shit is a pain in the ass, “to make sure Billings and his squad go out armed. That’s all I’m saying. They’ll have to enter airlocks not knowing what’s on the other side—probably Trogs. The only question is how many.”
“Or it could be more prisoners,” she counters.
“Do we have a map of the underground structure of this base, Ma’am?” I ask. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” she tells me. “It’s all top secret. All I knew about this place was the location I passed to you back on earth.”
I tell Silva, Mostyn, and Lenox, I’m dropping them from the conversation and leave them instructions to keep me updated when things change with our growing Trog infestation.
“What about the miners?” I ask Blair, skipping the Ma’am now that it’s just us. “What about Free Army personnel? They must have been here before, right? We didn’t just plan to show up here and invade, did we?”
“Of course not,” she snaps, taking my question as an accusation, just like it was meant. “This is our base.”
“Was,” I correct her.
“Is,” she insists. “And we need to take it back. That’s our number one priority, the only goal we can afford.” She looks around. “What alternative do we have? We have one operational ship, and one tug chasing a crippled Trog cruiser toward Jupiter.”
I don’t comment on that, though I know she means it as an insult. I ordered Jill Rafferty off in the tug. It was the right decision considering the risk of all those live Trogs still aboard the cruiser.
“None of our assault ships can fly without extensive repairs,” she concludes. “We can’t leave.”
She’s 100% right about that. The best we can do is prepare for the coming attack. No, not the best. “Might I suggest we send out a second recon squad, not just Sergeant Billings. It’ll be dangerous, but we need to find those automatic weapons. We need to know how many Trogs are on this base. We need to know what the subterranean levels look like. We won’t win if we react out of ignorance. If we’re going to take this base from however many Trogs are here, we need to be proactive.”
Chapter 3
Blair takes a moment to tap on her d-pad and double-check that she and I are on a private comm link. She doesn’t want any other ears listening in by accident. Standing in front of me now, she looks at me with an impassive face, yet her words come out dripping in acid. “We need to get a few things straight.”
I try to keep all inflection out of my voice, while knowing that we’re preparing for an attack we’re not likely to survive. We need to move this thing, whatever it is, along. “I’m listening.”
“I’m a colonel. You’re a major. I outrank you. We need to maintain the chain of command.”
“Is this about the ‘yes, ma’am’ thing again, ma’am?” Maybe throwing the ma’am on the end was a bit childish. I’m already irritated with the conversation.
“The troops need to see me in charge. The orders need to pass from me to you, from there to the captains and lieutenants—”
I interrupt. “We don’t have any captains, and only a few lieutenants.”
“—and from them to the sergeants and enlisted personnel.”
“Enlisted?” I ask, slipping into the trap of the argument. “Hardly anyone here is enlisted. These are all draftees. And that doesn’t matter anyway, does it? We’re all rebels now, right? We’re mutineers and murderers. We’re volunteers in the Free Army.” I wave a dismissive hand at the mining colony on our potato-shaped asteroid. “Free Army? With one shitty base so far from the middle of nowhere that nowhere doesn’t even know we’re here?” I’m sprinting into rant mode. “You tell me there’s more to this fucking fiasco—and by God, I hope so—yet you still haven’t told me or anyone else about what other shit we’ve got. The worst part is we don’t even own this asteroid. We’re not armed, and we’re about to be attacked, and you want to talk about chain of command protocol like it’s the most important goddamn thing we have to do right now, like your rank and your ego are paramount. Well, I’ve got news for you, ma’am, they’re not. I don’t care what you did back in the MSS to put all this together. I don’t care what you think you’re doing now. We need to figure out how to survive this attack. If too many Trogs come to the surface, we’re in big trouble.”
“You listen to me, you little upstart, nobody officer,” her voice is rich with righteous venom.
And with all the surprise anybody would feel who’s just spun off the kind of grandiose argument I just slapped her with, I realize my rebuttal-turned-tirade did nothing to win her over to my side.
She goes on to say, “I’m the only reason this revolution is anything right now besides a basement jerk-off fantasy for you and your spaghetti-headed friends. I’m the only reason you’re alive, and I’ll always be the only reason you stay that way.” She reaches out and taps the side of my helmet.
Damn, everybody wants physical contact to make their points today.
“You need to get this through your tantrum-addled brain. It doesn’t matter what you think of the Free Army, you’re in it now, and we’ll maintain our ranks just like the in the SDF. You’ll do exactly what the hell I order you to do, or I’ll kill switch you and not bat an eye about it. The world is full of starry-eyed revolutionaries who only need to be fostered with half of a freedom dream and a shiny gun. You’re nothing special.” And to make sure I understand this part, she closes the last centimeters between our faceplates. “You’re replaceable.”
That confirms it beyond a doubt. Suddenly I’m in the same position I put my platoon in back when we were lifting off from earth and I stood at the end of the compartment and told them I’d kill switch every single one of them if they so much as raised a hand at me.
Goddamn, it makes me feel powerless.
I hate the feeling every bit as much as I’ve hated my life under the Grays.
“Run out of self-righteous speeches?” sneers Blair.
Yes, however, I’m not a quitter. So, I have more to say. “Whatever you think I am is irrelevant.” I nod at some of the troops nearby, steeling themselves for the coming attack. “Their thoughts are important. I wasn’t in that prison warehouse with all of you, but I’ll bet I know what you talked about. Jill’s platoon was with mine when we destroyed those three Trog cruisers over Arizona. That’s one hell of a victory, probably the biggest the SDF ever had. It’s certainly the biggest thing our paltry rebellion has done in this war. I’ll bet all of those soldiers were talking about it and you were egging them on because you had to make them all believe we have a
chance to win this.”
I see from the look on Blair’s face I’ve hit pay dirt.
“You had to do it, because you couldn’t have them thinking this whole thing you led us into was a clusterfuck, or worse, an ambush you baited them into. If they’d started believing that while imprisoned in a Trog warehouse on an asteroid a billion miles from earth with no hope of escape, then they’d have probably had a contest to see who could kill you with their bare hands.”
Blair’s brain is squirming in a trap of her own making, and she can’t find a magic string of bullshit to break herself free. She’s not used to being on the losing end of anything. She steps away from me.
It’s funny, but I’m too riled up to rudely laugh at her. “The crunchy, nutty icing on your shit cake is this: all those people inside and the ones coming out know it’s me and my crew that rescued them. The best part is, because humans are humans, they unfairly ascribe life’s complicated achievements to single heroes no matter how many were involved. That’s especially true in military matters. Read any history book and you’ll know it. The prisoners will say it was me who saved them. Not my platoon. Not what’s left of my company. They’ll believe it was me who unclustered this fuck-pit you put them in. So, threaten your kill switch all you want. Your hands are tied. If you do it me, these grunts will frag your arrogant ass so fast you’ll never see it coming.”
Having had plenty of moments now to come up with her rebuttal, Blair snaps back, “Nothing’s to stop me from freezing the whole lot of you, and starting from scratch with a new batch.”
“Except the only chance you have to not end up as Trog bait is me and these soldiers.” Blair is off-balance, and I can see that I’ve won. “Without me, you have no chance, because whether you like it or not, these soldiers will fight for me and they’ll have a chance to win because they believe I can lead them to victory. Nobody believes in you. You’re just a bossy MSS cunt that not one of them trusts.”
It’s my turn to be aggressive. I step up close to Blair so that our faceplates are nearly touching. “So now I’m telling you, ma’am, work with me. Stop pretending this schoolyard posturing is important. You do what you do and be the queen bitch of this whole outfit, and let me do what I need to do—fight these goddamn Trogs and kill ‘em.”
Chapter 4
Détente.
“I’ll work on the defense,” I tell Blair. “You get those scout squads out. We won’t be staying out here in front of this warehouse any longer than is absolutely necessary.”
“What are you going to do to defend it?” asks Blair, looking around at the nooks troops are finding among the rock outcrops and the machinery maze.
“Let’s not pretend we’re going to get along,” I tell her. “Trust me to handle my business. And I’ll let you handle your shit.”
“Let me?”
I ignore the pettiness. “We’ll have plenty of time to bicker when all this is over.”
“Ma’am,” she spits at me to enforce her authority one more time.
“Fuck you with that shit.” I turn and head toward a platoon reconstituting just outside the warehouse door. “Work on assembling the units. And find us a better place than this to defend. We’ll all die out here if the Trogs attack in force.” I cut my comm link with Blair.
“You,” I point, as I walk toward a sergeant who can’t hear me. Coming up in front of him, I check his identity and connect with him over the comm while finding his info on my d-pad. I slip his name under my ad hoc unit hierarchy. He looks like he’s old enough to be my dad. And now I’m mentally on the other side of the chain of command argument. Ugh, karma. “Around the side of this building, you’ll find at least a hundred frozen corpses, all Chinese SDF. Bring them to the front of the warehouse and stack them into ramparts.”
“What?” The sergeant is horrified.
“Do it!” Sometimes people need a jolt even if it is rude.
He’s looking at my name stencil, and he glances at his d-pad. “Major Kane?”
“That’s me.”
His attitude changes instantly. He starts to thank me.
“There’s a horde of Trogs,” I point down the long axis of the Potato. “About a kilometer that way. They’re gathering strength for an attack. We need to ready the forces.”
“We have no guns,” he pleads.
“Work on the ramparts.” I look around and spot a handful of soldiers scavenging through one of the mobs of dead Trogs. “I’ll have those troops find what weapons they can and bring them to you.”
The sergeant looks at the men among the enemy corpses. He scans what he can see of the colony and spots more dead Trogs. His eyes fall on Hastings’ body, still lying in the open. He stops there.
With no more command edge in my tone, I tell him, “Do something with her. She’s one of us.”
He nods, turns to his troops, and starts passing out orders.
I walk toward the scavenging troops, moving a bit slower than I could, and I open a private comm with Phil. “Got a minute?”
“No,” he answers.
“You’re not doing anything,” I tell him, guessing—more than guessing. What could he be up to?
“You don’t know that.”
“Jesus, Phil. Do you have to make everything difficult?”
“Simple pleasures,” he answers.
I sigh. If Phil wasn’t so valuable…
“Here’s what I need,” I tell him. “I need a way to circumvent a kill switch, permanently.”
“I don’t understand. You’ve got the kill-switch capability built into your helmet. All you have to do is choose not to activate it.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m afraid Blair and I are heading for a major confrontation, and she’s already threatened to kill switch me if I don’t behave.”
“She’s a bitch,” says Phil, but he’s nearly laughing when he says it. He only knows her by name. “That must suck for you, not being in charge.”
“Dammit, Phil. This is serious. She can take out everyone in the division, and she thinks we’re disposable.”
“Disposable?” Now it’s Phil’s turn to be horrified.
“She thinks she can make her way back to earth for a refill of people just like us, but who are more pliable.”
“She can’t,” argues Phil. “How dumb is she? We’ve got a bunch of teenagers and middle-aged parents in the ranks now. What comes after that? Geriatrics? Earth is running out of disposable people.”
“Exactly.” Finally, Phil is engaged in the problem. “What can we do?”
“Switching helmets is the natural solution,” he says. “All of the kill switches are coded to the chain-of-command hierarchy. If she has kill-switch authority over the whole division, it won’t matter whose helmet you take.”
“What about all the Chinese bodies laying stacked beside the warehouse?” I ask. “What are your thoughts?”
“Some of us could swap for those helmets,” says Phil, “but are there enough for everyone? Then, whose kill-switch authority are you under? You don’t know, do you?”
He’s right.
“Maybe she’s bluffing,” offers Phil. “Have you thought about that?”
Of course, it’s possible, but that’s an expensive bluff to call.
“If she has a kill switch, then she can listen in on our conversations, too,” realizes Phil. “She’s probably listening right now.”
More Phil drama. Ugh.
Still, he has a point.
I turn and spot Blair in the company of a few sergeants over near the equipment yard, only she isn’t looking at them, she’s cutting glances at me, and she turns away just as I catch her eye.
Bitch!
I say, “I know you can hear me, Blair.”
“What?” cries Phil. “She’s actually on the line?”
“Yes,” I answer. “Chime in if you want, Blair. I don’t care if you know or if you don’t. I will find a way to disable your kill switch.”
“There isn’t
a way,” she tells me, confidently.
“There isn’t a pleasant way,” I answer, thinking back to the small grav plate Captain Milliken placed on my helmet when he was trying to kill me back when this all started. “I’m not interested in harming you. I just want to make sure you don’t kill my troops.” Or me.
Phil mutters something I can’t understand, yet I can tell he’s frightened.
“Or,” I say, “You could trade out your helmet with another, and we’ll destroy that one.”
“Not on your life,” she laughs. The laugh is mean and victorious. She thinks she’s got me worried and she thinks she’s regaining the upper hand.
“It puts us all on a level playing field,” I make my argument, like logic will magically work, “like real soldiers, depending on each other and trusting each other because we share the same values, we fight for the same things. That’s how armies succeed, not by threat of death.”
“Signing off,” says Blair. “I have more important things to do than listening to you two children plot.”
“God,” says Phil. “She’s a bitch.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “See what you can figure out, okay? In the meantime, I need you and Penny—”
The ground shakes violently as everything flashes bright blue in a grav wash.
I’m knocked onto my back as the comm erupts in shouts.
Chapter 5
The pinprick gleam of a trillion stars hanging in the endless black void is obscured with a giant dirty smudge wrapped in ephemeral blue tentacles.
Jupiter, so prominent in the sky a moment before, is a sideshow of funky rust and dull, gray stripes ornamented with sixty-three moons. The herd of smaller asteroids, stable in their positions relative to the Potato a moment earlier, are all on the move. Some are drifting away. A few inch forward. More are spinning, displaying sharp sparkles as light from our faraway sun catches and reflects away.
A Trog cruiser has inexplicably appeared a kilometer above us. A moment ago there was nothing overhead except vacuum. Now it’s there, with plates sucking fusion-drive power and thrashing out repressive grav fields as it stabilizes its two million tons of mass right above us.