by John Scalzi
“Okay, but three in a row,” Lambert said.
“What about it?”
“Has that happened before, in your experience? Ever?”
“No.”
“And you’ve been in the CDF how long, now? Six years?”
“Seven,” I said. “And three months.”
“Not that you’re counting,” Powell said.
“If you don’t you lose track,” I said. I turned back to Lambert. “All right, yes, it’s unusual.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?” Lambert asked. “Wait—I phrased that poorly. I mean to say, you don’t find it troublesome? Because when Ilse here, our current queen of the ‘who gives a shit’ line of thinking, is starting to get tired of our act, there might be a problem.”
“I didn’t say I was tired of it,” Powell said. “I said it’s not what I signed up for.”
“There’s a distinction in your brain between the two,” Lambert said.
“Yeah, there is,” Powell said. “I’m not tired of this. I can do this shit in my sleep. But I don’t see it as my job. My job is shooting the hell out of aliens who are trying to kill us.”
“Amen to that,” Salcido said.
“What we’re doing here, I mean, really, who gives a shit?” Powell said. She waved out the window. “These people are protesting. So what? Let them protest. They want to break up with the Colonial Union, let them.”
“When the other species come down to scrape them off the planet, then your job would get harder,” I pointed out.
“No it wouldn’t, because they’re not part of the Colonial Union anymore. Fuck ’em.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much, and in a twisted way, I assure you, I admire your commitment to amorality,” Lambert said.
“It’s not amoral,” Powell said. “If they’re part of the Colonial Union, I’ll defend them. That’s my job. If they want to go their own way, fine. I don’t see it as my job to stop them. But I also won’t stop the aliens from shoving them into a pot if they do, either.”
“Maybe that’s what we need,” Salcido said. “One of these planets to go it alone and get the hell kicked out of them. That would bring the rest of them back into line.”
“But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Lambert said. “It’s not just one of them. Not just one planet. It’s a bunch of them, all at the same time.”
“It’s that thing,” Salcido said. “That group. Equilibrium. Showing up and doing that data dump.”
“What about it?” Powell asked.
“Well, it makes sense. All of these planets with people getting worked up all of a sudden.”
“They’re not getting worked up all of a sudden,” Lambert said. “That rebellion in Kyoto was long-cooking. And the lieutenant here made the point about putting down a rebellion a year ago, on … where?”
“Zhong Guo,” I said.
“Thank you. Maybe that Equilibrium thing is crystallizing action now, but whatever it’s tapping into has been there already for years.”
“Then the Colonial Union should have been preparing for this for years,” Powell said, bored now with this conversation. “But it didn’t, and now we and everyone else on the Tubingen are shuttling from one stupid internal crisis to the next. It’s stupid and it’s a waste.”
“No, it makes sense,” Lambert said.
“You figure? How’s that.”
“We’re not attached to this place. We’re not attached to Kyoto. We weren’t attached to Franklin. We’re not attached to any of the colonies because we originally came from Earth. So it’s not difficult for us to come in and stomp around if we have to.”
“We’re handing off the work here to the Kyiv police,” Salcido pointed out.
“Right, after we handled the hard part. That’s our job. Handling the hard parts.”
“But you just said that this isn’t a long-term solution,” Salcido said, waving out to the funnels. “In which case the hard part is still here, which means we’ll be back. Or someone like us.”
“Yeah, funny, I remember talking about not addressing root causes a couple of weeks ago, and got shouted down with ‘who cares’ and a song about pizza.”
“It was a great song.”
“If you say so.”
“All I’m saying is that what we’re doing now is increasingly full of bullshit,” Powell said, bringing the discussion around. “If this is what we’re doing now, fine. So be it. But I’d rather be shooting aliens. I think everyone else would too.”
“She’s not wrong,” Salcido said, to me.
“No, she’s not,” Lambert agreed.
“I know,” I said.
PART FOUR
Friday.
“Root causes,” Lambert was saying. “You all kept mocking me for talking about them and now look where we are. Another colony planet. Another uprising. Except this time the planet’s already declared independence.”
The shuttle rocked on the way through Khartoum’s atmosphere. This time it was not only the four of us but my entire platoon, as it was on Rus. We weren’t doing protest suppression this time. This time we were making a surgical strike on Khartoum’s prime minister, who had declared the planet independent, encouraged mobs to occupy Colonial Union buildings, and then hidden himself, with a circle of advisors, in an undisclosed location, presumably because he knew that the Colonial Union wasn’t going to be particularly happy with him.
Indeed it wasn’t. It wasn’t happy with him, or in fact any of his party’s leadership, all of which had endorsed the independence—without, it should be noted, actually presenting it to the entire parliament for ratification.
“They learned from Franklin,” Lambert continued. “This time they knew not to give us a chance to respond first.”
“Which makes their independence illegal,” Salcido noted. He was sitting next to Lambert.
“It was always going to be illegal,” Lambert said. “By which I mean there was no possible way the Colonial Union would accept the legality of their independence. So there was no reason for them to put it up to a vote.”
“But now it’s also illegal by their own system of government.”
“No, because the prime minister had his cabinet approve a declaration of emergency powers and dissolved the current government,” Lambert said. “All legal as can be.”
“For what little good it’s going to do him,” Powell said. She was down a bit from Lambert and Salcido, on the other side of the shuttle, as was I.
“Oh, now, Ilse, he’ll be fine,” Salcido said. “He’s in an undisclosed location.”
“Which we’re on our way to right now. Another high-altitude drop and destroy.”
“We need to get Prime Minister Okada alive,” I reminded Powell.
“High-altitude drop, snatch, and then destroy,” Powell corrected.
“Which begs the question of how we know where this undisclosed location is,” Lambert said, to me.
“Okada’s had nano-transmitters in his blood since he became prime minister,” I said.
“I assume he doesn’t know that.”
“Probably not.”
“How did they get there, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“No idea,” I said. “If I had to guess, I imagine at some point or another he had a meal at the Colonial Union compound, and they were slipped to him then.”
“And we wonder why the Colonial Union isn’t looked on with great enthusiasm,” Lambert said.
Powell rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”
“You can snark at me all you want, Ilse,” Lambert said, and then disappeared as a hole in the shuttle appeared behind him and he was sucked out into Khartoum’s upper atmosphere, along with Salcido and the soldiers on either side of them. My combat suit, sensing pressure drop and shuttle damage, immediately snuck its mask over my head and started drawing oxygen out of what remained of the air in the shuttle cabin. Simultaneously as platoon leader I was patched into the shuttle’s systems, which told me w
hat I already knew: The shuttle had been hit and was no longer in full control of its descent.
I fought down the urge to panic and focused on damage assessment. The pilot was trying to keep the shuttle from tumbling, fighting with the now damaged controls. Four soldiers out the growing hole in the side of the shuttle. Five others dead or mortally injured, another five seriously injured but alive. Fifteen uninjured and me.
The shuttle was declaring it was being tracked; whoever hit us wasn’t done.
I connected to the shuttle and authorized the shuttle doors to open. Everybody out now, I said, through the platoon BrainPal feed. My simulated voice made me sound more calm than I was.
We were all already suited up to jump out of the shuttle. We were just doing it earlier now.
By fireteams. Let’s go.
The remainder of the platoon started out the doors. Powell stayed back with me, yelling at stragglers. The pilot kept the shuttle steady as possible. Powell and I got out of the door just before some sort of kinetic round tore the shuttle apart. I did a quick ping on the pilot’s uniform’s system feed. There was nothing there.
Lieutenant, Powell sent. She was falling about one hundred meters away from me and sent to me via tightbeam. Look down.
I looked down and saw flickering beams shooting up into the evening sky. They weren’t going all the way up into the atmosphere; they were terminating on points below me.
They were hitting my soldiers. Killing them.
Full camo chaos dive, I sent over the platoon channel, to everyone still alive. Then I ordered my suit to seal me in, went dark on communication, and made myself as close to a hole in the atmosphere as I could. The suit’s camo function would hide me visually and would do what it could to scatter any electromagnetic waves that would be sweeping over me, trying to bounce back to a receiver set on targeting me. My suit was also making subtle movements and sending out extensions to move me around randomly, changing my speed and direction of descent, almost making it harder to target me. Every platoon member who heard my order was now doing the same.
Chaos diving could kill an unmodified human with the jerks and turns. My suit stiffened up at the neck and other joints to minimize the potential injury. It didn’t mean I didn’t feel my insides strain. But it wasn’t meant to be comfortable. It was meant to keep you alive.
One other thing: The electromagnetic-scattering camouflage effectively makes you blind. You fall, relying on the data your suit polled before you turned it on to allow it to track where you were and how far you had fallen, factoring in all the shifts in direction and descent speed and feeding that into your BrainPal. The camo was designed to give me a visual feed again one klick up—just enough time to assess and plan a final descent path.
Unless there was an error, in which case I would see the ground just before I smacked straight into it. Or I might never see the ground at all. There would just be a sudden thump.
Also: I wouldn’t know if one of those beams had found me until it started frying me.
The point is that you don’t do a full camo chaos dive unless you absolutely have to. But that’s where we were at the moment. Me and every other soldier in the platoon.
It also meant that when we landed, we would be scattered all across the countryside, coms quiet to avoid detection. In our briefing I had given the platoon an alternative extraction point in case something went wrong, but having the shuttle shot out from under us so far up and then performing a chaos dive meant that the remainder of the platoon was likely to be scattered over an area a hundred klicks to a side. When we landed, we were going to be alone, and hunted.
I had several minutes to contemplate all of this as I fell.
I also had several minutes to think about what had happened. Simply put, there should have been no way for the shuttle to have been shot out of Khartoum’s upper atmosphere. Khartoum had defenses like any Colonial Union planet would, to prevent alien species from attempting an attack. But as they had been on Franklin and every other planet we’d visited recently, these defenses were built and run by the Colonial Union itself. Even if these installations had been attacked by Khartoum’s citizens and abandoned by their CU operators, anyone trying to operate them would have been locked out by a nested set of security measures. Unless the CU operators had gone over to the other side—possible but not likely—those were someone else’s beams.
Another wrinkle: The Tubingen should have been tracking the shuttle’s descent and alerting us to, and defending us from, any ground-based attacks. If it hadn’t, it would have been because it was otherwise occupied. Which is to say, that it was being attacked, either from the surface of the planet or above it. In either case, also not from the Colonial Union.
If this was correct, then it meant a couple of things. It meant that whatever was happening on Khartoum, it wasn’t just about the planet’s independence—the planet had aligned itself with enemies of the Colonial Union. And then it laid a trap for us. Not for the Tubingen itself—whoever was doing this didn’t know which among the Colonial Dense Forces ships were going to respond. The Tubingen, its shuttle, and my platoon were all incidental in this. No, the trap was for the Colonial Union itself.
But why, and for what purpose?
My visual feed kicked on and I was a klick above the ground. In the distance were lights which suggested some form of civilization. Directly below me was dark, hilly, and full of vegetation. I waited as long as possible and deployed breaking nanobots, which spread out widely to catch the air. I landed hard and rolled and then stayed on my back for a moment, catching my breath and looking up at the sky. It was local night and the darkness of the vegetation combined with my Colonial Union-designed eyes meant I could see the stars in all their local constellations. I sighted several and, with local time and date, calculated my position.
I checked with my BrainPal to see if there was any signal from the Tubingen. I didn’t want to try to signal them, in case anyone was listening, but if they were sending to us they might have information we survivors could use.
Nothing. That wasn’t good.
I stood up, visual camo still on, and walked to where I could again see the lights in the distance. I applied the visual to the data for ground maps I had in my BrainPal for the mission. I checked that against the position of the stars in the sky. I was in the foothills above the suburbs of Omdurman, Khartoum’s capital city. I was forty-five klicks southeast of the city’s capital district, thirty-eight klicks south of the “undisclosed location” where I knew the prime minister to be, and twenty-three klicks southwest of the secondary extraction point where I hoped any survivors of my platoon were now heading.
I wasn’t interested in any of those at the moment. Instead I called up my visual cache of the last hour and tracked back to a visual of one of the beams targeting a soldier of mine, and started using the visual information, along with my descent data, to track back the location of whatever was creating that beam.
Sixteen klicks due almost directly north, also in the foothills, near an abandoned reservoir.
“Got you,” I said, bumped up my low-light visual acuity as much as possible to avoid falling into a hole, and started jogging toward the target. As I did I had my BrainPal play me music, so I would be distracted from thinking about Lambert, or Salcido, or Powell, or any other members of my platoon.
I would think about them later. I would grieve them later. Right now I needed to find out who shot them down.
* * *
Six klicks from the target, something knocked me off my feet and threw me to the ground. I immediately pushed off and rolled, confused because I had my visual camo on, and because whatever hit me and tossed me to the ground was nowhere to be seen. I had been shoved by a ghost.
Lieutenant.
It took me a second to realize that the voice I heard was through my BrainPal, not my ears.
Directly in front of you, the voice said. Tightbeam me. I don’t know if we’re still being tracked.
Powell? I
said, via tightbeam, incredulous.
Yes, she said. She sent me visual permissions on her suit, which allowed my BrainPal to model where her body would be. She was indeed a meter directly in front of me. I tightbeamed her similar permissions.
Sorry about tackling you, she said.
How did you do that? I asked. I mean, how did you know that I was there?
Are you listening to music?
I was, I said. So?
You were singing as you ran.
Jesus, I said.
You didn’t know?
No. But I’m not surprised. When I was a musician they had to turn off my microphone at gigs because I would sing along. I can play any stringed instrument you can name, but I can’t sing worth a damn.
I noticed that much, Powell said, and I smiled despite myself. Powell motioned back, to the southeast. I came down that direction and started heading this way and began hearing you a couple of klicks back. I waited until I was sure it was you.
You could have tightbeamed me instead of tackling me.
It seemed safer this way. If you were on the ground there was less chance of you grabbing your Empee and spraying the brush out of surprise.
Point. Why are you headed this way, though? The secondary extraction point is not this way.
No. But the assholes who shot us down are.
I smiled again. It does not at all surprise me to hear you say that.
Of course it doesn’t. Just as I’m not surprised to find you on the way there.
No, I suppose not.
Shall we go?
Yes, I said. We both stood up.
Just to be clear, I plan to kill the shit out of every single one of them we find, Powell said.
We may want one or two for questioning, I said.
Your call. You better point out which ones you want ahead of time.
I will. Also, Ilse?
Yes, Lieutenant?
What was your job back on Earth? I’ve always been curious.
I taught eighth-grade math in Tallahassee.
Huh, I said. That’s not what I expected.
Are you kidding? Powell said back. You try teaching algebra to a bunch of little shitheads for thirty-eight years straight. The way I figure it I’ve got about another decade before my rage from that gets entirely burned up.