by J.J. Mainor
Chapter 13
A man in an armored suit walked the catwalk surrounding the top of the facility. Far enough from the battle in the trenches, but not too far that his visor couldn’t magnify the threat struggling to take the next trench, he spied the Republic’s forces rallying for another drive. The armored suits clamored from their hole, taking bullets from the drones only a couple meters ahead. Each man hit meant another was safe until the guns repositioned to seek the next target. Many bodies had dropped before the next trench was overrun and taken in the name of the Republic. Some of those bodies had been scrambled by the opposing commander. Others had been taken by the scrambler dish at the top of the facility in order to deprive their foe of the raw materials.
It was risky dropping the inhibitors long enough to make the scramble, but figuring the enemy’s scrambler was distracted with the battlefield, it seemed a risk worth taking. Still, the man in the suit on the catwalk grew concerned watching another trench fall to the military. There were only so many more trenches separating the two sides. The miners had more tricks to play should they need them, and this man saw they certainly needed one.
He retreated into the complex and removed his helmet once he was within the atmosphere. Beneath the suit was Ares who headed to the administrator’s office to report the situation to Dirk.
“I suggest we use the lava before they get any closer.”
Dirk chewed over the suggestion for several minutes. He removed his feet from atop the desk and rest his hands in their place.
“We don’t know what that will do. It could trigger the final melting of the crust, or it could restart tectonic activity on this world.”
“We knew what the risks were when we set these defenses.” Dirk fell back in his chair looking up at the tin ceiling for guidance. From all the circular dents where the former administrator seemed to have taken practice with a ball, it was apparent, he wasn’t the first to seek guidance from above.
He had never been an overly religious man. Sure, Dirk had a feeling most of his life that there must have been someone looking out for him. It was the only way he could explain that lifeguard pulling form the jaws of that shark when he was sixteen. And it had seemed like divine intervention played a role when the doctors told him they could save his arm.
Like some of the men, he could not imagine any god playing a role in his existence on this planet. No god would even begin to understand those soldiers outside, or the medical procedures of their doctor, or the data in the computers. Others on base saw the unholy happenings as a punishment for some violation against His laws. There were even those who wondered if this world was Hell. Given the magma layer was slowly dissolving the last bit of rock encasing it, this world certainly would resemble Hades in a matter of weeks.
Staring at the dents above, Dirk knew the Republic’s Space Force wanted something or they would have just bombed the site from orbit and blended the debris. That something was the one thing keeping them alive at this point. And the only thing driving that army was the support it had from orbit. With the inhibitors online, his scrambler would have no effect up there. But if it were to come down…
“Bring me the UN guy,” he instructed, returning his attention to Ares.
“Sure thing.”
Ares left to carry out his directive, leaving Dirk to turn his attention to the computer at the right side of the desk. Even two years out of date, it was still faster than the one he had bought for his son for the last birthday he shared on Earth. Having no possessions accompany him to the stars, Dirk didn’t even have a picture of the boy. He had to rely on his memory, shutting his eyes to imagine an image on the computer desktop of the fourteen year old with the wild, unkempt head of hair and the peach fuzz on his lip.
He promised himself if he got this job, he’d teach the boy to shave before departure, but that didn’t happen. They were all taken from Earth without notice. No one was allowed to say goodbye to their loved ones. And there was no telling how much time had passed since their last known memories on Earth. Jacob would be sixteen, same age he was when that shark tried to eat him, if there was no time gap between his memories. He had no way of knowing how long his pattern was in storage on the way to this world. He didn’t even know if this was the first job site he had been assigned to, or if there were others before this stint. The boy could be thirty-six or sixty-six by now.
The date was not stored in the computers, nor could they find any clue on any of the correspondences lying around the office. If there was one consolation Dirk could take from everything, it was that Jacob would not or did not grow up without a father. He would never know his dad was on a dead world fighting for dignity.
Ares returned with Remy, and left the two alone to talk.
“I’m guessing you didn’t come down here if you didn’t have a way back to your ship.” Dirk considered his guest as he would one of the prisoners they had managed to collect from the battlefield, except the few prisoners they had were grunts; no one on that battlefield knew anything more than their orders, and those orders were no more complex than “storm the castle.”
“No, I have someone waiting to bring me back up there. All you have to do is tell me what you’re after and I can go back…”
Dirk cut him off, uninterested in the diplomacy. He was concerned only for the inhibitors protecting the ship. “If you want to help us, you can ask your contact to disable the inhibitors so we can erase that ship from existence.”
Remy was horrified. To him, the suggestion was equally noxious as the Colonel’s tactics and attitudes.
“I’m not going to do that,” Remy told him calmly. He knew Dirk could be brought to the table. The fact he broke the silence and brought him to the office was a step in the right direction. “I’m here to stop a war crime, not perpetrate one.”
Dirk considered the words. There was no doubt Remy meant well, but he was misguided. He lacked the experience off world to shape his views. Even if Remy remained determined to hold onto his ideals and Earthlike values, Dirk knew they would break the longer he was exposed to the interstellar truths.
He took up a helmet from a junk pile in the corner of the room and tossed it to Remy along with a can of industrial grease.
“What’s this for?”
“We’re going outside,” Dirk explained to him. “But you need to cover over those letters. I doubt you want that army recognizing you.”
Reluctantly, Remy complied and hid the letters beneath a generous layer of the black goop as Dirk dug out a suit from the pile for himself. He tested the radios in their helmets to make sure they worked. Of course they were set to a different frequency than anything the Republic used so that the enemy commander couldn’t intercept their conversations. When they were ready, Dirk led his guest up and out onto the catwalk.
Remy gazed down to the battlefield, watching the armored bodies scurry out of the trenches and into the oncoming spray of projectiles. He had been witness to armies treated as expendable assets, but never with the callousness before him. He had never seen a strategy like this: throw as many bodies as you could until the enemy ran out of ammo. You wouldn’t waste robots in this manner.
Dirk pointed off to the right of the battle, maybe a kilometer past the soldiers. “Focus your visor there.” Remy’s helmet zoomed in on a massive tripod resting over the trench. It held a drill waiting for the orders to activate. And Dirk gave them.
Somewhere inside the complex, one of his miners activated the drill remotely, sending it down into the trench. It bore through the rock disappearing from sight. As Remy wondered what its purpose was, he spied a geyser of lava thrust up from the hole. The drill and the tripod would have melted instantly as the molten rock settled and flowed into the trench. Like an artery that had been punctured, the lava poured from the drilled hole and quickly filled the trench.
Remy’s eyes raced back to the battlefront, and just ahead of the flow as it began to cons
ume the soldiers still taking cover in its path. The realization poured through the ranks, but not quickly enough to evacuate the trench. A few made it out, but most met the same fate as the drill, incinerating in an instant.
Behind his visor, Dirk smile triumphantly. Though short lived, his maneuver had crippled those forces. It would take the commander time to regroup and figure a way over the new roadblock. And with the bodies now lost in the superheated magma flow, neither side could retrieve them for the raw materials.
Remy however, froze on the catwalk, horrified these seemingly ordinary people would resort to genocide before considering his offer for mediation. He couldn’t believe Dirk was so desperate as to refuse help when offered. These miners had crossed the line he feared the Republic forces would roll over.
“Don’t act so appalled,” Dirk told him, sensing his horror. Those aren’t people; not really.”
Remy turned to his partner, the angry glare so strong, no thickness of armor could hold it back. “You didn’t have to do that! I could have saved you.”
“The only way you can save us is to bring down the inhibitors protecting that ship.”
Remy remained frozen on the individual before him. Dirk was no victim. He was just another warlord, no different than the ones burning through the jungles of Africa, or the deserts of Asia.
“Then take me back to your prison, because I will not help you kill anyone.”