Colonyside

by Michael Mammay

  Her confidence made me trust her more. If she felt like this was her only option, maybe she’d do something desperate. But if she spoke the truth—and I believed she did—then I doubted she’d intentionally have been part of any order that led to people dying. That would make her less employable by other companies. I’d seen a callous attitude from her earlier, but that didn’t make her a murderer. To cross that line, a person needed suitable motivation, and she didn’t appear to have it. That didn’t make her my ally—she’d never be that—but she didn’t feel like an enemy either.

  “And here we are.” Stroud put her hand against a biometric pad and a metallic thunk announced a bolt releasing. “After you.”

  The door opened easily, and I entered a laboratory—or more a collaboration between a laboratory and a workshop, combining areas that looked semi-sterile in proximity with areas that looked like they might be more appropriate in a mechanic’s shop. Glass dividers broke up what would have otherwise been one open room and probably helped those semi-sterile areas stay that way. Pillars rose at regular intervals to bear the load of the roof, and the architecture didn’t incorporate them very well, leaving some of them in odd places. Six or seven people worked at different stations, but the space would accommodate twenty-five or thirty during peak hours. The place had a distinct smell that reminded me of mild astringent mixed with lubricating oil.

  “There’s a second room beyond this one with some more sophisticated machine tools and the 3D printers. If we need something, somebody here can make it. It’s much more efficient than shipping things in from off planet.”

  I wanted information on higher-tech stuff, so I drifted toward one of the clean compartments. I had no idea what a sonic device might look like, especially disassembled, but it didn’t have an electric engine, so I could rule out a lot. “I’d love to poke around. I don’t always know what I’m looking for. Sometimes I see something, and it sparks an idea.” That was true, but in this case, I also wanted Stroud to offer to leave me on my own so I could question a tech without her hearing.

  “Go right ahead. I’ve got some time.” She either suspected my motives or wanted to be a good host.

  I didn’t push it. If she wasn’t suspicious, me trying to get rid of her would change that. Since she wouldn’t leave and I’d already mentioned the sonic tech, I could at least use her help. “The first thing I’d like to see is the sonic devices you talked about. That idea has some promise.”

  “Sure, follow me.” She bypassed the first clean room and wound her way through a couple of open workshops to another one. The fact that she knew her way around the tech lab said a lot for her as a leader. A lot of bosses wouldn’t even know where their tech lab was, let alone know the stations inside of it. Stroud was comfortable here. I didn’t know if that helped me or hurt me.

  The door to the clean area—and I use that term loosely, as we walked in wearing our street clothes—opened without a biometric check. Once inside the lab, we had access to everything. “Is there a sterile area, too? Somewhere to fabricate chips and more sensitive items?”

  “There is. It’s all automated, though, with very limited access. Engineers here input what they need through their systems and it’s delivered complete.”

  “Pretty sophisticated for a colony company,” I said.

  “We go into new colonies focusing on the long term. That’s a company-wide attitude.”

  “Can I talk to the technician?” A medium-height woman in a white lab coat and wearing electronic magnifying glasses was hunched over a small device, working with both hands.

  “Sure. Valeria, if you have a minute?” said Stroud, in the tone that a boss uses when it’s not really optional.

  “Yes, ma’am.” The woman took off her glasses, blinking a few times, then walked the ten steps over to us. “What can I do for you?”

  “This is Colonel Butler. Carl, this is Valeria Rosario, one of our best techs. Colonel Butler is a special guest.” Rosario wasn’t wearing a name tag. Knowing her name was another point for Stroud and her leadership. She’d claimed not to know Schultz or Ortega, but they likely didn’t work in this building, since they secured away missions. She could have been telling the truth about that. Or not. I couldn’t rule out her lying to me.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” said the tech.

  “I had a question about the sonic disruption that you’re using to move the large primates.”

  “I can help you with the technical specs, Colonel, but most of the work on that came from the people on the ground. The tech is basic—a transmitter on a telescoping pole. The only tricky part of it was the power source. Since it’s for use under the jungle canopy, we couldn’t use solar power. But that’s a factor in most of what we’re doing out here.”

  “Is the frequency adjustable or fixed?”

  “Good question.” The tech smiled. “The original versions—the test versions—had adjustable frequencies. This allowed the field operatives to experiment to find what frequency range worked. When we got that, we started making them with fixed frequencies. Fewer moving parts means less chance for catastrophic failure.”

  “How did you get the frequency range narrowed down?”

  “That was all field techs and xenobiologists. We gave them the tools and they figured it out. I assume they tried different frequencies until they got the reaction they wanted, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “They did it in the jungle?” I asked.

  “They’d have had to. They can’t exactly bring a hominivert in here.” She snorted when she laughed, which made me smile, despite the chills that her answer gave me. Of course they couldn’t bring a large ape into the main dome. It was illegal and even hacking cameras, you couldn’t do something that blatant without someone seeing it. At the same time, doing it in the jungle would have been slow and produced hard-to-quantify results. But if someone had a secret facility in a location where they could go unobserved by the authorities, they’d have an ideal place to take a test subject. Ganos’s discovery now made a lot more sense. When she’d told me about Hubic hiding in an abandoned dome, I hadn’t ruled it out, but it hadn’t struck me as likely. But Caliber skirting the rules of ecological exploitation? Zentas had basically told me he’d do exactly that.

  And it seemed like he already was.

  “Thanks. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I did have a couple more questions.” This was the one I didn’t want to ask in front of Stroud, but she didn’t give me much choice. I thought I knew the answer, but I had to verify. It’s why I visited in the first place. “They can move the animals out of an area—is it possible to use the devices to move the animals into an area?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t know from a field perspective, but as I understand it, the hominiverts move away from the source of the noise. If you used multiple transmitters—like made a wall of them—they should move away from that wall. We specifically talked about that to protect a crew working on a new dome.”

  And if you could keep them out of a dome, you could keep them in one. Or you could open one side of it and force the primates in that direction. “Last question. What’s the range?”

  “The production model has a planning range of two hundred fifty meters. It’s omnidirectional, so it would be two fifty in any direction, so you’d need to put your devices every five hundred meters to make a wall. We could increase the range, but it takes more power and you have to deal with dampening from the terrain, so it gets more complicated. I can run down the specifics on frequency, amplitude, and power if you want.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said. I wouldn’t have understood it anyway. “Thanks for your help.” Having what I needed, we moved to different areas, and I wasted the next hour looking over technology and construction of products that had nothing to do with my investigation, hoping to make the sonic device disappear into the background of other things in Stroud’s mind . . . just one stop on a tour. I glanced at her from time to time, try
ing to read her, but I couldn’t. She stayed focused on me the whole time, never even stopping to check her device.

  Afterward I thanked her for her time, met Mac, and headed back to my quarters. As we walked, my mind danced through what I’d learned. I wanted to know Zentas’s role in everything that had happened on Eccasis, and I thought that I might find answers hidden at the not-so-abandoned dome.

  Ganos had pegged it as a hideout for Hubic. My mind drifted into more conspiracy-filled waters. If they’d used the dome for illegal research on hominiverts, they’d need a xenobiologist to run it. Someone like Xyla Redstone.

  Chapter Twenty

  I’d lost a bit of my grip on reality. Somewhere, deep down, I knew that. But on the surface, I kept coming back to the idea that she was alive. What better way to hide the head of illegal research than to fake her death? Everything fit. Suddenly Zentas having ordered the use of the sonic tech made sense. He hadn’t killed his daughter, he’d hidden her. From there, it only took me a short leap to get to Zentas and Redstone faking their estrangement.

  Now I just had to convince Oxendine to let me take a mission out to examine the signal Ganos had found. I sure as hell couldn’t tell the commanding general that I expected to find the subject of my investigation alive. Authority or not, she’d have me committed. The problem was, to talk about the signal itself, I had to tell Oxendine how we got it, and Ganos’s endeavors were already a sore subject.

  Surprisingly, Oxendine agreed without much coaxing. She got more caught up in her own failure of intelligence and that she didn’t know about the location until I told her. On top of that, she’d failed to catch her internal traitor, and that bothered her more than she would say. They’d traced the hack to a contractor named Alexandra Trine, but not until Trine had apparently been tipped off and disappeared. That someone could disappear in such a small, well-monitored area belied belief, and it hung a stain on the fabric of Oxendine’s command. Part of me wondered if we’d find the hacker on our mission to what we now called the facility.

  What Oxendine didn’t agree to was Mac and I going along on the mission. She flat out refused when I first brought it up, rightfully claiming that it was a mission for soldiers and that I wasn’t one anymore. When I pulled rank via my orders, she then shifted to the argument that it should be a contiguous unit, not something cobbled together with out-of-practice old men, which was again, a legitimate argument, even if it was a little bit of a personal shot. But I didn’t give in. I wanted into that dome, and I couldn’t have stayed away from it if my life depended on it. Chalk up another issue for my therapist at a later date.

  After Oxendine finally relented, I had to deal with Fader. She insisted on going along with us, and this time it was my turn to flat out refuse. She was a very competent officer, but there are outdoor cats and indoor cats, and she was the latter. She’s not a combat soldier. It seems like an arbitrary distinction, but it’s not. She’d had the basic training, the same as any officer, but her assignments had been on staff, mostly because she excelled at it. I put my foot down . . . until she made me move it. She played dirty. She told me that the only reason why she’d agreed to the mission in the first place was to learn from me, and what better way to learn? And then she said that if I held her back in this, I was breaking the unwritten contract between us—the one where she did whatever she could to help me be successful and I helped her develop into a better officer.

  As well as I’d done negotiating with Oxendine, with Fader, I never had a chance.

  Ganos was easier. When Mac told her what we were doing, her exact response was, “You assholes have fun with that.” I did have a job for her though. We’d been hacked the last time we ventured forth from the relative safety of the dome, and I wanted her to prevent that from happening again. The army would be more aware of it, and Trine had fled, but having Ganos monitor it in real time—and counter it if needed—would make me feel a lot better. She couldn’t defend us—apparently that’s not how it works—but she could look for someone breaking in and go after them. Convincing Oxendine to let Ganos on the net took another half hour, and I only won the concession that she could patch into a single vehicle—the one I rode in—and even then, only from an outside system. But Ganos said she could make it work, and when it came to computers, I trusted her over anybody.

  Then the governor got involved.

  How he got involved, I didn’t know. Oxendine didn’t clear missions through him, or even report them. But he called Oxendine directly and told her to shut the mission down. According to her, he’d never contacted her directly before. Once he did, she had no real choice. She was pissed—she made that clear enough, slamming around her office and cursing—but the current environment gave him that authority. She could push back by sending it up channels, but that would have to go off planet, and neither of us thought we’d get a quick response.

  I considered going to the governor’s office. I could have bullied him into the mission by threatening to message the president’s office and say that the governor was hindering my mission. He’d have folded like a T-shirt on laundry day.

  But I couldn’t. Not with Davidson and all the other leaks in his organization there. Caliber would know my mission before I even got out the door, and anything I hoped to find in the not-so-abandoned dome would be gone before I got there.

  So I pulled rank.

  Oxendine drafted an order on my authority from the president’s office telling her to ignore the governor’s protest. A pure cover-your-ass job, but whatever worked. Meanwhile, Oxendine loudly and publicly ordered the mission delayed and continued to hound the governor to approve it, knowing he wouldn’t. If we didn’t push back, he—or more likely Davidson—would get suspicious. Meanwhile, we secretly moved the mission timeline up. While the governor basked in his victory, we’d already be on target.

  It did beg another question though. Why had he said no? It could have been his natural opposition to anything Oxendine wanted, but I doubted it. Davidson had worked in mining, and mining meant Caliber. In my mind, Caliber wanted our mission stopped.

  I really wanted to see what was in that dome.

  Oxendine’s team fitted us with gear. We’d brought our own, but they had body armor integrated with modifications for the environment that we didn’t. The chest and back plates nestled into a carrier with a wide strap that slung across each shoulder, and the molded arm and leg protectors fit into Velcro-sealed pockets in the environmental suit itself. They offered weapons too, but Mac, Fader, and I still carried our civilian versions of the Bitch. They were just as good—if not better—and we had them sighted the way we wanted them. I did check the platoon’s basic loads of ammunition—they had explosive rounds this time.

  We loaded into ten vehicles, which was probably overkill for the mission, but sometimes overkill is good business. We split into two platoons of five vehicles each—thirty dismounted soldiers per platoon, along with three for each vehicle crew. We’d approach the objective from two directions. My team had the front, under the command of a lieutenant named Yoon, who came with Oxendine’s personal assurance that he was one of her best. The other platoon, under the command of Lieutenant Peretz, would circle around to prevent people from leaking out the back side. We’d flush people out, and Peretz and her platoon would round them up.

  I had by far the most experience on the mission, but I’d agreed to defer to the traditional leadership. I could always take charge on the scene, depending on what we found inside the facility if I found it necessary. I’d envisioned all sorts of things we might find in the dome and had a mental list of how I’d approach each one, right down to what I might say if we came across certain people.

  The other platoon had the longer route, so they departed first. The vegetation kept us bound to the roads and trails for the most part, which wasn’t ideal. But we had no choice—we couldn’t walk that distance. We made up for it with firepower. Each of the five vehicles had a heavy mounted weapon on top—three pulse and two project
ile in our platoon. The big vehicle-mounted pulse weapons beat their handheld counterparts, mostly because they could draw on the power plant of the vehicle. They’d blow human-sized holes in a cinderblock wall. Or melt a hole in a dome.

  Fader loaded into the third vehicle in our convoy while Mac and I rode in the fourth, sitting across from each other with four other soldiers. We didn’t talk. We didn’t need to. He and I had been down similar roads before together, and we both had different objectives on our minds. I fingered the card that I carried in my pocket. I hadn’t done that in a long time. It had the names of every soldier who’d died under my command and each one since I’d left command that I held myself responsible for. Gutierrez was the most recent on the list. She’d died back on Cappa when a bomb went off that someone meant for me. I didn’t take responsibility for the bullshit that went down more recently on Zeta Four. Somebody else owned that. Farric I still had to process fully.

  The thrum of the vehicle relaxed me, and I found myself almost dozing. We had the video feed from outside piped into the back with us, so I could follow along, but it showed a wall of green. We had about an hour drive to the drop point, and for the first forty minutes or so we traveled roads and paths that the soldiers had traveled before.

  The vehicle jostled and my belts dug into my body as we hit a stretch of rough road about five kilometers from our release point. We slowed almost to walking speed as we transitioned onto a half-kilometer stretch that resembled a dry stream bed more than a road. The bad road made sense. They couldn’t have a new road leading to an abandoned facility without painting an open for business sign on their foreheads.

  An explosion rocked the vehicle and jolted me fully awake.

  “Holy shit,” someone said on the intercom. “That was big.”

  Big and close, judging from the sound and pressure wave. I started to key my mic to ask what happened when the radio burst to life with chatter.