Colonyside

by Michael Mammay

  “Yes, I would. Doing something important for the galaxy and turning a profit aren’t mutually exclusive. The population growth in the galaxy is expanding at an unsustainable rate for the livable planets we have. Smart people can see that. We’ve got a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty years before it’s a real problem. And that’s including putting a billion new people on Ridia Two. Poor bastards.”

  “Someone will stop you.” Even I knew that sounded weak.

  “Who? Politicians? I doubt it. Nobody running for office looks more than a few years into the future, and they don’t look more than a month into the past.”

  There was a hole in his plan . . . There always is. But I needed time to find it, and to do that, it was time to make him work to get me on board. “So what do you need from me? Just murder a bunch of hominiverts?”

  “They’re animals. It’s not murder.”

  I shook my head, hesitated for a few seconds, looking down, pretending to be conflicted. In truth, I had nothing to lose. If people learned of my involvement, it would tarnish my reputation, but they couldn’t really tarnish something I’d already blown to pieces years ago. I glanced at Zentas, who smiled. He knew he held a winning hand. He could afford to be gracious. “Can I have some time to think about it?”

  “I told you before I’m not used to waiting. But for some reason, I feel magnanimous around you. So, yes. Absolutely. Take a day. I’m on a twenty-year timeline. I’m not going to worry over a question of what day of the week we start.”

  That worked for me. It gave Fader and the team time to get off the planet, and it gave me time to think about how to best position myself to ruin his plans. I gestured at Karlsson. “Am I a prisoner, or a guest?”

  “As much as I’d like to say that you’re a guest, I’m not letting you have free run of the place. So, I’m afraid it’s the cell for now.”

  “I understand.” I did. He wasn’t an idiot. “Can a guy at least get a drink?”

  “Of course.” He turned to Karlsson. “Get Colonel Butler some whiskey. Something good.” Turning back to me, he asked, “Is there anything else we can do for you while you make your decision?”

  “I really hate being alone. I think I’d be more comfortable if Ms. Eddleston was in the cell next to me.” Of course that wouldn’t happen, but I got to watch Eddleston’s face as she debated whether her boss would do that to her or not.

  Zentas smiled, taking it for the joke I mostly intended. “I think I’ll keep her out here and working.”

  “It was worth a shot.” She’d set me up. I’d let them think I was over it.

  I wasn’t.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  After a few drinks and a night of thinking about it, I had to admit that Zentas had played me perfectly. He’d appealed to my weaknesses to get me to the planet, and he’d shown me a false trail once I got here to drag me in deeper. I jumped right into the trap, and now he had me in a tough spot. He didn’t need me. People knew I’d come to Eccasis, and if something happened to me, nobody would refute his story that I was involved with his twisted plan. Someone like Fader could protest, say that I wouldn’t have gone down that path, but my history and the power of Zentas’s propaganda machine would wash over that like the tide on a multi-moon planet. To be sure, he’d manipulated politicians and military leaders as well. They might be mad about it, but his money and their potential complicity made it unlikely that they’d make public waves.

  All in all, it didn’t look good for me, but in a weird way, that helped. Zentas wouldn’t trust me—of course he wouldn’t—but I needed him to be confident. If he didn’t believe he had me under control, he wouldn’t take risks. The only way to beat someone in a big pot is for them to think that they’re going to win it. I didn’t know if I could exploit that, but I would sure as shit try.

  I started with the man who brought me breakfast. He wasn’t dressed like a guard, but he didn’t have a badge with his job title, so I couldn’t be sure. The tray he carried was loaded with too much food—bacon and eggs and biscuits and potatoes. No gravy, but it didn’t seem like the right time to complain about the menu. I tried a different line. “Is there any word on whether my team made it off of the planet or not?”

  “I’m not sure, sir.” He met my eyes, and while I didn’t know him, I’d have bet on him honestly not knowing.

  “Any way you can ask someone for me? I understand it’s probably above your authority level to find out and tell me yourself—I’m not trying to get you in trouble here.”

  “I’ll pass the message. Yes, sir.”

  “Thanks. What’s your name?”

  “Hanson.”

  “Thanks, Hanson.” Hanson probably wasn’t the right guy, but I didn’t care. I’d try everybody I met until I found someone I could use. Yes, that probably makes me a bad person. Whatever. It’s what I do. I manipulate people. And this time I was pretty sure I was doing it for the right cause. I’d been manipulated too. But unlike last time, I knew it and could try to do something about it.

  Maybe a couple hours later, Eddleston came to see me. I say maybe because I still didn’t have any real way to tell time. They’d turned the lights off for me to sleep, then turned them back on at what I assumed was morning. I also assumed they would bring me lunch, which hadn’t happened yet.

  “Hanson relayed your question.”

  “And?”

  “They’ve shuttled up to a larger ship, but it hasn’t departed yet.”

  “Good.” I could let them know my feelings about that. If they’d wanted to make a play for my team as hostages, they’d have never allowed them to get on that shuttle. Mac wouldn’t have sent the report yet, but he’d do it before he went into cryo. Soon. But I doubted that would bring a swarm of soldiers to save me. I certainly couldn’t rely on it. If I wanted to stop this, I’d have to do it myself. “You can tell your boss that I’ve made my decision, and I’ll share it once they are safely on their way.” I was playing dumb on purpose. Whether they left or not didn’t matter. They could be seized just as easily at the opposite end of the trip, where they’d be in cryo and nearly helpless. But maybe someone on the other side would see me tying my already made decision to their departure as a mistake. I didn’t know what that might accomplish, but any misinformation I could seed was good.

  “I’ll pass that on to him. And I’ll be back for your decision once I have confirmation of the ship leaving orbit.”

  Lunch came and went, and Eddleston hadn’t returned. Hanson didn’t bring my meal, and the woman who did wouldn’t respond to me in any way. I didn’t know if my captors had made a deliberate change or if she just happened to be antisocial. Maybe she just hated me personally. I did have that effect sometimes.

  Eddleston finally showed around dinnertime. I was lying on my bed and didn’t get up. I didn’t want to look too eager. “The ship has left orbit, headed for Talca Four.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate the information.”

  “Care to share your decision?”

  “I’d be happy to. Is Mr. Zentas available?”

  “He’s not presently on the base, no. You can share it with me. I assure you that I’ll relay it.”

  I pretended to consider it, lying there without looking at her. Unlike Hanson, whom I’d wanted to befriend, I wanted Eddleston to question our relationship. I thought her more likely to help me if she thought it would advance her standing with Zentas. She didn’t care about me. She cared about her next promotion. I had to position myself in a way that made that promotion more likely if she helped me. I had some leverage. If I forced Zentas to come and take my statement personally, it would show Eddleston as unable to get the job done and she’d lose face. She’d lose the power of being my go-between. The question was, what would she be willing to do to avoid that? I let the silence hang for maybe fifteen seconds. “Sure, I can tell you. As long as you agree to deliver the context as well as the answer. Plus, I want you to answer a question.”

  “Of course.” If my delay or condi
tions perturbed her, it didn’t come across in her voice.

  I levered myself to a sitting position and flipped my legs over the side of the bed. I wanted to watch her as we spoke. I’d come up with the seed of an idea that might screw up the mission, and I had to see her reaction. “I’ll agree to help with the mission, but only as a means to minimizing casualties—both human and hominivert. And I want to be directly involved in how we do that. It’s not that I don’t trust you . . . well, yeah, actually, it’s exactly that.”

  She remained businesslike and didn’t give me anything I could use as she made a note in her device. “That’s it? No demand to be allowed to roam free? To see the plan?”

  “I’m not naïve. I know that’s off the table. But the casualties . . . I feel like we can work together on that. Zentas and I.” I threw the last bit in as a dig. She didn’t react, but hopefully it hit her on the inside.

  “Any specifics on that?”

  I smiled, tipping off my joke. “Well, I’ll need to see the plan.”

  She laughed. Good.

  “Seriously, though, I think that we can choose the outer domes that get hit and save a lot of lives without losing the effect Zentas is looking for.” I gave her that one for free. I expected her to take it to her boss as her own idea and to try to get credit for it.

  She made her note. “In case he follows up, what are some of the things we might look for?”

  I answered without hesitating, pretending her question was innocuous, so she might think she got something out of me. “We can look which ones have the lowest staffing. We can time the attacks to off-shift hours and reduce casualties that way.”

  Her face lit, a slight crack in her previously unreadable demeanor. She covered it quickly, but it had happened. “I’ll pass along your decision, as well as your suggestion. We’ll see what the boss thinks. Now, you said you had a question?”

  “I did. I’m just curious, really. The hacker working from inside the military—Alexandra Trine—I assume she was yours?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. We had someone working undercover, but they didn’t read me in on that. I didn’t have need-to-know.”

  “Is she working here?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they got her off planet once she finished her mission.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate your honesty.”

  I hated waiting. I’d played my hand with Eddleston, but I had no way to see the result until she returned. I ended up dozing off after dinner, which proved to be a bad idea because I woke with the lights out and then couldn’t go back to sleep. Alone in a cell at night, my mind couldn’t help but wander to all the ways this could go wrong or how I could be misreading the situation. Tonight’s special angst included a continuous thought that a politician or someone like Serata was working with Zentas. Eddleston had fooled me. Who else had? Oxendine? My rational side doubted it, but my rational side didn’t have control. I still had part of the bottle Zentas’s man had provided, but I’d been trying to stay mostly sober. I had no idea when Eddleston would return, and I wanted a clear head. After a couple of hours—or what felt like a couple of hours—I gave in and poured myself a heavy double.

  Eddleston returned the next morning while I was eating my breakfast. Hanson had brought it, but I’d given up on him as a target. Eddleston jumped straight to the point. “Mr. Zentas appreciated that you saw reason. He was less receptive to your suggestions on the bases. He believes that a certain number of casualties are necessary to put—and this is a quote—‘a human face on the tragedy.’”

  I hadn’t expected he’d acquiesce immediately. I’d keep working at it. My first goal was to stop the entire plan, but if I couldn’t do that, I at least wanted casualties as low as possible. “Hmmm. And what do you think?”

  “I think he’s the boss, and if that’s his plan, we don’t have a lot of room to work. Your help was predicated on limiting casualties. I can no longer promise that.”

  I appreciated her candor, and her implication that we had a deal and she’d stick to her side of it. “There’s still room to work together on this. He says we need some casualties. Unless he’s got a specific number, we’re still negotiating. I’d argue that fewer could be better, as long as you got the right people.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “As you said, he’s the boss, so it’s important that we acknowledge his goal and show that we’re working toward it. He wants a human face on things, and I agree that casualties would do that. But what’s more human than a survivor?”

  She nodded, though I’m not sure she meant to. “Survivors. That could work.”

  “We’d need somebody with a good story. Somebody photogenic, but not too slick. Somebody with kids. Maybe a combination. Someone they can plaster all over the news.”

  “We plant an actor?” She sounded eager.

  “No way. That might work well at the beginning, but when the truth about it came out, it would undermine the entire effort. We do our research, find the person—or better yet, people, so there are multiple options—and time the attacks so they are on duty. Then we make sure they survive. The press handles the rest.”

  “I’ll tell you right now, Mr. Zentas won’t want to leave it up to chance, and he’ll reject any solution that does.”

  “He’s got influence with the press. It’s hardly chance if you control all the variables.”

  She made a note. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t trust you. You’re not going to make me believe that you’re on board with this.”

  “I’m on board with minimizing casualties.” She couldn’t possibly detect a lie in that, because I spoke truth. If I lied, she’d shut down on me. But I kept my real reason to myself.

  To make sure that Zentas went down.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Eddleston and I kept going like that throughout the day and into the next. Zentas seemed genuine in his statement that we weren’t in a rush, and while I didn’t see him, Eddleston assured me every time she came that our planning pleased him. That Zentas didn’t seem to be on base seemed odd. He wouldn’t be in the main dome during the attack. Or maybe he would. That would give him the ultimate alibi, after all. Did he have the guts to put himself at risk like that? I suppose foreknowledge and preparation lessened the danger. I wanted to know his planned location during the mission, and to learn that, I needed to communicate outside of my little prison.

  That became my objective when Eddleston showed up after breakfast.

  She had a canvas bag with her, much like she’d had the previous day, when she’d brought me new clothes. “More clothes,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “How did it go with the boss?”

  “I think we’ve got the bases selected, and we’re working on the timing. It’s a lot of work, sifting through all the schedules to select the ones with minimal staffing.” She opened the door with her palm and a seven-digit code and handed me the bag. That she felt safe enough to do that meant that she still didn’t see me as a threat. That gave me a last-ditch option if I couldn’t change Zentas’s plan into something I could stomach. I could probably disable Eddleston and mess some stuff up around the base before they got me.

  “Sure. There are—what, thirty thousand people colonyside? It’s not like you can put this into a public search engine. How are we doing on casualties?” I asked.

  “We’re projecting between nine and fourteen right now. One of the most logical targets never has fewer than six, even on the shortest shift.”

  “That’s still too many,” I said.

  “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Look, I’m working for you. You get in there and work for me. Get that base taken off the list.”

  “There’s no way. It’s right in the path, and a diversion around it would take too much work.”

  “So don’t sabotage that one.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “The domes aren’t at much risk unless we give the ’verts a way i
n, right? So don’t give them a way into that one. Let them flow around it.”

  “I’m not sure he’ll buy that.”

  “Try,” I said.

  She sighed. “Fine. But right now, we’ve got another issue to work through. We’re trying to figure out how to stop this whole thing once it’s going full bore. Mr. Zentas wants the horde to get within five hundred meters of one of the heavily staffed domes. The problem is, once we get them that close, we lose the ability to destroy them without risking blowing up the dome too.”

  “Yeah. There’s a reason we don’t turn missiles and bots loose on colonized planets.” Imagine that.

  “He’s not going to back off of that requirement, so if we don’t figure something out and the ’verts do breach that dome, we could be looking at a tenfold increase in casualties.” She stared me down, and I began to wonder who was manipulating whom. I hoped my attempts weren’t quite so ham fisted as hers.

  “I’m sure Zentas has former officers on his staff who can figure this out.”

  “I’m sure he does. But are they as good as you?”

  Probably. “I don’t know.”

  “More accurately, are they as motivated as you to save lives?” She had me there. But it also gave me an opportunity.

  “What weapons do we have in the inventory? There are at least seventy variations of war-bots. I’ll need the specs.” Murder aside, it posed an interesting problem. The bots weren’t built to do close defense of a settlement, but a lot of military gear did stuff the designers hadn’t planned for once you put it in the hands of innovative soldiers. I’d once watched a soldier heat her soup on the engine of a ground-support aircraft.

  Eddleston thought about it a moment. “I’ll get you a briefing on the arsenal.”

  “We’ve also got to figure out how we deploy it. We can’t position the bots ahead of time. It would spoil the story. I’ll need to know ships and other delivery assets. Plus, platforms that fire missiles. Everything we use will have to be mobile if we want to make it look like we reacted after the threat materialized.”