About forty minutes into our march, we located a paved road that ran through the woods—a highway leading to town. There were no signs of cars. The police had probably closed the highway to assist with our invasion. Shannon divided the platoon into two squads, which he marched on either side of the road.
“Harris, over here,” Shannon called, as we marched.
I trotted to the front of the formation, sloshing through the damp pine needles and kicking up mud. Shannon had left the rest of the platoon and stood on a small ridge surrounded by a particularly dense growth of trees.
“Harris, what do you see in that stand of trees?” he asked, pointing straight ahead with his rifle.
The pocket of trees looked unremarkable. I used my heat-vision lens to see if someone was hiding in the brush. Nothing. Magnifying the view made no difference. “Trees,” I said, sounding confused.
“Ever patrol a wooded area?” Shannon asked.
“Only as a cadet,” I said.
“There’s a trapdoor between those trees,” he said. “See it?”
I used every lens in my helmet. “No, Sergeant,” I said, beginning to wonder if he was playing with me.
“Stop looking for it. Listen for it. Use your sonar locator.”
The locator was a device in our visors that emitted an ultrasonic “ping,” then read the way that the ping bounced off objects and surfaces.
Using optical commands, I brought up the locator. A transparent green arc swished across my visor. In its wake, I saw four lines cut into the ground beneath a tree.
“Come here, Harris,” Shannon said. He walked toward the door. As I followed, my sonar locator made a new reading, marking an oblong cavity beneath the ground in translucent green. “Damn,” I whispered. “I never would have thought about a locator sweep.”
“It’s called a snake shaft,” Shannon said. “You have any idea what it’s used for?”
“No,” I said.
“Neither does anybody else,” Shannon said. “They’re what you might call an anomaly. Let’s go in for a closer look.”
Sergeant Shannon pulled a grenade from his belt and set it for low yield. “Fire in the hole,” he yelled as he tossed it into the trees. The grenade exploded with a muffled thud. When the steam cleared, I saw that he had blown a ten-foot hole in the top of the tunnel. Water poured down it as if it were a drain.
I stepped in for a closer look. It was so dark that even with my night-for-day vision, I could not see the bottom. “Who builds these?”
Shannon came over to me. “Mogats, I suppose. Nobody knows for sure. We found them during a battle in the Galactic Eye. That was the first time anybody saw them, I think.”
I looked up from the hole and stared at Sergeant Shannon. Had Shannon let that slip, or was he trying to tell me he was a Liberator?
“They can stretch on for miles, and they’re strong. I’ve seen LG tanks park right on top of one of these snake shafts and not dent the roof.” LG tanks were low-gravity combat tanks—units that ran low to the ground and weighed in at as much as a hundred tons. “We used to dare each other to hide in the shaft while a tank ran over it. Far as I know, no one ever died doing it.”
I stared down into that gaping black maw and watched water pour into it. “Should we check it?” I asked.
“You want to go down in there?” Shannon asked. He did not wait for me to answer. “Me either. I’ll have a tech send a probe through it later. Might be something down there. Sometimes they’re rigged to blow up.
“I want you and Lee to go scout the area for more of them. Make me a map.” With that, Shannon returned to the platoon.
It took several hours to scour the area. Our search turned up eleven more snake shafts. Lee and I caught up with the platoon at Hero’s Fall. I needed sleep, but that was not about to happen. Captain McKay and Sergeant Shannon hailed us. “Harris, Lee . . . Glad you could join us.”
“We just got here, Sergeant,” Lee said.
Across the camp, the platoons had already begun to assemble. I could see ranks forming. “Follow me,” McKay said as he started toward the camp.
We set up camp in a large meadow just outside of town. By that time, the rain and wind had stopped. A pervasive stillness echoed across the grounds. The sun rose over the trees, and the wet grass sparkled.
Three Harriers and a civilian shuttle flew in from the west. The fighters formed a tight wedge and circled low in the air as the shuttle touched down. Once the shuttle landed, the fighters thundered over the city’s edge and vanished behind a line of buildings.
Captain McKay called the two platoons he commanded to attention. When we were in place, the shuttle’s hatch opened. Out stepped Captain Olivera, looking tall, gaunt, and dapper in his Naval whites. Behind Olivera came Vice Admiral Barry, the rather bell-shaped commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Olivera and Barry met with McKay at the bottom of the ramp, and the three of them held a brief conversation. A few moments later, another officer disembarked, one whom I had not expected to see. Wearing a white uniform that seemed tailored to fit his skeletal frame, Admiral Klyber strode off the shuttle with what I would later learn was his distinctive long gait.
Klyber stood at least three inches taller than Olivera—the tallest of the other officers. Pudgy little Barry barely came up to Klyber’s neck. Klyber conferred with Barry, asked McKay a question, and the entire party ambled forward.
“Let’s have a look at the ranks, shall we?” Klyber said in a comfortable voice, but he paid little attention to the rows of Marines as he walked by. “Have you encountered any resistance?” Klyber asked.
“No, sir,” McKay replied.
“No one challenged the air wings, either?” Klyber asked.
“No, sir,” said Olivera.
“Have you found evidence of terrorist activity?” Klyber asked.
“One of my platoons sighted a large tunnel just west of town,” McKay answered. “It was over three miles long.”
“A three-mile-long snake shaft?” Klyber asked. “Religious fanatics, mobsters, racial segregationists . . . It’s getting hard to tell the riffraff apart. I understand the Mogats have a large presence on Ezer Kri. Are your men prepared to lay down the law?”
“Yes, sir,” said McKay.
“Then we have little to worry about, Captain,” Klyber said, sweeping his gaze over the ranks. “This seems like a very pleasant planet; let’s hope our stay is uneventful. Admiral Barry, I wish to conclude our tour of Ezer Kri within the month.”
The name of the city appeared as “Hero’s Fall” in our orders and in the mediaLink accounts of our operation, but as usual, we were misinformed. The local signage said “Hiro’s Fall.” Apparently the city was named after Takuhiro Yatagei, “Hiro” for short, the planet administrator who stocked the planet with people of Japanese descent. This was the spot where he and the original colonists landed—in legend talk, they “fell from the sky.”
Searching for “riffraff ” in Hiro’s Fall proved to be problematic. The bureaucratic tangles began the first day. The mayor of Hiro’s Fall complained to Governor Yamashiro, and Yamashiro formally inquired of the Senate if the Unified Authority was declaring “martial law” on Ezer Kri. The historic reference did not go unnoticed.
I wish we had declared Martial Law. I wish we had launched a full-scale invasion. Enemies do not demand their rights when you bully them, citizens do. Several shopkeepers refused to allow us to inspect their businesses. The president of a car manufacturer called his congressman in DC when Captain McKay sent an inspection team to visit his plant. The Hiro’s Fall police department even arrested one of our fire teams for assaulting a local resident. When the police discovered that the victim was a burglar caught in the act, they let the squad go with a warning.
None of this should have mattered, but the more we scratched the surface, the more we found evidence of deeply rooted corruption. An inspection of the port authority logs showed that the local police ignored smugglers. The Senate’s problem might have
been with the Japanese population of Ezer Kri, but the problem in this town was a Mogat infestation. The Mogat community had become so deeply rooted in Hiro’s Fall that people referred to one of the western suburbs as the “Mogat district.”
I had read more than a few stories about Mogats since taking Aleg Oberland’s advice about following current events. The Mogats were a religious cult that took its name from Morgan Atkins, a mysterious and charismatic man who vanished about fifty years ago. I did not know anything about Atkins himself, and the only thing I knew about his movement was that it was the first religion created in space.
The U.A. government promoted Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These churches had holy sites on Earth, and the government encouraged any activity that strengthened ties between frontier planets and Earth.
Atkins’s beliefs were pangalactic. His preaching stressed independence, stopping just shy of outright rebellion. While the U.A. Constitution called for general freedom of religion, the Senate spun out a litany of obtuse laws designed to discourage Mogat expansion. The laws did not succeed. Protected by the courts, Mogat communes sprang like daisies across the frontier. News stories about the Mogat movement inevitably started with accusations about smuggling and ended with warnings about Mogat proselytizing and predictions that Atkinism would one day be the largest religion in the galaxy.
No matter what we found, Barry and Klyber seemed unwilling to do more than patrol the streets. We sent platoons on routine patrols through the Mogat district—an industrial area lined with warehouses and factories. We sent “peacekeeping” missions to monitor spaceports. Klyber wanted to make our presence felt without creating confrontations. His strategy worked. Most of the residents of Hiro’s Fall resented our presence. We made ourselves hard to ignore.
I did not mind patrolling Hiro’s Fall, though it was fairly dull work. The town was not especially picturesque, but you could see the Japanese influence everywhere. A few downtown parks had pagodas with rice paper walls and fluted roofs. The canal running through the center of town was teeming with gold and white koi. Less than 30 percent of Hiro’s Fall was Japanese; but if you were in the right part of town, you might see women dressed in orange-and-red kimonos. My sightseeing ended when the shooting began.
We began sending routine patrols into the Mogat district the night after we landed. These patrols were uneventful. We would hike past warehouses, steel foundries, and gas stations. Workmen stopped and stared at us. There was no way of knowing if these people were Atkins believers, though I suppose most of them were. One thing I noticed during a patrol was that few people in the Mogat district were Japanese.
Seven days after we landed on Ezer Kri, Staff Sergeant Ron Azor led the Twenty-fifth Platoon into the Mogat district for a late-morning patrol. The goal was to follow a random path, marching through alleys and small streets as well as main roads. Azor’s path, however, was reckless.
Our combat helmets were designed for standard battlefield situations. They offered good visibility in most situations, but anything above a seventy-degree plane was a blind spot. Whoever planned the attack must have known that.
Azor opened his platoon up for an ambush by marching through a labyrinth of tall buildings and narrow alleyways. A four-story cinder-block building lined their final stretch. Walking beside that building, Azor’s platoon had no hope of spotting the enemy that watched from above.
Just as the platoon reached the middle of the block, somebody fired two rockets from the roof of the building. Four men died instantly. Gunmen, hiding behind a ledge, picked off three more men as the platoon dashed across the street for cover.
Desperate to regroup, Azor shot the door off a warehouse. He and his men ducked in and radioed for assistance. Moments later, three rockets slammed into the warehouse. The corrugated steel walls blew apart as did a fuel pump inside the building. No one survived.
I was off duty when Shannon burst into the barracks and announced the attack. Every available man was called in. I threw on my armor and climbed into a truck. As we drove from the camp, I looked into a blue sky filled with feathery clouds, wondering how there could be an attack on such a beautiful day.
I asked that question again as the truck dropped us next to the pile of rubble that had once been a thirty-foot-tall warehouse. Twisted fingers of what once was a wall stood in the corners of the lot; everything else had crumbled. We were the third platoon to arrive on the scene. Men in green armor dotted the rubble. Shannon led us to a corner of the ruins, and we began pulling up metal sheets and concrete chunks by hand. I felt the urgency, but I knew that we would not find survivors. No one survives that kind of devastation.
I heard the thudding engines of gunships passing overhead. Long and squat and bulky, three Warthogs floated across the sky. They hardly looked airworthy, but there was something menacing about the deliberate way they scoured the rooftops.
The tension was thick. Had a pedestrian carelessly strolled down the street, we might have shot first and asked questions later. But the streets were empty. Perhaps they had been empty before the ambush as well. I wondered how many people knew that the ambush was coming.
“Dig,” Shannon shouted over the interLink. “Any man who finds a survivor gets a three-day pass.”
We normally would have located the bodies by looking for signals from their helmets, but the heat of the explosion must have destroyed their equipment. There were no signals, so we dug blindly through concrete, iron, and dust. As time went on, hope dwindled, and the rescue effort became less organized.
City engineers arrived on the scene with laser arcs that could cut through concrete and iron alike. With their help, we located twelve crushed bodies and the search became even more discouraging. Judging by the way the bodies were laid out, Azor must have told his men to spread out along the outer wall once they entered the warehouse. Perhaps they thought they needed to guard the windows and doors.
Sergeant Shannon came to check on me. He cursed softly when I mentioned my theory about the way the bodies were spread. “Fool,” he said, yanking a metal sheet from under concrete so violently that it tore. “Clone idiot! The enemy shoots rockets at you, so what do you do? You don’t hide in a fuel dump. Goddamn it!”
As Shannon spoke, a formation of fighters flew over us. Even though we were wearing helmets and speaking over the interLink, the noise of the fighters drowned out his voice. When they streaked away, I heard Shannon say, “So much for passive force. Klyber is going to make an example of friggin’ Ezer Kri.”
We did not find all of the bodies. In the early evening, as the sun set and a thick layer of clouds filled the sky, Captain Olivera spoke to us on an open interLink. “An entire platoon has perished here,” the captain of the Kamehameha began.
As he spoke, three Harriers cruised low overhead—less than fifty feet off the ground. They rotated in perfect unison and banked as they made a hairpin turn. Perched on two crumbling piles of rock, I watched them. Suddenly the middle fighter in the formation exploded and dropped out of the sky. It landed in a heap of smoke and flames. Looking quickly, I saw a contrail leading from a nearby rooftop. Someone had sneaked up there and fired a missile. The two remaining Harriers broke out of formation.
“Spread out! Take cover!” Shannon yelled.
The Harriers zipped around a building, then charged back to the battle zone. Crouching, with my rifle drawn, I watched the roof from behind the knee-high remains of a concrete wall. No more shots were fired. Whoever hit that Harrier had slipped away after making his point.
CHAPTER EIGHT
What leads men to make such foolish decisions? Admiral Klyber could never have touched the Mogats of Ezer Kri had they lain low. The government did not trust them, but our bylaws protected them. The daily patrols would have continued. We might have raided some buildings. Perhaps they had something to hide, or perhaps their separatist beliefs prevented them from waiting us out. Whatever possessed those Atkins believers to ambush our platoon, they had seriously miscalculated.
Fanatics that they were, perhaps the Mogats thought they could take on the entire Scutum-Crux Fleet. But a few rockets and a massacred platoon did not intimidate Bryce Klyber. It irritated him. It showed him that the Ezer Kri government could not be relied upon.
With the Kamehameha at his command, Klyber had more than enough firepower to overwhelm Ezer Kri—a planet with a commerce-based economy and impressive engineering facilities but no standing army. Annihilating Ezer Kri would not have been enough for Klyber. He would have used Ezer Kri to send a message across the territories, and he would have made that message clear enough that every colony in the Republic would understand it.
The day of the massacre, the Kamehameha altered its orbit so that it flew over Hiro’s Fall. As it made its first pass, the ship opened fire, leveling the entire Mogat district. More than fifteen square miles were thoroughly pulverized. Whatever it was that the Mogats wanted to hide, the Kamehameha vaporized it in a flash of red lasers and white flames.
A few hours after the demonstration ended, Captain McKay sent several platoons to the area to inspect the damage and search for survivors. It was all theatrics, of course. The destruction was total; nobody could have survived it.
I did not recognize the scene when I hopped off the truck. The sun had not yet risen, and in the gray-blue light of my day-for-night lenses, the urban Mogat district looked like a desert. Lots that once held buildings now looked like rock gardens. The heat of the lasers had melted anything made of glass and metal. It incinerated wood, paper, and cloth into fine ash.
We strolled around the wreckage for nearly an hour, not even pretending to search for survivors. Klyber sent us so that the citizens of Hiro’s Fall would know that the U.A. Navy assumed responsibility for demolishing the offending district and that the U.A. Navy felt no regret.
“You see anything?” Vince Lee asked, as we walked over a sloping mound of pebbles that might have once been a factory.
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