by Rick Partlow
No one spoke. The eight of us sat around the table in the Situation Room silent, not even neurolinking, doing our best not to look each other in the eye for fear one of us would say something. Most of us, I knew, had not said a word to each other since we’d arrived on Hermes. Mat and Reggie had dropped Holly and Brian and Deke and I at the barren moon in the next system down the Transition Line from Demeter where we’d left our stealthships, and then we’d headed back to base separately. The twenty hours it had taken us to get to our ships had been the worst of my life.
Holly had screamed first, then tried to attack Mat---Deke and I had barely been able to restrain her---then cried uncontrollably. I’d held her for what seemed like hours as the sobs racked her, and I’d cried too. I hadn’t known Valeria that well, but Daniela had been a good friend in the Academy, even if we’d grown apart since the Thatcher. Deke and Brian had sat with her as well, for a while, then drifted off to be with Mat and I’d remained with Holly. She hadn’t said a word, just stayed in my arms, head buried in my shoulder long after we’d used up all our tears.
When the time had come to leave the ship, she’d kissed me and said “thank you.” Those had been the last words I’d heard till Major Huntington had met us in the hangar early that morning and told us to report to the Situation Room. Kel and Cowboy were already there, and it looked as if they’d been there a while. Cowboy had tried to say how sorry he was; none of the rest of us had responded with anything but a nod.
I don’t know who we’d thought we’d been waiting for, but it hadn’t been Admiral Krieger. He stepped into the room with a hesitance to his stride that I hadn’t seen when he’d stepped so confidently in front of us to tell us his brilliant plan to free Demeter. His dress whites seemed less spotless and bright to me now, and more like a funeral shroud. He stopped in front of the table, placing his hands on it to support himself.
“Let me begin,” he said, with a voice that seemed carefully controlled, “by telling all of you how very sorry I am for the loss of your friends. Captain Dominguez and Captain Vallejo are both heroes, and despite the secrecy of your unit, they will not be forgotten.”
I looked at him through narrowed eyes, untrusting. He was the type to always say the right thing, whether he meant it or not.
He straightened up, fingers working restlessly. He licked his lips and it reminded me too much of a lizard. “We’ve gone over the initial reports from Captain Savage and Captain West, but there's much they didn't witness first-hand.”
So, they had been here a while.
“There will be a formal investigation into exactly what went wrong, of course,” he went on, “and I’m certainly not here to point any fingers. But I did want to take this opportunity, while you were all together, to point out that there are doubtless many factors that none of you were in position to witness. That's why I wanted to make sure no one jumped to any conclusions..."
I could hear the stress indicators in his voice; my headcomp could detect the deception, the desperation. I felt my mouth curling into a sneer. I opened my mouth to say something that I knew would get me in trouble, but Mat spoke first.
"You just wanted," he rumbled like the warning growl of a grizzly bear, "to make sure we covered your ass well enough that none of the blood splashed back onto you. Sir."
I glanced back at Mat, eyes going wide. He was still seated, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. His face was as animated as I'd ever seen it, twisted with bitter anger.
"Major M'voba," Admiral Krieger seethed, slamming a fist down on the table, "you are out of line! Perhaps you think you can get away with speaking to a superior officer that way because your mother happens to be the Prime Minister of the Pan-African Federation..."
"Leave my family out of this," Mat snapped, coming to his feet with a scrap of chair legs on the bare, cement floor.
I felt my mouth drop open in disbelief. Mat's mother was the head of the Pan-African Federation? I wasn't an Earther, but even I knew that was the largest united collection of nations on the planet and that Miriam Ekpo, the Prime Minister, was one of the most powerful politicians in the Commonwealth. And Mat was her son?
What shocked me even more was that Holly and Reggie didn't seem surprised by it. Neither did Cowboy, strangely enough.
"You came here with a plan that included us," Mat went on hotly, "but which we had no say in constructing, without consulting us or Colonel Murdock despite knowing next to nothing about us. We did as we were ordered and carried it out, because we're soldiers and we do our duty." His shoulders were shaking now, and I didn't know if it was from emotion or from a concerted attempt to keep himself from killing Krieger. "Things went badly because your plan was shit, the stuff of children playing with war game simulators." A sneer. "You expected split second timing between three different operational elements, none of whom had the chance to rehearse or coordinate, and you got the only outcome possible." His lips split in a snarl that bared teeth. "This is not a fucking game, Admiral Krieger!"
Mat was shouting now and I rose in my seat, worried I'd have to try to restrain him.
"This isn't one of your simulations run on a computer!" Krieger was backing away as Mat came around the table and thundered down at him from several centimeters taller. "Your inflexibility and foolishness killed real people! Killed my friends! And now you have the balls to show your face here and talk about investigations and responsibility!"
"That will be enough, Major M'voba."
Nine sets of eyes snapped to the door, where Colonel Murdock stood as if he'd been there the whole time, face calmly neutral.
"Colonel!" Admiral Krieger exploded, his tone so much more aggressive than his stance as he seemed to retreat gratefully away from Mat, nearly running to the perceived protection of Murdock's presence. Once safely there, he jabbed a finger in Mat's direction, pale face turning beet red. "This man is insubordinate and undisciplined! I am going to file formal charges against him and you..."
"Shut up." Murdock's words were as flat and emotionless as his face, but they stopped Krieger in mid-rant, his face looking as if he'd been struck. "You're going to leave here and never come back, Admiral Krieger. If you ever mention the existence of this unit or this place to anyone, you'll be convicted of treason and slapped in a brig on the most remote asteroid in the Commonwealth until the war's over. If you don't believe me," Murdock preempted the protest forming on the Admiral's lips, "check your 'link. There's a Presidential order there to back me up."
Krieger goggled at him, disbelief in his expression. He looked for all the world like a man who'd taken a step down a ladder and found the next slat missing. He grabbed his 'link off his belt and fiddled with the screen, scrolling through until his hand fell away and his mouth curled into a sour grimace. His eyes darted back and forth over and over, like he was reading and re-reading the same message. Finally, he looked back up at Murdock with resentment in his eyes, and just maybe a little fear.
"I never meant to..." he began, but Murdock wouldn't let him finish.
"I know," the Colonel said. "I don't blame you for what happened, Admiral. But I still have to deal with the consequences and I need to do it without distractions. So, if you would be so kind..." He gestured towards the door.
Krieger nodded, seemingly grateful for a way out, then quickly left the room. Murdock watched him go, waiting, I thought, for him to reach the lift banks before he turned back to the rest of us.
"Sit down, Mat," he said gently, nodding back to the table.
Mat seemed a bit stunned, perhaps by his own words, but he moved back around the table and took a seat. Murdock sat on the edge of the table, looking down at his hands for a moment before he spoke again.
"You're all young," he said, finally, his tone quiet and gentle. "At your age, I'm sure you're concerned with who's to blame." He looked up, scanning us all with his clinical gaze. "Trust me, my children, there's enough blame to go around for this. There's the President, to start. He knows as little as poss
ible about us, doesn't want to know and for good reason. Yet he thought it was a good idea to override the one officer who does know about us, Admiral Sato, and listen to Krieger and his group when they demanded this operation.
"Then there was Admiral Sato, who decided that his career was more important than my advice and the lives of my people. And, of course, there's Admiral Krieger and his band of yes-man toadies, each more eager to sign off on their boss' idea than the last." He sighed. "Then there's me."
He stood up and faced us, hands by his side. "I could have...I should have threatened to resign if the decision wasn't reversed. I suppose I was afraid it would be accepted, but I should have done it anyway." The corner of his mouth turned up slightly. "I know you've reached your current rank through unusual circumstances, so let me be the first to tell you, this is not how things usually work in the military. There usually aren't explanations or apologies. You do your job, and if your friends die, well, that's the cost of doing business. But you aren't the regular military and things are different here."
His expression hardened and I got the distinct impression I wasn't going to like what I heard next. "Because this is also your fault," he declared, a bit of anger creeping into his tone for the first time. "You are not like any other military unit, and I made it clear that your number one priority in this mission was for all of you to come back alive from it. That didn't happen. And as much as Daniela and Valeria's deaths is a personal tragedy to each of you, to the Commonwealth war effort, it's a disaster on par with the loss of the Mars shipyards."
He paused to let that sink in, and sink in it did. I felt myself deflate inside as I remembered how I'd gone against our orders, gone to help the militia instead of heading for the extraction point. But...it had been the right thing to do, hadn't it?
"There were ten of you," Colonel Murdock said, eyes frosting up. "Ten of you in all the Commonwealth, in all the human race. Ten of you that we were counting on to make a difference against the Tahni, to break their spirit." He sucked in a breath, like a man who'd just felt a sharp pain. "Now there are eight." He shook his head, palms turning upward. "I get it, you're all young, you thought you were immortal before we turned you into super-soldiers."
My mouth was dry now and my gut was churning with anger. I wanted to be angry with him...but instead, I was enraged at myself.
"I hope this has driven home the lesson," Murdock finished up quietly, "that you are not."
He walked to the doorway, stopped there for a moment and looked back at us. "We'll have a memorial for the fallen tomorrow morning at 0800. You're off till then."
There was a long silence after he left the room, but Mat broke it by standing and facing us.
"This was my responsibility," he said, his words as heavy as lead, with the finality of a judge's gavel. "I was the commander on the ground. I should have..."
"Should have what?" Holly demanded, coming to her feet. She was so much shorter than Mat, but she somehow looked him in the eye. "Should have ordered Daniela and Valeria to abandon the wounded Marines? Do you think they'd have followed that order, Mat? Do you think any of us would have?"
He stared at her, eyes widening a little at her vehemence. She swung around to regard the rest of us. "I don't give a damn what Colonel Murdock says, we're all here because we wanted to protect innocent people. We're all here because we wouldn't give up when the odds were against us. Daniela and Valeria didn't die because any of us fucked up, they died trying to protect people, trying to save lives when the odds were against them." She stepped over to Mat and hugged him fiercely. He returned it with a thoughtful, slightly numb look on his face.
"That's the lesson I'm going to learn from this," she finished, walking out the door.
No one said anything for a beat after she left, but finally Deke turned to me, shrugging.
"I know it's like morning here," he said, "but you wanna' go find a drink?"
"Maybe later," I told him, shaking my head as I got up and stepped toward the exit myself. "I have to go finish something."
***
I'd never visited Jenna's work before. It was your run-of-the-mill office building on the outside, part of a block of them decorated in mid-23rd Century Government Drab and surrounded by a security fence that was, I knew, very well guarded by automatic defenses. You had to have special clearance to get through the gate in that fence, clearance not even I could get; but I'd called ahead and she was waiting for me just this side of it, doing wonderful things to a Fleet uniform, golden hair shining in the light of the primary.
When she noticed me coming up the walkway, she ran up to me and threw herself into my arms, kissing me so fiercely it took my breath away. I reveled in it, basking in her warmth and the warmth of Proxima shining in the cloudless sky. Life felt unbelievably sweet.
"I was worried about you," she told me, drawing away just a few centimeters. The smell of her hair was intoxicating.
"I know," I said, smiling despite everything. "Sorry to pull you away from your work..."
"We were just waiting for the mainframe to run some numbers," she said dismissively. "They don't need me around for that." She grinned at me churlishly. "As a matter of fact, I can probably get away with taking the rest of the day off."
"Do it," I told her without hesitation. "I don't have to be back on base till tomorrow morning." She laughed and kissed me again. I gave this one some serious attention and heard her purr when I broke away.
"Easy tiger," she whispered in my ear. "Wait till we get back to my place."
"How about our place?" I returned.
She blinked, uncomprehending.
"I thought you weren't allowed to live in town," she said.
"I'm not," I agreed. "Look, I know you like your apartment, but if you want...well, I got permission for you to move in with me on base." I raised my hands palms up, expecting a protest. "I know it'll mean a flitter ride to work and back instead of a walk, but..."
"Why?" Her look was playful, but her tone was challenging.
"Why what?" I asked, shaking my head.
"Why do you want to move in together?" She repeated.
I smiled, knowing the answer she wanted and ready to give it.
"Because I love you," I told her, and it felt so easy and right. "I think I've pretty much loved you since the first night I met you."
"I love you too, Cal," Jenna replied, a smile lighting up her face. "And yes, I'd like very much to move in with you. But what brought all this on?"
I tried not to let my smile fade, but I also tried to answer honestly. "I guess I've just been a bit too cautious," I admitted. "Last time I was in a relationship, it didn't work out so well."
"I get that," she told me, grabbing my hand and squeezing it. "Wait here for a few minutes, okay? I'll square things with my shift supervisor and be right out."
I watched her head back through the gate, hoping to hell I was doing the right thing. What if next time I didn't come back? I shook off the thought. I was, I knew, selling Jenna short. She was an adult with a mind of her own and she knew exactly what it was that I did. She didn't need my protection.
Chapter Nineteen
This felt wrong. I knew it had to be done, but I couldn't shake the simple fact that it felt wrong. I glanced over at Deke, wondering if he felt the same way, but all I saw was the featureless darkness of his hood. He was nearly invisible in the shadow of the sandstone hoodoo, hidden by the tendril-like fronds of the shrub growing from its base. I hoped I was just as hard to see, because we still had another standard hour before the primary sank beneath the horizon, and we weren't moving till then.
Below us, down the rugged, weathered cliff and across three kilometers of rocky, sandy flats, was the shrine. Or maybe temple was a better word? The cultural translators weren't sure; they just knew it was some sort of religious center that the Tahni had built over two hundred years ago, on the site of the founding of their first interstellar colony. It wasn't just a historical monument; it was tended by their e
quivalent of priests and the Empire's higher military officers and government officials were required to travel there to worship at least three times during their active career.
Which made it a legitimate military target, I suppose. But there was part of me that rebelled at the idea of desecrating a temple, even an alien one. And that's what we were about to do: desecrate it. Not destroy it. This planet wasn't important enough to risk an Attack Command strike, not anymore. Back during the last war, it had been; it was the last jumpgate hub before Tahn-Skyyiah and the Tahni had fortified the hell out of the system. But the Transition Drive had made it a footnote, and the colony here had shrunk to a small population who maintained the temple.
Security had shrunk as well, which was how we'd been able to land the Raven undetected last night. The only opposition we'd detected was a platoon of conventional soldiers who pulled guard duty a squad at a time. Until about an hour ago, when a new ship had landed, a big and important-looking shuttle which had touched down on the makeshift landing field just outside the town as we watched from cover a kilometer away. It had disgorged an ornately-dressed retinue who orbited a single male Tahni, his clothing even more gaudy and colorful than the others, his headdress nearly a meter tall and glowing silver in the light of the primary.
Whoever he was, he'd only brought one bodyguard with him: a hulking male dressed in grey and black-striped camouflage. The others steered clear of the bodyguard, like they were afraid of him. They were all somewhere in the town now, probably in the government-run visitors' quarters. If they were like the other pilgrims the Scouts' probes had shown us, they'd visit the temple tonight under the light of the planet's small moon.
I tried to wrap my mind around the temple's layout, but it had inhuman touches that seemed to slide off my eye until I forced myself to notice them. A courtyard began on its perimeter but then twisted around itself like a Moebius strip through walls that curved into what seemed like random joints, varying in height and thickness in a pattern I couldn't discern. Looking at things like this was when it really sunk home for me that the Tahni were alien, despite their humanoid appearance. Their military structures were form following function, but when they built for aesthetics...