by Rick Partlow
“Come on Pete,” I rose, turning him away from what was left of our brother.
One hand on his arm, I led him back towards the road, towards the city. We’d won the battle; it was time to find out how much we’d lost.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Marines had made it to the city before Pete and I did. A pair of massive battlesuits stood to either side of where the gate had been, leering gargoyles guarding the entrance to Hell. Flames licked at the twisted metal that had once been Tahni gun turrets, reflecting in the dull grey surface of the Marine troopers’ thick, tungsten armor and playing over their Commonwealth Fleet Marine Corps markings. Still as statues, they ignored us as we passed through, any warnings they sent ahead of us trapped in the silence of their helmets.
Most of the Tahni floodlights had gone dark, but the streets were lit by the guttering fires that had half-consumed the harvester factories, and a smudge of smoke from their destruction rose darker against the dark clouds. Outside the enclosure that had held the civilian prisoners, a pair of Marine landers squatted in utilitarian ugliness, grey and green boxes with wings and overpowered engines still hissing at the touch of the rain.
There was a trauma team set up under a quick-setup canopy in the lee of the lander, medical techs in white utility fatigues swarming among the casualties. I could see dozens of people laid out under that canopy on diagnostic mats…and dozens more wrapped in the white sterility of body bags. I stopped there in the street, thirty meters away, eyes fixed on those body bags, not wanting to move forward, not wanting to know.
And then I did know, because my headcomp didn’t give me the luxury of ignorance. Pete nudged me, said my name, but I already saw them walking through the fog and smoke from the group of freed prisoners being looked after by the medical techs. I already knew their thermal signatures, already knew their heartbeats.
Alexander Chen was having to help his wife walk; she’d always been skinny but now she was practically a skeleton, her hair turned ghost-white. But there was still a spark of life in her eyes, a spirit that the Tahni couldn’t kill. She was smiling at me, and I tried to smile back but I couldn’t look away from Rachel.
She had a smart bandage on her shoulder and the clothes around it were scorched and blackened; she was walking with a bit of a limp. But her face had a look of grim satisfaction, and I wondered if she’d found what she’d been looking for.
I folded her into my arms wordlessly, just feeling her breathe against me, feeling the beat of her heart. She felt real and warm and solid and I never wanted to let her go.
“Isaac didn’t make it,” I told her, unable to keep my voice from breaking.
“He’s with Candace now,” Rachel whispered to me, her hand wiping tears from my face that I hadn’t realized were there.
“You came back, Caleb,” Alandra Chen was saying, stepping over to us with help from her husband, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You came back for us.”
“Captain Mitchell?” I turned towards the words, still holding Rachel.
He was a tall man, with the build and musculature of someone raised at near Earth gravity and the sort of face you might find in a recruiting ad. He wore the grey field armor Fleet personnel used for dirtside missions, but it had an air of fastidious neatness that told me the man was either the worst sort of desk jockey or a detail-obsessed perfectionist. The competence and confidence in his eyes and his tone made me guess the latter. My neurolink could read his ID chip and it told me he was Lieutenant Commander Sanchez, for all the good that did me.
“You’re Captain Caleb Mitchell.” It wasn’t a question this time. I guess they’d been expecting me.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, feeling my shoulders sag in resignation.
“If you’d come with me, please.”
He didn’t wait for a response, just turned on his heel and strode purposefully off down the road further into the city. I pulled myself away from Rachel, kissing her on the forehead, then looking between her and Pete. I’d known this bill would be coming due.
“Wait here,” I told them, hoping I’d have another chance to talk to them before the Marines stuck a neural restraint on me and threw me in the brig.
I caught up with the Fleet officer easily, despite his efficient stride, and we walked together in silence through the carnage left behind from the battle. Most of the city had been plunged into darkness with the destruction of the Tahni watchtowers and their security floodlights, but that didn’t seem to slow down Commander Sanchez and it certainly didn’t affect me. Here and there the darkness was broken by the crackling of flames where a building or a vehicle burned, and often that fitful glow illuminated broken bodies, Tahni or human.
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won,” Sanchez said softly, staring at what was left of a Canaanite man, the corpse’s face frozen in fear and pain, hands forever clenched at the gaping wound in his chest.
“Wellington,” I remembered. The quote had come from some Earth general from four or five hundred years ago. We’d studied him in military history class at the Academy.
“Quite,” Sanchez acknowledged with a brisk nod.
There were three more Marine landers nose-to-nose outside the South gate…well, what was left of the South gate after our improvised truck bomb had obliterated it and twenty meters of fence-line on either side. And beyond the Marine boats was an assault shuttle, sleek and deadly with a proton cannon slung beneath its blunt nose and missile pods hanging beneath the wings.
A command post was already going up in a clear spot outside the gates, rising in layers of grey buildfoam under the glow of portable floodlights, as dull yellow construction ‘bots wheeled back and forth mindlessly. Gathered nearby, as if the prospect of imminent shelter from the dribbling rain attracted them moth-like, was a cluster of officers in the grey field armor of Space Fleet…and one in the black utility fatigues of Intelligence.
“Good evening, Caleb,” Colonel Murdock said, turning away from the very attentive group of Fleet officers to face me. His expression was as calm and business-like as always, but I’d known him long enough to detect a hint of satisfaction in the set of his eyes.
“Hello, sir,” I returned, nodding respectfully, restraining myself from blathering on about how sorry I was. I wasn’t sorry, and if it landed me in the brig for the next ten years, then it had been worth it.
“Tell me,” he asked in a tone that might have been solicitous, “were you able to find your family?”
I tried to answer, but had to take a breath and try again before I could say it.
“My parents and my sisters died in the invasion,” I answered, finally. “My older brother died taking the Control Station. The only one left is my little brother Pete.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said, sounding sincere. “But right now, there’s business to discuss…”
“Yes, sir,” I cut in, “I understand. But before we do, I wanted to thank you.” I jerked my head around at the landers, the Marines. “For all this. We couldn’t have held out against their picket ships if you hadn’t come in time.”
“No need to thank me, Caleb,” Murdock said, waving it away. “It’s our job. Four years ago, I told you I wanted you to win this war for us, and I think you just might have.”
“Sir?” I asked, blinking in incomprehension. I mean, I knew this would be a blow to the Tahni war effort but win the war?
“With the Goshen system back under our control,” he explained patiently, “the Tahni have lost their most direct route to the Solar System. There are other Transition Lines they can take, of course, but those add months to the journey and there’s no convenient staging area in between that we don’t control.” A thin smile passed across his face. “Plus, with Canaan as an example, I’m fairly certain I can convince the President to return to a strategy of, shall we say, island hopping: retaking our occupied colonies back along the route to Tahn-Skyyiah, and this time doing it my way.”
Co
lonel Murdock shrugged. “It won’t be this month, it probably won’t be this year; but this was the beginning of the end for the Tahni. Which is why I need you to say your goodbyes to your friends and your brother and get back to work.”
I felt the gears grinding inside my head. “But sir, what about…”
He didn’t let me finish. “I know,” he raised a hand, “it’s not fair to ask you to go out again so soon after I sent you on such a dangerous mission by yourself.” I blinked again. I knew I’d heard the emphasis on the words “I sent you” and I knew what that meant. “But needs must when the Devil drives.”
“Yes, sir.” I felt a smile spreading across my face, but I fought it down. Best not to gush; I didn’t want to be too obvious in front of people who didn’t need to know what was going on. “Do I have time to say goodbye, Colonel?”
“Of course,” Murdock assured me. “I still have to coordinate relief efforts for the civilians, and organize a defensive strategy with the Operations Officer from the Jutland. Be back here at my shuttle and ready to lift in two hours.”
“Thank you, sir.” Two hours…well, it was better than being hauled off in a neural restraint web. “I’ll be here.”
“You’d better, Caleb.” Now there was something of the subtly threatening tone I’d expected, a shading to the set of his eyes. “Vacation’s over.”
***
“It’s not fucking fair,” Pete spat, slamming the flat of his palm against the buildfoam wall of the temporary shelter going up around us. The roof was done, and three of the walls, and that was dry enough for a handful of the refugees.
By God, yes, we were refugees now. That would take some getting used to.
“It’s a war, Pete,” I said, pulling him into a hug with an arm around his neck. “It was never going to be fair. I still have a job to do.” I held him out at arm’s length and cocked my head to the side. “I’m counting on you to look after things while I’m gone. Someone has to help rebuild the farm.”
He let out a sigh of resignation, then nodded reluctantly. “I’ll do my best, Cal.”
“I know you will, brother,” I said. I gave him one last embrace then let him go.
“I’ll help, too,” Rachel said, slipping into my arms as Pete stepped away to give us privacy.
“What about your family’s farm?” I asked her, looking down into her cerulean gaze.
“You are my family,” she said, putting a hand behind my neck and pulling me into a kiss. She tasted of sweat and dirt and smelled like blood and burned clothes and days without bathing and I didn’t care. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on.
“I love you, Rache,” I said. I’d said it so many times before, when we were teenagers, and never known what it meant. I thought I did now, that the time and pain and loss had taught me.
“I love you too, Cal,” she told me, and I believed her. “Promise me, though.”
“Promise you what?” I asked, shaking my head.
“That you’ll come back,” Rachel said, tapping my chest with a finger. “I can’t let you go unless you promise me.”
“It’s going to take a while,” I warned her, searching her face for any sign of the anger and betrayal I’d once seen there when I’d had to leave her. All I saw in those clear blue eyes was peace.
“I can wait,” she assured me, resting her head against my chest. “Just tell me you’ll come back. You told me before and I didn’t believe you, but I’ll believe you now.”
“Then I swear,” I told her finally, whispering into her hair as I cradled her against me. “I swear to God that when this is all over, I’ll come back home to you.”
She slowly disentangled herself from me, and there was a playful glint in her eye as she gently pushed me away.
“Then go win the war for us, Glory Boy.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Some days, I thought we’d never get here,” Deke confessed to me, shouting to be heard over the roar of reentry.
I didn’t bother asking him why he was speaking aloud instead of using his neurolink; it was a ritual he’d fallen into after our second drop on Demeter, and soldiers being a superstitious lot, he hadn’t deviated from it over the last eighteen months and ten drops since. He didn’t put his face hood on or use his neurolink until the pod’s chutes popped.
And God knew, we needed all the luck we could get on this one.
“You mean you didn’t think we’d be able to invade Tahn-Skyyiah,” I requested clarification, “or didn’t think the two of us would survive long enough to do it?”
“Bit of both, I suppose,” he said, laughing. “It’s been a long haul, bud, but I think this might be the finish line.”
“I hope so,” I admitted, thumping my fist idly against the interior padding of the drop pod. “I’m ready to get this shit over with, Deke.”
He laughed again, reaching over to slap me on the shoulder. “You’ve been homesick ever since they dragged you back from Canaan. At least they’ve let you call home, now that your people know you’re alive.”
I nodded. It had helped, being able to exchange messages with Pete and Rachel the last year and a half, even if there hadn’t been any time for leave what with the Boys leading the Marines to retake one occupied colony after another. The dominoes had started falling with Canaan, just like Colonel Murdock had said.
Sometimes I wondered about my trip to Canaan and how easy it had been to get off Inferno with the Raven and a hold full of weapons. Had the Bulldog arranged the whole thing? Had I been his way of circumventing a military strategy he disagreed with? If that was the case, I wasn’t sure if he was the smartest man I’d ever met or just the most diabolical. Or both.
Either way, I’d been fairly surprised when I returned to Inferno and found out that no one except Deke had known I’d even left in the first place. Since then, we’d all been so busy with one mission after another, there hadn’t been any time to talk about it with anyone else. I’d told Deke everything, of course; he made all the right noises but I’m not sure if he really understood my family dynamic because his family life was so different. To him, my family was something I hadn’t talked about much since the Academy and now they were dead and he was sorry, but… Mostly he just gave me shit about settling down with a corn-fed farm-girl.
The brutal snap of the main chute opening jerked me against my restraints and interrupted my train of thought; we shared a look before we both pulled on our face hoods. Now, if we were only able to make it to the ground without being blown to shit, we were about to be the first humans to set foot on Tahn-Skyyiah.
This is the same damn op we did our last training run on Inferno, Deke reminded me. Disable the fusion reactor.
Seems like a million years ago, I mused, trying to shut out the sensor feed from the outside of the drop pod. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it until we landed, so there was no point staring out at the city, waiting for the missile that would kill us.
You really gonna’ go back to being a farmer on a backwoods colony world after the war? He asked me out of nowhere. You gonna’ be satisfied with that?
For a while. Maybe not forever, but for a while. What about you? Are you heading back to Earth?
I’ll visit. Don’t know if I’ll be staying or not. It’s a big Commonwealth, and it’ll be bigger without the Tahni fucking things up. Maybe I’ll go knock around the Pirate Worlds for a while, have a little fun.
I laughed silently at that under my hood. What, you haven’t got shot at enough?
Something shook us hard, sending the little pod swaying wildly from side to side under its dark canopy and I felt my testicles drawing up into my gut. We were three hundred meters up. I didn’t know what had hit us; it might have been turbulence; it might have been someone taking a shot at us. I hoped to hell it was turbulence.
At a hundred meters up, I started paying attention to the exterior cameras. We were coming down at the edge of an industrial park, and we were coming down fast. I didn
’t see any military activity below, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any; and although we had drones in the air trying to jam their electronics, I wasn’t counting on that, either. But at least the landing zone seemed clear from what the pod’s cameras could tell me.
Then the ground came up fast and we hit hard, and I was slammed back into the padding that lined the walls of the drop pod with enough force to make my vision go fuzzy for just a few seconds. My headcomp didn’t let me indulge in shock; there wasn’t time. Prodded by my cybernetic taskmaster, I hit the control to blow the hatches, then grabbed my weapon and tactical vest and scrambled out through the skeleton of BiPhase Carbide. I ducked behind the remains of the drop pod with Deke and took a second to absorb the data my headcomp was feeding me about my surroundings while I slipped into my tactical vest and attached my plasma gun’s sling to it.
Tahn-Khandranda, the Spirit of the Empire, loomed over us in the grey, pre-dawn light. The twin needle-thin spires of the Imperial Center towered high above the sprawling octagon of the palace, surrounded by the glistening white spheres that were the Three Temples of their faith. The height of the buildings decreased the further away they got from the Imperial Center, as if the city were bowing in respect, and the industrial areas at its edge were no more than twenty meters or so tall. Except the reactor complex, which stretched out in front of the open lot where our pod had landed.
The fusion reactor was housed in a huge, concrete dome two hundred meters across, ringed by clusters of coolant tanks, and the whole thing was surrounded by a three-meter-tall security fence. I knew there was much more underground: the whole power distribution network ran through underground conduits to the city and to the defense lasers that ringed the city limits.