by Marko Kloos
He glances over at Sergeant Fallon again and quickly averts his gaze.
“What do you want?”
“You’re a Shrike jock. You know the maps for this place by heart. I want you to sit down with me at the command console and mark every airbase and settlement on this continent, along with troop strengths and defensive measures.”
Captain Beals barks a laugh. “You want me to give you the entire defense setup of Arcadia. Sell out my comrades and help you kill them easier.”
“Pretty much,” I reply.
“Why the fuck would I want to do that? Because then you’ll keep that battle bitch over there from carving me up with her knife?” He shakes his head. “They’ll find you sooner or later. And then they’ll mow you down for what you did back at the 85th base. They may get me, too, but I’d rather go that way than get skinned by Sergeant Psycho over there.”
I look at the captain, who is sitting on the ground cross-legged with his wrists flex-cuffed together. Then I crouch down in front of him like Sergeant Fallon did a few hours ago. He looks up at me warily.
“Let’s stop the feather-preening. Let me lay this out for you. The Fleet—the real Fleet—knows where you are. Both of them do. The SRA are pulling on the same rope with us right now, and they have a lot more ships left than we do. Sooner or later, they’ll come for the stuff you stole. Or just to fuck up your little paradise, out of spite.”
Captain Beals looks at me, but doesn’t say anything snippy in response.
“When they come, this is going to end in one of two ways for you. You’re going to die in battle, or they’ll capture you and put you in front of a military tribunal. I don’t think I need to tell you how that’ll go for you,” I say.
He looks over toward Sergeant Fallon again, who is calmly eating out of the ration pouch on her lap. “But this is where you come in and play good cop.”
“I’m not good,” I reply. “I only want to get off this rock and back home with my wife. I don’t give a shit about you. But I’m counting on the fact that you don’t want to die, either.”
“Who the hell does?” he replies. “So what are you going to dangle in front of me, to get me to rat out my comrades?”
“We pull this mission off, I’ll testify that you provided instrumental assistance to us. You come back home with us, and I’ll put in a good word at your tribunal. You won’t be here when the Fleet shows up and kills or arrests everyone on this rock for desertion and high treason. And you’ll be spared a blindfold and a firing squad.”
“And if you lose? What if I give you the information you want and you all get killed?”
“Then you’re no worse off than before. From where I’m sitting, you can’t lose either way. Or you can just take your chances with the Fleet or the Lankies, whoever shows up here first. But someone will show up, because everyone already knows where you went. We are just the recon team, and we took out a quarter of your offensive airpower. Once the rest of the Fleet shows up, or the SRA decide to get themselves a nice, pre-terraformed colony for their own use, you people are fucked.”
“You may be wrong all around,” Captain Beals says.
“Or your bosses may be,” I reply. “They were already wrong twice. They thought nobody could track where you went, and they thought Earth was about to fall anyway. You really want to put all your chips on their call again?”
Captain Beals looks past me and chews on his lower lip. He stares off into the woods between the two drop ships for a little while. I get up from my crouching stance and step back a little. The forest we’re in is another pine grove, strong trees at least twenty meters tall. If it weren’t for the giant blue orb on the horizon in the distance, it would look and feel like Earth.
Another empty and clean world, and we bring death and destruction to it the first chance we get, I think.
“They’re looking for you. They’ll capture you and haul you in, and then they’ll put me up against the wall when you tell them I’ve talked. Sorry, Lieutenant. I think I’d rather take my chances with them. And maybe the rest of you will be too busy with the Lankies to come calling here.”
I close my eyes and try to control the sudden rage that is flooding me.
Selling each other out for little favors, for tiny scraps from the tables of our masters. Is that all we’ve ever done? Is that all we’ll ever do, even with the world going to shit and our exterminators at the door? Billions of lives are riding on the outcome of Mars, and this waste of biomass in a flight suit is willing to sell all of them out to save his own hide?
Something in my brain just gives way. Until now, I’ve never fully understood why and how Sergeant Fallon lost her idealism and turned into the person she is, but now I begin to get my head around it.
I turn around and walk away from Captain Beals.
“Master Sergeant,” I shout, and Sergeant Fallon looks my way.
“Sir.”
“Take out your sidearm and shoot this man in the head.”
Behind me, I hear a yelp of protest and surprise.
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Fallon says. She puts aside her ration bag and stands up. Then she starts walking over to where Captain Beals is sitting on the ground. As she passes me, she unsnaps the retention hood of her sidearm’s holster. She looks at me as I pass her, maybe looking for a sign that I am bluffing, that I need her to be bad cop to my good cop for a minute, but I avert my gaze and keep walking. Behind me, I hear a pistol leaving its holster, and then the racking of a slide.
“Stop!” Captain Beals’s shout is almost a scream. “Lieutenant, stop! I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’ll take your deal. Just stop.”
For just a second, I let the rage control me as I consider just letting Sergeant Fallon go ahead with it and rid us of the captain’s dead weight to haul around. Then reason takes over. I have more lives to think about than just mine and Sergeant Fallon’s.
I turn around. Sergeant Fallon has almost reached the captain, and he’s looking up at her with wide, terrified eyes. She raises her weapon, and he lets out an inarticulate noise of fear.
“Master Sergeant,” I shout. “Hold fire.”
She looks over at me, her targeting laser never wavering from the captain’s forehead.
“Sir.”
I look at the terrified captain and the cold-as-a-glacier master sergeant. I’ve never been so fully aware of the fact that I have someone’s life in my hands. If I give the word, Sergeant Fallon is going to shoot this officer with the same lack of hesitation she’d show if I told her to smash a wasp.
I feel my rage subsiding a little, no longer seizing my brain in a stranglehold. Whatever I’ve become in this armor, this uniform, under this flag—I’m not yet the kind of man who can order the execution of a prisoner who’s sitting before me with his wrists bound together, and I hope I never will be.
“Deal’s off,” I say to the captain. “You tell me what you know, you get to keep sucking down air for now. But I won’t vouch for you when the Fleet comes. That was your decision, not mine.”
He lets out a shaky breath and nods.
“Master Sergeant,” I say. “Haul that piece of shit over to Blackfly One. If he tries to run, you will shoot him without warning.”
“Yes, sir,” she replies. Then she holsters her weapon with a smooth motion. She picks the captain up off the ground, and he gets to his feet and almost falls back down because his knees are shaking. Sergeant Fallon shoots me a look and a curt smile.
Nice job, she mouths.
I turn around and walk off toward the drop ship, not wanting to clue her in on the fact that this wasn’t at all a round of good cop, bad cop, but a last-second stay of execution.
CHAPTER 27
Captain Beals has a sizable audience standing behind him when I have Sergeant Fallon deposit him in the command console’s jump seat. Halley and Lieutenant Dorian are in the hold with us, and the two lieutenants commanding Second and Third Platoons are here as well.
“Look, don’t t
ouch,” Sergeant Fallon warns. “If you go into a comms menu, I’ll blow your brains all over that bulkhead. Do you copy?”
Captain Beals nods silently. The air of tough-guy bravado he was assuming earlier has dissipated. He puts his hands in his lap, wrists still shackled together with flex cuffs.
I bring up the TacLink screen with our known-world recon data, which has expanded a little with our run from the Shrikes and repositioning. Now we are at the northernmost end of the crescent of surveyed ground, two hundred kilometers from the nearest colony settlement.
“All right, Captain. Start putting labels on stuff,” I say.
He studies the map for a few moments and then points at the closest settlement.
“New Eden,” he says. Behind me, Halley lets out a derisive little snort.
“Ten thousand settlers,” he continues. “Each settlement has an airbase with a Shrike squadron. New Eden, that’s Strike Fighter Squadron 91. Twelve ships, plus a few spares.”
“What about the SI garrison?”
“One company,” he says. “One platoon in the admin building in town, two at the airfield, one at the terraformer. It’s the same arrangement everywhere else.”
He points out the other towns on the map, which make an irregular line from north to south.
“Tranquility,” he says. “That’s the place you hit three days ago. Strike Fighter Squadron 85. That one in the middle is Arcadia City. The capital. That’s where the president and battalion command sit. Strike Fighter Squadron 22, that’s my unit.”
“Now short two Shrikes,” Halley comments with some satisfaction in her voice.
Captain Beals ignores her jab and points to the next settlement, directly south of Arcadia City.
“Midland. Ten thousand settlers, one company of SI, same deal as the other towns. Home of Strike Fighter Squadron 35. And then all the way south, Landing. They have Strike Fighter Squadron 5.”
He looks at me and shrugs. “That’s it. Are we good now?”
“Not quite,” I say. “You’re saying the SI companies are all split three ways and deployed piecemeal?”
“Yes,” he replies. “That’s what I’m saying. They rotate them through so every platoon gets to stay in town one week out of four. Main base is the airfield, and the platoon at the admin building pulls local security.”
“What about AA emplacements? Missile batteries? Radar coverage?” Halley asks. “And I still find it hard to believe that you have a carrier and a dozen freighters, and you only took along a lousy battalion to garrison the place.”
“We had fifty thousand dependents to haul,” Captain Beals says. “And food, and equipment, and all the shit that middle-class ’burber civvies take along when you tell them to bring only essentials.”
“So our dear former president is in Arcadia City?” I ask.
“Yeah. The administration is set up in the main admin building.”
“Does he have special security, or is the admin building platoon guarding him?”
“Both,” Captain Beals says. “He’s got those CSS bodyguards. Don’t know how many, but I never see him with fewer than four. And they have a tactical team. Twenty guys at least. They do their small-arms training at the airbase.”
“What about armor? We killed two Mules at Tranquility. What else do they have?”
“The airbase grunts have MAVs for patrol. And they keep a platoon of Mules per town. Four units. But no anti-air, and they keep the radar at the airbase cold for Lanky EMCON.”
“Interesting,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“Very interesting,” Halley agrees.
“Master Sergeant,” I say to Sergeant Fallon. “Take the captain outside and put him in the care of the biggest, most ill-tempered privates in your field of vision. But don’t let them break him too much. We may need more intel in a little bit.”
“That’s a solid copy, sir,” she says, and pulls Captain Beals from his jump seat. “Be right back, sirs. Just gonna take out the garbage.”
“Situation,” Halley says. “We are hiding out on a hostile moon, and the garrison is on the lookout for us. We have three platoons, two drop ships to transport them, and one full fuel load between those two ships. The pickup is four days away, and we don’t have enough fuel to reach the rendezvous point. This is a little less than ideal, tactically speaking.”
The other platoon leaders chuckle at this. Sergeant Fallon shakes her head with a smile that says kids these days.
“Have you tried to raise Company again, Lieutenant?” Halley asks me.
“Three times since we landed,” I say. “No reply yet. Wherever the major and his SEALs are, they’re either out of radio range, or they don’t want to talk to us. I sure as shit hope it’s not the latter.”
“I’m fine with that,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Saves me from having to ignore another idiot order. Our tactical situation wouldn’t be less than ideal if the major hadn’t ordered us to blow our cover. Loudly. Sorry, ma’am,” she says to Halley. “Do continue.”
“Options,” Halley says. “Let’s hear them.”
“We can keep running until the fuel is gone,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “Use the rest of it to spread out the squads and go to ground. Then hide out and do hit-and-runs until the rest of the Fleet shows up.”
“That may be months,” Lieutenant Wolfe says. Second Platoon’s leader frowns and runs a hand through his reddish buzz cut. “That may be never, actually. If we lose Mars, they won’t have anything to send after us.”
“It’s an option,” Halley replies. “Other ideas?”
“We could raid the nearest airfield and fill up the drop ships from their fuel tanks,” Lieutenant Hanscom suggests.
“They’re all on alert now. You want us to fight off a prepared garrison platoon or two? I don’t think they’ll let us sit on the ground long enough to fill up,” I say.
“Shrikes will shoot us to shit before we get off the ground again.” Lieutenant Dorian shakes his head. “Not feeling too great about that option. I’d rather fly my bird dry and walk, to be honest.”
“It’s an option,” Halley repeats. “Let’s hear them all before we decide what not to do. Lieutenant Dorian?”
Blackfly One’s pilot looks at the TacLink display over the command console and purses his lips.
“Transfer all the fuel to one of the drop ships. Use that to make orbit with one platoon and get to the rendezvous point. Fill up and then return to pick up the next platoon and refill the other ship with auxiliary tanks.” He looks at the other pilots and shrugs. “I wouldn’t give that one great odds. They probably have their whole task force out of the dock and on alert by now. But it’s better than running around down here until they catch us.”
“We’d have to stay alive for another four days without switching positions again,” Halley says. “And then the two platoons we leave here would have to stay with the drop ships for another four days. What are our odds of staying in this place for eight days undetected, with three squadrons of Shrikes combing the place for us?”
Lieutenant Dorian shrugs again. “It’s an option, right?” he says.
“Yeah, it’s an option.” Halley looks at me. “What are your thoughts, Lieutenant?”
I look at the TacLink display again, where the map is blown up to maximum size and updated with all the intel Captain Beals gave us a few minutes earlier.
Five settlements, I think. And four of them with airbases and garrisons on full alert.
I make my brain switch gears a little, and pretend I’m on an SRA-controlled world. I’m the mission’s combat controller, and I have to come up with a threat assessment and targeting priorities for the infantry.
What would I do if these were Russians or Chinese?
The answer pops into my head almost automatically. My analytical, dispassionate professional brain has the answer very quickly, and it clashes very much with my emotional preferences. But this is the only way to get out of this that won’t invariably end up with everyone dead.
I point at the center of the map and poke the settlement labeled ARCADIA CITY with my finger.
“That’s the way,” I say. “The only way to win this thing. We go in and kick them where it hurts.”
“That is nuts,” Lieutenant Hanscom says. “That’s their main command and control facility.”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s kind of the point.”
The other squad leaders and Lieutenant Dorian all start talking at the same time. I look over at Sergeant Fallon, who just returns my gaze with a raised eyebrow.
“Keep going,” Halley says, in that tone she uses when she doesn’t agree with me in the least but feels the need to let me state my case. Only usually this tone comes up in discussions about plans for our next leave, not our survival and that of everyone with us.
“Arcadia City is the only one of the settlements that doesn’t have an airbase parked right next to it,” I say. “We can’t take on a base full of Shrikes. Not with them all aware that we are here and looking to break their shit. We can’t take on a full garrison battalion with three platoons.”
I zoom in on the map and spin the recon image of the main admin building around for everyone to see from all angles. It’s a boxy concrete bunker without windows, built for resilience and as an air-raid shelter for the colony leadership, standard colonial prefab architecture.
“But we don’t need to take them all on at once. We can take on a platoon and a handful of CSS agents. We hit them hard with all three platoons and take control of their main C3 hub on this moon. If we get our hands on their command staff, we can maybe even make them stand down. They’re all gormless career throat-cutters like that asshole out there.” I nod toward the spot where several SI troopers are guarding Captain Beals outside. “The next Shrike base is two hundred klicks away. They’re flying patrols all over this rock looking for us. We can assault that place and take it over before they can get a flight of Shrikes halfway there.”
“Hold a gun to the president’s head,” Halley says with a thin smile. “Can you imagine? We could get three squadrons of Shrikes and a full battalion to stand down.”