“Time to move out, then, eh soldier?” Ian said, with a wry twist to his mouth.
Chapter Six
We caught up with the others as they reached the installation. It was a fabricated semi-dome sticking up from the landscape and largely hidden by foliage and rocks. The surface was reflective and smooth, but there was a hatch on the side of the installation and a sensor array in a slender tower above it. It looked like it had settled into the earth, so it must have been there for a while, but there was no tarnish that I could see. There was also no beaten track or anything else that would suggest recent use. It was a bit of a puzzler.
Corporal Maxwell was first through the doors. I thought that probably wasn’t SOP, and I wondered why he chose to do it. Wasn’t the person in command supposed to hang back so he didn’t get attacked? He came out a moment later saying it was clear, and we all shuffled inside. Fergus sealed and locked the hatch, and I looked around with the others.
The walls were made of one-way glass. They’d been reflective outside, but they were clear on this side, giving us a 360° view. It was larger than I had expected, and there was just enough room for everyone. The center of the dome had desks and monitors for the sensor arrays, but the surrounding area was spacious and carpeted. There were even a few couches and comfortable chairs around the edges.
Stairs led below to a lavatory, storeroom and four bunks. It seemed like this place was meant to host an observation team, or something similar, but there was no one around.
“Everyone top your tanks up from the air tanks below. There should be enough,” Maxwell said, “and then eat and get some shut eye. We’ll head out again in eight hours.”
I sidled over to the computers, trying not to draw attention. The screens were dark.
Connect to computers, I tried ordering my implant.
Connection established. Limited connectivity.
What does ‘limited connectivity’ mean?
Connection is available to computer databases, but not to sensor arrays or communications networks.
I scrolled through the database.
Database Directory.
Research Logs.
Equipment manuals.
Communications protocols.
Pretty slender database selection. It didn’t sound like the occupants were much for record keeping.
Download Research Logs, I ordered.
Downloading...
I followed the line of colonists that wound down the staircase, waiting for my turn to use the facilities and top up my air. It occurred to me that the installation was probably climate controlled, so I slipped off my mask and turned the valve to ‘off.’ Best to conserve what we did have. I saw a few others stare at me curiously before taking their own masks off.
The air smelled a little stale but mostly it smelled of foreign plants and pollens that I hadn’t experienced yet because of the mask. Even stale the air tasted good. Breathing silicon smell and tanked air is not ideal and my sweat mingling in with it hadn’t helped.
The wait was long, and as I stood there I found my mind drifting to Denise. After all the chaos and drama that it took to rescue her, she’d been killed by anti-Imperial terrorists. Her death made everything feel flat and worse than useless.
Poor Denise. She hadn’t been able to escape an early death. The girl who loved boys and fun and breaking all the rules had been through hell and wound up dead even after surviving it. I wanted to cry, but here, surrounded by killers, didn’t seem like a good place to break down. I blinked back my tears furiously and almost laughed at myself. By now I should be immune to tragedy. What was there left to take away from me? It doesn’t matter how much you’ve lost, there’s still pain when you lose something more.
Downloading...
Stupid implant, interrupting my grief. I should turn it off, but I just couldn’t after what happened the last time I did. I had many faults but refusing to learn from my mistakes was not one of them. Or maybe it was. I didn’t know anymore. I felt so tired.
When my turn to top up my air supply came, I carefully refilled my tanks, sealed them and reset both the external gauge and my implant’s tracking function. This seemed like one of those things you should keep track of.
“Almost done, honey pie?” Ch’ng said from behind me.
I whirled and gave him a death look. He laughed.
“Look at the claws on the kitten,” Sentry said as he joined the laughter. “Don’t let the girl scratch you.”
It was lame. It was still worrying, with his history, and apparently with the allies all around him, but it wasn’t super-villain dialogue. There was something, though, about the way he said ‘the girl’ that bothered me. With my expression dead-pan I let my mind unravel the mystery.
When I realized the answer, I looked up, and my gaze locked on to Ian’s. I was the only woman left in this group. How had I failed to notice that? In fairness, there had been other things on my mind, and I wasn’t raised in a world that paid a lot of attention to gender. Even so, I kicked myself for not noticing a salient detail.
Ian crossed his arms over his chest. There was no sympathy or protectiveness there. I clenched my jaw. It’s one thing to be an ex-pacifist. It’s something else to be a dangerous killer. I was going to have to work on that if I decided to survive.
“Didn’t you see?” I asked, “I eat shadows for breakfast.”
It wasn’t very original, but it was still better than his line.
They didn’t stop grinning, but there was an edge of respect in it now. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to make good on my reputation. Without Roman’s help there was no way I could...yet.
I was glad when my turn in the facilities arrived. I sealed the hatch door tightly as I took care of my necessities and emerged slightly less smelly and more presentable. I was sorry to discover that there were still no scissors around to cut my hair but the braid sufficed at present. I went back up top and positioned myself near to the outside hatch to sleep.
There was a marine posted there, and if Maxwell was worth anything there should be one posted all night. It was the best place I could think of to avoid being molested. Worth a shot, at any rate.
Downloading...
Either that was one huge file, or my connection was poor. At this rate it would take all night. I curled up, planning to get what sleep I could. With the terrors outside and within, I was worried that sleep wouldn’t come, but before I knew it I had drifted off.
Chapter Seven
At first I thought I was dreaming. I was holding a gun and following a group of marines into a high density housing unit. I wasn’t controlling my body’s actions, though, just watching, as if I were a passenger.
A marine nodded to me. She was a pretty blonde woman, and she looked tough as nails. She made a hand gesture and pointed at the door. There was a look of familiarity in her eyes as she looked at me.
I ran to the door, opened it quickly and ran through, brandishing my nettlegun like I was ready to fire it.
“Room clear,” I said, and oh! I recognized that voice!
I felt a surge of affection.
“Understood, Aldrin.”
I was riding, somehow, in Roman Aldrin’s head. I had gone to sleep thinking about him, and it was possible that I was dreaming this, but it felt very real.
My...fireteam, I guess... was coming in behind me. The blonde was the fireteam leader. She gave the orders. We cleared three more rooms. She gave me hand signals, and I flew through the doors scanning for the enemy. Or at least that’s what I thought Roman was doing.
I caught a glimpse of him in a mirror on one of the walls. His hair was cut very short, like an Imperial marine – which he was now. He looked worn, tired, and worried. It made me worried for him. Was he terribly unhappy as a marine? Was he being treated poorly? He didn’t look like he was eating well. His face was thinner and older looking. I tried to see if I could glimpse him in any reflective surface that we passed. Had he lost weight? Was he ok?
My
tension rose with the minutes. I wished I could help him somehow. Not with the job, he seemed to have that taken care of, but he seemed like he was worn to a frazzle and I didn’t like that.
Roman’s team must have been must be looking for someone in the residences, but the rooms were all empty. Maybe it had been evacuated before they arrived.
We entered a room with a red door in the same manner we had every time. This room was like the rest, spare in decoration, modern, but lower class. There wasn’t much money here. Roman seemed pre-occupied by something half under the couch. A toy? He didn’t like to speak much about his childhood since he lost his parents. I wondered if it reminded him of it somehow.
His fireteam fanned out through the room. Their blonde leader was by the door. She had sergeant stripes. I didn’t like her. A boy not much older than Roman was running his hand over his nettlegun and looking nervously out the window when one of the walls exploded with flechettes. They flew through the molded plastic, shredding it in seconds and tore into the nervous marine.
The blonde started calling out orders and everyone was firing. Everyone except Roman. Fire! I thought, madly, don’t let them shoot you! Don’t die in something so routine!
But Roman dropped his gun. Was he ok? Had he been hit? I hadn’t felt anything, or seen his vision shake. He scrambled to the couch and dove underneath. Running from danger was not like him at all.
Somehow, he had realized something that had escaped me. There was a child hiding beneath the couch, his huge eyes welling up in tears and a look of terror on his tiny face. I felt my arms go around him, tucking his little body under my armor, and tucking his little head into my chest.
Me, Vera, the one riding inside Roman’s head...I wanted to cry. It was so Roman to notice and to care. It was so like him to put himself aside and drop everything on a hunch that someone needed protecting. Warmth and appreciation flooded me. I hoped the boy would be ok. But of course he would be. He had Roman to protect him. Hadn’t I always been okay when I had Roman to protect me?
My eyes opened and the dream...or whatever it was... ended.
Planetary time?
22:42
I rolled over and went back to sleep. I needed to log some real sleep time. I could sort out how I felt in the morning if I was still alive then. I fell asleep with warmth at my core. Roman was alive somewhere and still himself. I treasured the memory of him saving that little boy.
I was kicked awake; another reminder that I was not royalty anymore.
“What’s up?” I asked, cognizant of a change immediately.
“We were able to contact Command,”Maxwell said in his usual spare way, “They saw a shuttle land close to our location, but haven’t been able to raise them on the comm. We’re going to investigate.”
“Has it been eight hours?” Ian grumbled from beside me.
“Close enough. Welcome to life with the marines.”
“I never signed up to be a Marine,” Ch’ng said.
“And no one is giving you that honorific, prisoner,” Maxwell said, “I said ‘welcome to life with the marines’, not in the marines.”
“I thought we were colonists,” Ch’ng said.
“Yeah. Whatever.”
Maxwell shut up pretty quickly after that. I guess he was supposed to maintain this ‘colonist’ fiction and had slipped up. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t think any of us were stupid enough to think we weren’t prisoners. I wondered, though, what the point of sending us here was instead of just executing us. We didn’t seem terribly helpful in an environment like this one. I could almost hear what Roman’s snide remark would have been, ‘Cannon fodder, of course. Typical Empire stuff.’
We all were given the privilege of visiting the facilities one last time, and then it was masks on and single file out the hatch. As we entered the alien world of Baldric once more my implant chirped.
Download Complete.
Well, at least there’d be something to think about while we were walking. Something other than how my stomach did a flip, and I felt all affectionate every time I remembered Roman saving that kid. I should probably start at the beginning, but I decided to play the last entry first. I’d always been the sort of person who read the last page of a mystery book half way through.
Play last entry.
A video screen popped up in the bottom right of my vision. I paid it some attention, multitasking so I could concentrate on walking behind Ian. He was conveniently ignoring me, which made it easy to watch the video.
A woman with her hair tied back looked into the screen with big eyes. She was in the facility we just left.
“It’s gone horribly wrong. We never could have predicted this. They’ve got Baker, and now...”
She screamed horribly then, as a shadow slid over her and a brilliant yellow fungus started to spurt out her nose, climbing into the air.
I checked the time code. There was fifteen more minutes of the video log. That told me two things. First, that someone had been there to shut off the video and clean up her body and the fungus tower, and second, that I was going to have to watch these from the beginning after all.
Chapter Eight
The terrain was hilly and jagged, but the thick forest had thinned out. There were still stands of trees and thick brush, but there were also open spaces of packed, bare earth. The soil was hard and clay-like, and a sickly yellow. In most terraformed worlds that would indicate poor soil, but it was hard to tell on this planet without testing. The terraforming efforts hadn’t gone very far if we were still using breathing apparatuses.
How long had we owned this planet? It was one of hundreds of numbered planets of the Blackwatch Empire. Few were habitable without major terraforming efforts which could take hundreds of years. Some of them took decades to develop an atmosphere thick enough to support more complex life forms, but that probably hadn’t been necessary here since there was already some sort of native life. If you can call shadows life.
That was particularly interesting. Sentient species were exceedingly rare to find. Sentient species that were humanoid – or sometimes humanoid – were almost unheard of. I would have thought that some news organization would have caught hold of this and broadcasted years ago. A more likely theory would be that these were other colonists, somehow mutated into what we were seeing. Government propaganda was capable of deceiving us into believing that they were ‘native’ to the planet, but what would have to happen to a person to turn him into a shadow?
It was downright creepy. I wondered what Roman would make of it. Roman. Roman who had helped that little boy when no one else cared enough to notice. I couldn’t stop thinking about that.
The sun was finally beginning to sink towards a sunset, although if the previous hours had been any judge it would take a long time going about it. The long days made me feel very tired.
Play Records from beginning.
The timestamp on the recording was from before I was born. I sighed. This was going to take a while.
If I had to be honest, I would admit that I don’t know the science of terraforming very well. I am extremely well educated, but there is only so much you can fit into a curriculum, even one aimed at future rulers. My training as an Ambassador leaned very heavily towards the social sciences. I have an excellent grasp of language, communication technology, psychology, history, politics, rhetoric, strategy, tactics, logistics, government, economics, culture, the arts, and I was given a sufficient physical education. My general knowledge is good, but it was always intended that I would rely on advisors and experts for the things that I couldn’t possibly fit into my course of study.
I was following the basics of the video logs, but to say that I understood the specifics would be a lie. I got the gist of it. I understood some of the reasoning and the problems that were coming up as the months faded into years, but the nuances were lost to me.
It was dry subject matter, mostly relayed in dry voices. The people reporting would do a number of reports in sequence and
then be replaced by another speaker giving similar reports. I let them play continuously as I hiked behind Ian.
My pack was heavy, the landscape was hostile, and the company was unfriendly, so I had a lot of things to distract me as I walked. We were four hours into our hike before anything interesting happened in the logs.
Up until that point I could summarize them as follows:
The Blackwatch Empire first set up a tiny installation running planetary tests. It was the installation we slept in last night. It had a staff of three. After finishing the required battery of tests, they determined that the planet was ripe to terraform for human colonization. No encounters with sentient native life had been made at that point, nor had they travelled more than 5 km in any direction from their small base, although a satellite made a full map of the planet. The first mission lasted six months.
A year later another group of scientists were sent (numbers unrecorded) and they set up shop in the same base. They went to great pains to explain that their mission was secret, that they were personally vetted by the Emperor at the time, Hiro Matsumoto (Nigel’s father), and that this was a personal project of his. I remembered Uncle Hiro as being a secretive and moody man. Maybe the scientists were jittery for that reason, or maybe for reasons unknown, but they seemed nervous in their reports. They began work on the atmosphere and under the planet’s surface.
About two years after they began their mission a group of colonists were sent to them. By the tone of their report it sounded like they were ‘colonists’ like us – political prisoners. It turned out good old Uncle Hiro had plans from the very start to make this a functional prison planet. The scientists were worried. Security, in their opinion, was not sufficient, and the colonists jeopardized their work just by being there. They thought Baldric was a gem to be studied and treasured, not treated like a human trash heap.
That’s when things got interesting to me. There were hints that one of the colonists was a Matsumoto. Interesting. I wondered which one. I knew my own genealogy the way that any royal does. It’s drilled into your head from the time you are tiny, and all the portraits and history books just reinforce that. A Matsumoto here in prison. It wasn’t in the histories at all, which meant that likely they had died here. I felt a sudden, and instant, affinity with this hell-hole of a planet knowing that my blood was buried somewhere here.
The Splitting (The Matsumoto Trilogy Book 2) Page 5