1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  I pulled the tab on my drink and sat down next to him while he rewound the segment he’d just watched. It was CSNC news, which I guess was a pretty balanced report, mostly, but I don’t know why the hell they thought some old, bald dude was more convincing than a good-looking woman. I mean, they were both CGI saying the same shit…

  “Russian President Anatoly Popov addressed a special session of the UN Security Council this morning, reiterating his contention that the United States’ treaty with the Helta is tantamount to a declaration of war.”

  Popov was a fat fuck, and that’s about the kindest thing I could say about him. He’d taken over after Putin died, but his attempt at imitating Putin’s strongman routine seemed less an homage and more a satire. Every time he tried to sound commanding, he came off like a cartoon character, with his shock of white hair standing up like a rooster’s comb, and yet this was the asshole who controlled a third of the world’s nuclear weapons.

  “The United States has no right to involve the people of this world in an alien war!” He pounded the podium in rage and I remembered old video clips of Khrushchev slamming his shoe on the table of the General Assembly in the 1960s. “A decision which affects every nation on this planet should be decided on by the UN, not by a single nation for the selfish purpose of enriching their coffers and leaving the rest of us to accept our fate! The people of the Russian Federation demand that the United States submit this matter for an immediate vote of the full United Nations General Assembly and pledge to abide by its decision! We further demand that if the General Assembly does vote to allow this alliance to occur, that all military duties be shared by the members of the Security Council. We will not allow the United States to lead us to destruction in an attempt to aggrandize themselves!”

  The bald old man replaced the fat old man, though his expression was just as serious.

  “Russia’s representative to the UN immediately introduced such a measure to the full General Assembly, with the majority of the nations condemning the alliance between the United States and her allies and the alien Helta, but the United States vetoed it. President Crenshaw conducted a news conference shortly after to give a response to the vote.”

  “This charade is about one thing,” Crenshaw said, joined en media res, “and that is President Popov’s greed. He doesn’t care about the fate of the world, he cares about Russia not having access to weapons technology. And I am not of a mind to provide weapons to a man who has already invaded his neighbors. I don’t think the people of the Ukraine would appreciate us aiding in the absorption of their independent nation by Russia.

  “The fact is, the Tevynians know about Earth, know our location, and they have the ability to reach us. We can turn down alliance with the Helta and throw ourselves on the mercy of a military force that has so far shown it has none, or take this opportunity to be able to defend ourselves. I would prefer that everyone in the world understood this was the wisest choice, but I will not sit back and wait for them to acquire both the brains and the courage to make the decision, not when it’s my family, my nation, my world hanging in the balance.”

  “Ooh,” one of the Delta weapons’ specialists said through a mouthful of crackers, “good line. Give that fucking speechwriter a raise.”

  “As for President Popov’s contention that we are hoarding the Helta technology for ourselves,” Crenshaw continued, “I wish to assure him that we will be disseminating the technological advances they’ve shared with us as soon as we can separate those which have weapons potential from those which are purely beneficial. But everyone needs to bear in mind that our main goal is to defend our world against not just a possible but a probable attack from an aggressive and imperialist government. It won’t do a bit of good to provide cheap transportation and power to the nations of the world a few months faster if we are subsequently taken over and subjugated by the Tevynians.”

  The singularly unattractive announcer simulacrum reappeared, with a shot of black-clad marchers clogging a city street somewhere that might have been Portland or Seattle, waving signs that said shit like “No alien wars!” and “Get the US out of the UniverSe,” which at least had the benefit of being imaginative. The marches and signs and yelling were a constant background noise and no one paid attention to them anymore, besides the media and the political hacks.

  “Protests continue in many major cities as—”

  Jambo hit the pause button, looking as if he wanted to throw the remote control at the screen.

  “I knew the fucking Russians were going to cause trouble. You’d think Popov would be happy we’re so focused on the Tevynian threat that we didn’t do a damned thing about the Ukraine, that everyone is too distracted to even care, but he just keeps pushing this thing.”

  “I think it’s 3-D chess,” the guy eating the crackers opined. He’d said his name was Gus, but he’d never bothered with a rank, or a last name. “I think he’s pushing this shit in public because it’s distracting the press and the rest of the world. He knows he ain’t getting those alien weapons, so he’s gonna grab as much territory as he can with both hands while no one’s looking. He probably thinks by the time we have the guns and the time to confront him, his people will be so dug in, it’ll be impossible to push them out.”

  “You’re giving him too much credit,” a tall, rangy redhead piped up, without looking away from his handheld video game. Everyone called him Ginger, which I assumed was a nickname. “He isn’t smart enough to think that strategically. “He’s saying this shit because he believes it, and if the boys and girls in DC aren’t taking his talk about this being a declaration of war seriously, then they damn well should be.”

  “What do you think, Andy?” Jambo asked me. “You think Popov is for real or is it all just bullshit?”

  I thought about it for a second. I hadn’t had a lot of time to follow the news the last few months, but I knew things were tense. There’d been riots everywhere, from Rio to Riyadh and Beijing to Boston, and cities were still burning in some places. Governments had gone under in the Middle East and Africa and a dozen border wars had gone hot, including Pakistan and India, though they hadn’t gone nuclear. Yet.

  China had been curiously quiet, and most people were of the opinion that Crenshaw had negotiated a deal with them to keep a lid on at least one of our biggest worries.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I mean, I think even Popov—”

  A notification chime drew my attention and it was all I could do not to gape like an idiot when I saw the message icon blinking at me on the Threadit screen.

  “Just a second,” I told Jambo, stepping out into the hallway outside the breakroom.

  Out in the offices, Space Force enlisted men were packing away equipment for the shuttles, but none of them so much as glanced my way. I touched the message box with a trembling finger and read the response.

  Dad, I’ve really missed you. I keep asking mom to let me call you, but she won’t let me and she’s put a block on my phone. I want to see you before you leave. Where are you? Zack.

  I was breathing hard, about to hyperventilate. I felt more nervous then when my V22 was going down outside Maracaibo. He’d answered me. He wanted to see me.

  Holy shit. I hit reply, hoping maybe I could catch him before he signed off.

  I’m in western Idaho, but I won’t be here long. I don’t think I can get to Austin before I have to leave.

  I shouldn’t have told him that. I knew it, knew I could face a court-martial for giving away our location. This was stupid. There was no chance I could see him, but maybe I could figure out a way to get ahold of him for at least a video chat before I left. Maybe on a third-party app that could get around the block on his phone…

  The message icon lit up again.

  I am at Uncle George’s house in Bend for two weeks before school starts. Could you come to Bend in time?

  Mountain Home, Idaho to Bend, Oregon. I cursed, not remembering the distance if I ever knew it, and checked it on the
tablet’s mapping software. Under six hours if I drove. If I could get ahold of a car. Where the hell was I going to get a car?

  Fuck it.

  I made my decision. My fingers flew over the keyboard, the thoughts cohering on the tablet screen.

  I can be there this evening. Seven o’clock. What’s the address?

  A pause, not overly long, not any longer than before, yet it seemed to take years and I wondered if he’d backed out, decided it was a bad idea, decided he believed what his mother had been telling him. The chime surprised me, though it shouldn’t have, and I nearly dropped the tablet.

  There’s a convenience store just a couple blocks from Uncle George’s house. I walk down there all the time to buy candy bars. I’ll drop an address pin in this post. Meet me there at 8PM. Love you, Dad. Can’t wait to see you.

  I could barely see the screen. There was something in my eye and I had to wipe my sleeve across my face before I typed a reply. I’ll be there. Love you, too.

  I waited another two or three minutes just in case there was another massage. When none came, I turned the tablet off, folded it up and stuffed it into my pocket. It was one of the general-issue folding tabs from the break room, cheap and ubiquitous, but I didn’t want anyone stumbling on the search history for this one, at least not for the next couple days.

  I sucked in a breath and tried to think, but raw emotion surged in my chest and it was everything I could do to keep from sobbing. I hadn’t seen Zack in person in nearly a year, and I’d begun to think I never would. The last time we’d been in the same room, he’d been quiet, reticent, only willing to talk about online gaming and the latest virtual reality headsets. He was thirteen, smack in the demographic for my show, but said he’d never watched it. He hadn’t been willing to talk about his friends, school, or even sports beyond a noncommittal one or two sentences of “they’re all right” or something like that.

  I thought I’d made peace with it, accepted I’d made mistakes, not the least of which was marrying Allie in the first place. It had seemed the thing to do. You graduated college, you got your commission, you bought a new car and you married your girlfriend. The fact you’d be spending the next year or so in one training school or another, moving from one base to another while your wife was alone, having to deal with her own career along with the hassles of setting up your new life together by herself wasn’t something anyone thought about.

  I’d been assigned to a stateside base, which had seemed lucky, and we’d thought everything would be fine. Then Venezuela had happened and the vicious cycle began. After the first combat tour, Allie had been so grateful I survived and I’d been so happy to be back, we decided to have a kid. And the shakes, and the flinching at loud noises and bright lights, and the constant paranoia? No big deal. It would go away over time, we were sure. And we were right, it did.

  Then the next tour came and I’d had to leave Allie alone, still working, this time with a three-month-old to take care of on top of that. He’d been over a year old when I came back and still it had seemed magical, not dying, not getting wounded or maimed despite the other men and women dropping all around me, having Zack toddle up to me at the welcome home ceremony. I’d missed his first steps, but I was back now. And the shakes were back, too, and the paranoia. When I’d driven past the grocery store because I didn’t like the looks of one of the vehicles parked outside, Allie had said she understood, that she realized it would take some time for me to get readjusted. When I started to wake up screaming, I went to see a Marine doctor and they’d prescribed sleep medication. It worked so much better when I took it with a shot of vodka.

  I volunteered for the third tour, and then the fourth one after that, because the death and the blood and the fear all seemed easier to deal with when I was somewhere I could shoot back at them, where they were real things and not just in my head. We’d joked how we had it so much better than the previous generation who’d done all their fighting in Muslim countries where alcohol was forbidden. Passing around a bottle of rum at night in the little adobe hut at our firebase was a good way to take the edge off, even if it was technically against regulations. And if I hit the bottle a little too hard when I was home between deployments, and didn’t spend much time at home with my family, well, none of those civilians understood me.

  I guess I hadn’t blamed Allie for leaving me. I’d probably been expecting it. I did blame her for not having the guts to wait and tell me to my face instead of just taking off and letting me find out when she didn’t answer her phone or come to pick me up at the airport and I had to take a cab home to find the house deserted. I did blame her for trying everything she could to keep Zack away from me even when I got off active duty and got cleaned up. She had every right to be angry with me for neglecting our marriage, but no right at all to involve Zack in our problems.

  I guess I’d thought, deep down, that I’d have time to make things right with Zack when he got older and more independent from his mother. Now, I was heading into space and God knew whether there would be another chance. I couldn’t blow this one, whether it got me in trouble or not.

  The motor pool. It would be almost abandoned with everyone getting ready to leave. Maybe I knew where to get a car, after all.

  Chapter Twelve

  The sun was kissing the peaks of the Cascades when I pulled into Bend. I hadn’t been there since the year after Allie and I got married and I’d forgotten how beautiful the place was. The mountains were bare of snow at this time of year, but I could picture them with their white winter caps. The river was the main attraction in the summer, and there were probably still kids bungee-jumping off of the main bridge even this late in the day.

  School started in a couple weeks and the last of the summer tourist traffic should have been packing the roads, but I cruised right into town with only a couple slow-downs and one long stop for pedestrians. I guess tourism had taken a hit with the whole alien thing going on. I wondered how many people would lose their businesses because of all this, how many would suffer in the short term. In the long term, it might even out with cheap power and improved medical care and incredible new technologies, but for now, a lot of innocent people were going to be hurting. I wondered how many wouldn’t take kindly to a government vehicle driving through.

  The car I’d borrowed—well, technically stolen, though I intended to bring it back—was unmarked and unobtrusive, just a normal four-door sedan in all its beige blandness, though it had US government plates. I was lucky to have found the keys for it in an unlocked cabinet, because the only other choice was that damned camo-colored CUCV and I didn’t have any faith in its ability to get me all the way to Bend without breaking down.

  The sedan was the same model I’d driven doing recruiter duty as a reserve officer, no frills, not so much as a connection to let me play music from my phone, so I had to let the mapping software guide me through the phone’s external speaker, which felt incredibly old-fashioned and damned inconvenient.

  The navigation app took me through the historic downtown area and out into what had been an upscale neighborhood ten years ago. Back then, Bend hadn’t had anything that could be called a bad part of town. There were good neighborhoods and there were awesome neighborhoods, or so Allie had told me more than once. She’d wanted us to move there once I got out of the Marines, and her older brother, George, had been all for it.

  But everything changes, and Bend had changed as well. It was still a beautiful city and the crime was low, but parts of the city now had shuttered and abandoned businesses that no one could afford to tear down and rebuild. Like the convenience store my navigation program led me to.

  I pulled to the side of the road and double-checked the address. No, this was it. The store, which had also been a gas station, had been shut down for a while, judging from the buildup of mold and dirt on the plywood across the windows and the graffiti scrawled on the faded block walls. There were no other businesses on the street except a small coffee shop that was closed now, if it
was still in operation at all. The rest of the block was high fences across backyards and only a couple of pedestrians in sight.

  A couple of cars cruised past, one of the drivers looking annoyed as he pulled around me. I cursed softly and turned into the store’s parking lot. The gas pumps were empty shells, stripped of their electronics, and I parked beside them, totally confused.

  How long had it been since Zack had been here? Did he not know it was closed down? Something felt wrong. I pulled out the folding tablet I’d taken with me and tied into the free city WiFi, checking to make sure Zack hadn’t left another message. Relief surged in my chest when I saw he had.

  Dad, I asked Uncle George and the store is shut down. I’m going to sneak out anyway and meet you there at eight.

  I checked the time. He’d sent the message an hour ago and it was already a couple minutes past eight. I wanted to send a reply and tell him not to come here, but it wouldn’t have done any good now. He’d already be on his way. I sighed and stepped out of the car, pacing across the parking lot, watching for him.

  I hadn’t taken the time to change out of my field utility fatigues before I left, and I felt very much a sore thumb standing alone in front of the shuttered business in camouflage and combat boots. I was just screaming for some local cop to stop and check on the strange guy in camo hanging out where he had no business being. If the base had reported the car as stolen, all it would take was law enforcement running the tag number and I’d be sitting in a Bend holding cell when the shuttles left for the Truthseeker.

  I rubbed the back of my head as I looked up and down the sidewalk. No one.

  Damn it. Where was he?

  I was so absorbed watching for Zack that I almost didn’t notice the panel van when it pulled up. The gentle squeak of brakes alerted me and the first thing that struck me was how old the thing was, probably a 2020 model, the white paint faded and peeling, the headlights clouded with the cataracts of age. It was the sort of van you expected to hear about in a police BOLO. I was relieved that it wasn’t the cops, but then I thought it might belong to whoever owned the closed-up gas station and I began trying to come up with a good excuse why I was here.