by Joshua James
“Why are we reliving this?” asked young Saito.
“It’s not only important to learn about your military, but about what drives human beings. We need to understand you, Lee. To do so, we need to understand your failures as well.”
“I understand, Colonel. Sorry for any trouble my son may have caused you,” Sanada apologized. He roughly grabbed young Saito by his arm and practically dragged him out the door of Tenzan’s office.
When he went through that door, young Saito aged by about twenty years. He was on the same docks he and his father worked on. Saito was helping put the finishing touches on a UEF fighter’s fold engine. The war with the AIC had just started and ships, supplies, and manpower were in desperate demand.
The Pale Man closely observed not only Saito, but the other workers as well. It looked as if he was trying to figure out how humans built their ships, and trying to pick up any details that might’ve been integral to making their own versions appear authentic.
There was a loud horn, and yellow lights around the docks started to flash. That meant that it was the yellow group’s turn to take their lunch break. With a yellow band on the sleeve of his work uniform, Saito dropped his tools and made for the cafeteria. The Pale Man walked beside him.
“The war. It had already started at this point?” asked the Pale Man.
“It just did,” answered Saito as he made his way, alongside thirty or forty other fellow workers in the yellow group, towards the cafeterias. “A couple of months ago.”
“And you hadn’t signed up yet?”
“No. I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I had a family to take care of,” explained Saito. He took out a small holo disc from his pocket and handed it over to the Pale Man.
The Pale Man pressed the small button in the middle of the holo disc. Out of it was projected a small holographic photo of Saito, with his wife Beverly and their four-year-old son, Ben.
“Interesting,” commented the Pale Man. “You sacrificed what you wanted to do in order to provide for your family. It’s a selfless act.”
“Any man would do the same. Or any decent man, I suppose.” Saito stopped and looked up at a projected TV screen showing the news. It was a report from the battlefront with the AIC. The war was still young, and things hadn’t become as bitter, costly, and brutal as they would. Not yet. In himself, Saito felt guilty. He felt like he should’ve have been out there fighting.
“Some would not make the same choice?” This seemed to confuse the Pale Man. “And human beings, they have a choice whether or not to fight?”
“We did, at least at first. But in a couple of years the draft would come.”
“Were you drafted?” asked the Pale Man as he and Saito entered the cafeteria. “Is that why you went to war?” Quickly, the Pale Man’s attention shifted to the line of workers, waiting patiently for food with trays in hand.
“No. I signed up voluntarily.” Saito went to sit down at one of the cafeteria tables. Suddenly he found himself in his bedroom, sitting down not on the cold steel of a cafeteria table but on the edge of his bed. Beverly lay in the bed next to him, sitting up against the headboard. She urged him to lie down next to her.
“It’s okay, baby. I’m not mad. I won’t pretend that I understand why, but I’m not mad.” Beverly had been surprisingly understanding after Saito had just informed her that he’d signed up for the UEF Marines.
“Is it?” asked Saito. He put his legs up on the bed and moved back, sitting up against the headboard next to his young wife. “I can’t help but feel like, I don’t know, that I’m abandoning you and Ben.”
“Don’t worry about us, Lee. We’ll be fine. You wanted this since you were a kid, right? I’d rather have you risk your life out there in the war than spending another minute being miserable working those docks just to make sure there’s food on our table.” Beverly stroked Saito’s thigh.
“I’m going to worry about you two. How can I not? You’re my family.”
“Then why’d you go?” asked the Pale Man. He stood at the end of the bed, really killing the intimate vibe of the memory.
“I felt like I had to,” Saito answered.
“But what about doing what you had to, to provide for your family?”
“I figured I could serve a couple tours of duty out in space as a Marine, then reapply for officer’s school. As a Marine, I could make more than I did at the docks. When I was an officer, I could move my family out of Japan and start a real career that would make sure that they were taken care of.”
Beverly put both her hands on Saito’s cheeks. They were cold. She turned his head towards hers, making sure they made eye contact. “It’s gonna eat you up inside if you don’t at least try. Just don’t die. If you die, I swear, I’m gonna kill you.” She forced a laugh.
“I promise. I will be back.”
Beverly smiled. And then she slapped him hard across the face.
Seventeen
When his vision came into focus, Beverly was gone. He was staring up at another UEF Marine, Pvt. Jake Rollins.
“Wake up, Saito!” yelled Rollins. He looked around. Ships flew past overhead. The sounds of gunfire and explosions were everywhere. Rollins looked panicked—no, not panicked, alert.
“Wha—?” Saito sat up. He was in full Marine uniform, including his head-encompassing helmet. His own heavy breaths became condensation on the strong plastic visor.
“We need to keep moving! Take out that battery, or those transports are going to be shot out of the sky!” Rollins picked up a belt of high-explosive charges.
“Yeah….yeah, yeah!” Saito got up off the black soil of Europa, Jupiter’s moon. He picked up his rifle and his belt of high explosives. Both he and Rollins had one.
“You okay?” asked the third Marine who’d been ordered to storm the AIC unit-air battery. For the life of him, Saito couldn’t remember his name.
“So this is human combat?” The Pale Man stood not far away, in the middle of the fighting. He looked around.
Across the vast alien landscape, the Pale Man observed the battle unfolding all around him. Streaks of orange and red light, super-heated high-velocity rounds, flew all over the place. Fighters and bombers from both sides screamed by overhead, dropping payloads, peppering the battlefield with their guns, the unfortunate crashing down in fiery wrecks.
The Pale Man took in the sounds of gunfire, explosions, people screaming orders and for help. He looked down at an AIC soldier, holding his own guts in that steamed in the cold Europa air. He saw one man get cut in half by a fighter ship’s high-caliber cannons. He watched as a cutter grenade was thrown in a trench, exploding into a ring of plasma that beheaded the trench’s occupants. He wasn’t fazed, just fascinated.
“This is human suffering and savagery.” Saito answered the Pale Man first, then the Marine whose name he forgot. “I’m fine. C’mon, let’s go!”
Saito, Rollins, and the unknown UEF Marine charged across the battlefield towards a series of three anti-aircraft guns. The railguns blasted UEF ships out of the sky, and would do the same to the reinforcements coming in. Almost a hundred men would die if the guns weren’t taken out before they arrived.
Perhaps Saito had forgotten the third Marine’s name because he didn’t make it very far. He took a super-heated bullet to the face. It easily cut through his helmet’s visor, burst through his face, and came out the back. Immediately he fell to the black dirt, dead as could be.
Rollins and Saito kept moving. Lee remembered the crunching noise as the projectile passed through the Marine’s skull.
Saito and Rollins ran as fast as their booted feet could take them. An artillery shell fell between them, sending both young men flying in different directions. Saito’s whole world became hazy. He couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched ringing in his ears. His insides hurt; that was the only way to describe it, like someone had punched all of his organs. Still he got up, once again picked up his gun and explosives, and
continued on.
“Why? Why keep going? You were clearly hurt. And as I can see, people are dying all over the place. So what if a few transports get blown up? It’s just more wood on the fire, is it not?” The Pale Man was fascinated that Saito kept on mission.
“Because I could. Because I wasn’t going to just let those people die if I could do anything about it!” Saito yelled as he ran towards the anti-aircraft guns.
When Saito reached the anti-aircraft guns, he was surprised to see, once he got over the ledge of the crater the railgun was situated in, fifteen or twenty scared AIC soldiers. They were nothing more than kids, barely older than he’d been when he went into UEF Young Officer’s School.
Saito and the young AIC soldiers stared at each other for a moment. Neither side seemed to want to make a move; they just wanted to live. Then Saito saw one of them point their gun in his direction, and he opened fire. The Pale Man watched and smiled.
The same feelings, a confusing mixture of anger and guilt, overtook Saito as he shot every one of the young AIC soldiers in that crater. Not one of them was spared. All that stopped him from breaking down, there in that moment, was the objective at hand.
Saito armed and threw the belt of high-explosive charges at the anti-aircraft gun. It blew up in a spectacular explosion that the Pale Man watched with glee. Seconds later, a UEF bomber came swooping down, somehow evading the other two anti-aircraft guns’ fire, and blew them to kingdom come.
“Jesus, Saito.” Rollins arrived hurting just as much as Saito, at least physically. Saito stood at the edge of the crater, looking down at the young AIC soldiers he’d shot. Some of them were on fire from the anti-aircraft gun he’d blown up, but one that wasn’t ablaze caught his attention. “I dunno how you pulled that off. You’re a damn hero.”
Saito ignored Rollins and slowly slid down into the crater. The young AIC soldier he was focused on had something clasped in his dead hands. When Saito pried them open, he found a relic of the distant past, a Polaroid. After seeing what it was of, he fell backwards, sitting next to the young men he’d killed just minutes earlier.
“What was it?” asked the Pale Man. The creepy alien walked through the fire and stood over Saito. “The picture, what was it of?”
“This kid’s family,” answered Saito. He cried under the cover of his helmet. “All this kid had to hold onto before dying, in this hell, was a picture of his family.”
“I’ve learned all I needed here.” The Pale Man held out his hand. “Come, let’s move on.”
Eighteen
“So, you think you can do it?” asked Morgan. She’d just shown Ada the basics of flying a raider-class gunship like the Lost.
“No, absolutely not,” laughed Ada.
Morgan let go of the piloting stick. “Sure you can. You’re the smart one in the group. I can tell.”
The autopilot was damaged, but Morgan had managed to rig the ship to follow one of Vassar-1’s navigation beacons.
“Takes one to know one, I guess,” laughed Ada. “But if I was smart, I wouldn’t even be here.”
Morgan liked that Ada didn’t shy away from the compliment, but she didn’t care for the self-doubt. There was enough doubt in the world without adding your own. “Thought you said you were drafted?”
“I was…but I could’ve run. A lot of people back home did.”
“Where are you from again?” asked Morgan. “Your accent, can’t quite place it.”
“Sweden, a small town just outside Stockholm.”
“And you think they’d let you run?”
“Lots of people did. Swedes, we, well, war isn’t our forte.”
Ada stretched her back. She had just spent the last couple of hours bending over so she could see all the pilot instruments Morgan showed her. Morgan had gone over more than just the basics, because she could tell Ada was taking it all in, but there was still plenty more to know. Still, if what she’d learned wasn’t enough, they’d be in serious trouble.
“Considering you’ve survived this long, I gotta think you’re pretty good at it.” There was a brief, awkward silence. Without the common ground of learning the ship’s controls, they didn’t have much to talk about.
“So, do we have any idea how we’ll be getting into Vassar-1 space undetected?”
“Ben and I were just talking about that.”
“And?” Ada asked
“And we won’t. There’s only one gate into the planetary shield. We aren’t getting through it undetected.”
Ada frowned. “That seems like a problem.”
You have no idea, Morgan thought. The only hope was the credentials that the director had given her. But those would only work if the director validated them, and Morgan wasn’t entirely sure that the director was willing to do that. Not while the director suspected, as Morgan did, members of their own services.
“We’re small and agile,” Ada said, nodding at the controls. “At least, you make it sound that way. Can’t we just slip by?”
Morgan smiled, and hoped it didn’t seem condescending. “We’re small and agile, but not that small and agile.” She shook her head. “They’re going to see us coming, and we need to figure out what we’re going to do then.”
In fact, while they couldn’t avoid detection, she believed the tiny gunship could get past the gate if it had to. But that would send up all kinds of alarms, and Morgan would have to call in favors she didn’t want to think about. Not yet, anyway.
Ada nodded, and was silent for a moment. “So…tell me about your captain,” she inquired at last.
The change in topic momentarily disoriented Morgan. “Ben? Our captain?” She laughed in spite of herself.
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just….He’s our captain, sure. but he’s the least captain-y captain of all time. If that makes sense.”
“Kind of. What do you mean?”
Morgan swiveled around in her chair. “He’s our captain because I don’t have the patience to do it and have to fly this thing. And Ace, well, he’s Ace. We needed someone with some experience, too. And connections. And money. And—”
“So wait, you just used him?” Ada asked.
“You could say that, sure.” Morgan felt a little uncomfortable, and figured she looked it, too. “Considering where Ben was from, who his dad was, and his war experience, we thought he was the perfect choice.”
“So he just came along?”
Morgan rubbed her heads together. “Well, we kinda kidnapped him.”
Ada snorted to herself. “I should have known. As soon as I think I have something figured out, I’m wrong.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“So you said ‘we’ a second ago. Do you mean it was just you and Ace before?”
“What? Yeah, exactly.” Morgan almost slipped. She never slipped her cover, but there was something about Ada. The young Swedish Marine was easy to talk to. “Ace and I can actually work together, you know, if we have to.”
Ada smiled diplomatically. Morgan had a feeling she’d already gotten the measure of Ace. With a guy that shallow, it didn’t take long. He wore everything on his sleeve.
“Back to your kidnapped captain,” Ada said.
“I’m going to regret telling you that, aren’t I?”
Ada smiled. “I’ll keep that to myself. But what I really want to know is, can I trust him? Is he a good man?”
The implication that Ada already trusted Morgan wasn’t lost on her. She had to take a second to think. What were her feelings on Ben? Honestly, beyond the needs of the mission, she hadn’t given that much thought. Ben was easier to get along with than Ace, but that wasn’t saying much. He was smart. He could be condescending, but he usually got it right in the end. He was, for the most part, a good person, but something haunted him; that much was obvious. Lots of somethings, it seemed.
“He’s a good man. He can be a bit childish at times, but when it counts, the true him comes out.” Morgan got up out of her pilot’s chair. “Why
don’t you take a seat, see how it feels? I’m gonna go check on the rest of our motley crew.”
Morgan made her way out of the Lost’s cockpit. She needed a little space from Ada, whom she liked, but who was forcing her to get in touch with actual human feelings a little too much. It made her feel soft.
She entered the ship’s shared space. Tomas and Ace were sitting on the wall-installed couches talking about weapons systems. Without hearing more than a couple of sentences, she knew it was obnoxious. Neither of them were who she was looking for.
“Where’s Ben?” asked Morgan.
“I dunno,” answered Ace. “In one of the quarters. His, if I had to guess.”
“Thanks, Ace,” Morgan said. “Always helpful.”
“You think an induction thrust assembly could actually be used as a weapon against these things?” Ace asked. “Because this crazy bastard seems to think so.”
“We do need something other than conventional weapons against these things,” Tomas offered.
Morgan stopped to think for a moment. It was true; they had to start thinking outside of the box. She was impressed with Tomas for that. She was even more impressed that he was managing to put Ace’s skills to use.
“I think it’s not a bad thing to think about. We’re going to need every idea we can get soon enough.”
“You think we’re flying into trouble?” Tomas asked.
Morgan shrugged. “Been a good bet so far.”
Nineteen
Morgan left Ace and Tomas to argue the merits of their proposals. Personally, she wasn’t betting on anything stopping these things. At least, nothing she’d seen yet.
But that didn’t mean she was giving up.
There were just three sleeping quarters on the Lost, made for six occupants. Only big enough to fit a bunk bed and four feet of head room, the quarters were cramped. Morgan only slept or spent time in them if she absolutely had to.
Morgan knocked on the door of Ben’s typical quarters. Things were a bit in flux with their new visitors. There was no answer, so she opened it up, expecting to see Ben sleeping in there.