by C H Gideon
“Do you want me to inform the battalion?” the doctor asked.
Jenkins shook his head. “No, I’ll do it. I want you to oversee the decontamination shed, and make sure to pack each and every mech with all the perishables they’ll need for the next thirty days.”
“That slate—” Fellows gestured to the one he had given Jenkins. “—contains my requisition list. I’ll need those supplies before I can construct the decontamination shed.”
“I’ll call them down ASAP,” Jenkins assured him. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“Colonel.” Doctor Fellows snapped a salute before exiting the cabin.
“May I have your attention…” Colonel Jenkins’ voice crackled through Elvira’s interior speakers, rather than through her headset. Xi recoiled in surprise, realizing he was making a battalion-wide address.
“This can’t be good,” Xi muttered.
“Ten minutes ago, Doctor Fellows informed me that our HQ has been blanketed in a layer of radioactive material,” Jenkins explained, causing Xi’s throat to tighten in alarm. Visions of radiation-poisoned war victims flooded her mind, and for a moment, she thought her heart skipped a beat as she imagined herself with a patchy head of hair and an emaciated physique. “He has already increased our med dosages, and we will begin adjusting battalion-wide protocols to compensate. Within twelve hours, we will have a decontamination shed up and running, where all vehicles and personnel will be scrubbed as clean as possible. After each mech has undergone this procedure, quarantine protocols will be in effect throughout the battalion. I know you meatheads like to play in the snow, but fun time’s over. The enemy has violated humanity’s, and even the Illumination League’s, most fundamental war-time conventions. I intend for us to stand our ground and deliver the only appropriate rebuke—right into their teeth.”
Xi felt her neck-hairs stand on end as her CO gave voice to the anger she currently felt at hearing she had been poisoned by the enemy.
“Check with your unit commanders for revised deployment protocols,” Jenkins concluded. “Jenkins out.”
“Is this for real?” Blinky asked, stepping into the cockpit with a concerned expression.
“Seems like it.” Xi nodded irritably, doing her best to project an air of calm and control.
Sarah Samuels pushed past Staubach. “Captain Xi, how can we confirm the Jemmin really used a dirty bomb of some kind?”
“Trust but verify?” Xi quirked a brow in mild approval of the reporter’s suggestion.
“Something like that,” Samuels said guardedly.
“Well…” Xi mused sarcastically. “We could gather up some surface ice in cadmium-lined containers for later testing, or we could pop a section of the top-side hull off and stuff it in a box somewhere in the hope the Bonhoeffer can retrieve and analyze it, or...”
Samuels gave her a withering look. “Captain, if you don’t intend to take my question seriously...”
Blinky’s eyes lit up. “Or we could pull the Geiger-counter from the med-kit and test samples of surface ice against samples taken from a meter down?”
Xi rolled her eyes, but in truth, she was glad he had taken the initiative after she’d left the proverbial door wide open for him. “Well…I guess you could,” Xi said grudgingly.
“But what about breaking quarantine?” Samuels asked with mild concern.
“It doesn’t matter until after we scrub the mech,” Xi shook her head. “This cabin is already full of irradiated dust. Once we’ve cleaned Elvira inside-and-out, we can’t re-open the hatch without re-contaminating the interior.” She twisted her mouth into a bemused smirk. “I guess that means you’re going to have to choose where you’d like to ride out the rest of this mission, Ms. Samuels.”
Samuels returned the smirk. “We’ll just have to wait and see how things shake out. I’ve grown rather fond of Elvira and her crew, after all.”
“Great…” Xi said with patently false enthusiasm, turning back to her HUD and sarcastically muttering, “Really, really great.”
8
Offense vs. Defense
“Those are way too fragile to be packed like that,” Podsy barked, driving his forklift over to the drop-can in bay four. “These are the last of our radiation meds, Gong,” he explained, mustering as much patience as possible while dealing with the hard-headed grease-monkey. “They need to be packed in orange, drop-rated containers to make sure they survive the landing.”
“The green boxes have more interior volume, Chief,” Guo Gong argued. “We can put three times as many doses in the same space by using them.”
“The green boxes are less protected, so three times nothing is still nothing,” Podsy snapped. “I’d rather deliver half of the drugs safely than all of them like that—” He pointed derisively at the stacks of green-boxed meds. “Use the orange pipes, like I said fifteen minutes ago, and with any luck, we won’t miss our drop.” He checked the drop-timer above the can, which showed just seventeen minutes to delivery. “Let’s move, people,” he urged, clapping his hands as loudly as possible while the recalcitrant Guo grudgingly did as ordered.
His shift had been on-duty for fourteen hours, which was nothing as far as he was concerned, but they were beginning to fray at the edges. For most of Third Shift, this was their first deployment. They had responded well to the pressure of the situation, but a few rough edges still needed to be sanded down.
A Second Shifter drove a forklift past, carrying a positioning gyro for a Scorpion-class-compatible SRM mount.
“Hold up,” Podsy called after the crewman, causing her to stop and make eye contact. “Is that for Elvira?”
“No, Chief.” She shook her head. “This is for Devil Crab 2.”
“Lift it up so I can see the plug mount,” he urged.
She hesitated before doing as told, and once she had lifted the meter-square device high enough that he could see its underside, he shook his head irritably.
“Devil Crab’s control cable uses a thirty-one-pin connector, not a Scorpion’s standard twenty-six like Elvira,” he explained as he turned his forklift toward a nearby workbench. “We never got around to re-standardizing Crab’s connectors after Durgan’s Folly. Take it over to the bench,” he urged. “I’ll re-do the connector, but you’ll have to help me.”
She complied, and he did his best to lean out of his forklift’s seat to gather the needed supplies.
“Tell me what to get, Chief,” she said when it became painfully clear he was moving far too slowly.
“A size fourteen stripper—” He gestured to the tools hanging above the bench. “—and a same-size set of crimps.”
She retrieved the indicated tools while Podsy carefully opened the connector end and peeled back the wires, one by one, before clipping the whole thing off and tossing it into the re-usable parts bin. It took him less than two minutes to replace the twenty-six-pin connector with the proper thirty-one. Without needing to be told, the Second Shifter brought a test box and plugged it in to verify its status.
The diagnostic completed in a few seconds and all indicators flashed green.
“Good work.” He nodded approvingly, high-fiving the crewman before urging, “Now get it over to the can.”
The next ten minutes flew by as his team finished loading for the drop. Gong even managed to get the radiation meds correctly packed and secured with a minute to spare before the doors closed and the overhead lift mechanism began conveying the drop-cans to the launch tube.
Each can was loaded into the tube’s airlock, which could hold eight such cans simultaneously, and soon Chief Rimmer broadcasted through the area.
“Initiating drop in five…four…three…two…one…can one away…can two away…can three away…” he intoned with the consistency of a metronome until, finally, all eight cans were out of the tube and en route to the surface of Shiva’s Wrath.
During ejection, Podsy sat at the same workstation that Rimmer had previously used to grant him access to the Bonhoeffer’s sensors. He began poring over stored
sensor data, specifically the information surrounding those fifteen Vorr shafts. He needed to access the Bonhoeffer’s main processor for a few minutes to crunch the numbers, and for that, he would again need Chief Rimmer’s access codes.
“All cans down,” Rimmer said grimly. “Can Four’s braking thrusters failed and the impact exceeded green box tolerances. What was green-packed in Four?”
Podsy made brief eye contact with the wide-eyed Gong, but Podsednik had no desire to rub the crewman’s nose in it. Everyone made mistakes; the trick was learning from them.
Podsy switched on his workstation’s two-way intercom and replied, “Nothing perishable other than a few desalination filters, sir. All the radiation meds were orange-tubed by Mr. Gong.”
“Good work, Gong,” Rimmer congratulated while Gong suddenly looked ashamed, but Podsy needed to focus on his sensor feeds.
“Chief Rimmer, a word?” Podsy asked over the intercom.
“On my way.” The chief appeared at Podsy’s side a few moments later. “What is it?”
“I need to run some simulations,” Podsy explained. “These laser-drilled shafts were cut from orbit, but I don’t know the laser’s point-of-origin. I need access to the Bonhoeffer’s main processor for at least three minutes, maybe as much as five, to run the simulations and get a clear picture.”
“So, what’s the problem?” Rimmer asked bluntly.
“I need your access codes, sir,” Podsy said warily.
“Not anymore you don’t.” Rimmer shook his head. “General Akinouye personally approved my request to have your privileges upgraded. In fact, you probably have greater access than I do at this point.”
Podsy blinked in confusion. “Why would he do that, sir?”
“The general’s been doing this a long time, Chief.” Rimmer smirked. “If there’s one thing a lifelong CO like the general can spot a click away, it’s talent. And any CO’s first job is to put the people under him where they can do the most good and then give them what they need to succeed.” He clapped Podsy on the shoulder. “Carry on, Chief.”
Too surprised to intelligently reply, Podsy said, “Thank you, sir.”
He then refocused on the task at hand and began running simulations with the hope that they would paint a clearer picture of who burned those holes in the ice on Shiva’s Wrath.
“My son was right,” Xi heard a deep, gravelly voice call out from beyond the decontamination shed.
Xi turned to see what might have been a slightly-older clone of Tim Trapper Jr. emerge from the other side of Elvira, which was getting a thorough scrub-down by a team of PDF soldiers apparently serving out some kind of disciplinary sentence under Trapper’s watchful eye.
“Excuse me, Sergeant Major?” Xi asked.
“He said you were a lot like my daughter,” Trapper Sr. explained as he appraised Elvira with every purposeful, yet leisurely-looking step he took around Xi’s mech. “He was right. Have to say, though… Between you and me, I prefer your taste in vehicles to hers.”
Xi was intrigued. “You don’t like TFMC dropships?”
“Not as far as I could throw them,” he spat, meeting her eyes and sending a shiver down her spine at the uncanny resemblance between father and son. “Though I’d be the first to admit it’s mostly because she rode one to her death. A person can learn to accept a profound loss, Captain Xi, but it’s unreasonable to expect that person to forget it.”
Xi nodded in agreement. “If it was forgettable, it wouldn’t be very profound, would it?”
“Exactly,” he replied approvingly.
A question sprang to her mind, and it passed her lips even before she realized it was on them. “What about forgiveness?”
“Forgiveness?” he chuckled. “Well…it probably takes a better man than me to pull that particular maneuver off. Dawkins,” he barked at one of the troopers scrubbing Elvira’s acid-burnt top-side, “if I see one more half-assed thrust of that broom, I’ll personally arrange an intimate encounter between the two of you. Is that clear?”
“As a Solarian’s conscience, sir,” Dawkins replied snappily before redoubling his efforts to wash down Xi’s mech and avoid further aggravating the senior Trapper.
“What happened between you two?” Xi asked, this time fully conscious of the question and its potential hazards.
“Honestly?” The grizzled sergeant major sighed, and for a fraction of a second, he looked like a tired old man before his gruff exterior and stiff posture once again projected the air of a battle-hardened leader of men. “Loss happened. Some are better dealing with it than others, and it turns out I don’t measure very high on that particular stick.” He turned and critically eyed her from head to toe before chuckling. “When he’s right, he’s right.” Trapper Sr. thrust his hand out. “I’m glad to have met you, Captain.”
“Likewise,” she acknowledged, accepting his hand before he climbed up Elvira’s leg with a demonstration of agility and spryness that should have been impossible for an eighty-two-year-old man.
He moved over to the acid-burnt patch of Elvira’s top-side and whistled. “Never seen a burn like that. Looks like it only missed the cabin by about a few centimeters.”
“I’ve got a good Monkey,” she said with conviction. “He hosed it off before it ate the rest of the way through.”
Trapper nodded approvingly. “Hang onto him.” His attention was taken by something, or someone, to Elvira’s stern, and he barked, “Who in the name of Hades taught you how to push a broom, Butte?”
He made his way out of Xi’s sight and left her to marvel at just how uncannily Senior and Junior resembled each other.
“All right, Styles,” Jenkins said after the door to his private cabin was shut. “Let’s hear it.”
“The angle of the strikes suggests they were made from a single position in low orbit,” Styles explained. “Podsy used the Bonhoeffer’s main processor to run billions of simulations, and this is what they showed as most likely.” He pulled up a visual display of the ship’s probable location. “We can’t be certain, but it looks like this one would favor a Jemmin, not Vorr, warship. The ability to remain stable while in low orbit takes a lot more technical capability than we have or the Vorr, most likely. By stable, I mean the ship can’t move more than a millimeter from its geosynchronous orbit for the duration of the drill. Judging by the cleanliness of the holes, it didn’t even move that far.”
“How confident are you that it was the Jemmin and not the Vorr?” Jenkins asked.
“Eighty-five percent,” Styles replied firmly. “With the ice core samples, I could tell you with absolute certainty, but we have to assume they’re long gone.”
“So, the Jemmin came here, punched a bunch of holes in the ice…” Jenkins wearily rubbed the bridge of his nose. “…and, what…left something behind?”
“That’s our best guess.” Styles nodded.
Jenkins shook his head dubiously. “But if that thing was important enough that reclaiming it justified the risk of a shooting war with the Vorr, why wouldn’t they have come and picked it up before DIE ever came to this world?”
“There are a couple possible answers,” Styles said as a gleam entered his eye. “One is that they didn’t know that the humans were coming. The second, and I think more likely answer, is that the Jemmin didn’t know about it until recently.”
“But if they dropped it…” Jenkins trailed off as he slowly began to take Styles’ meaning. “You’re saying that whatever’s down there was left by a rebel Jemmin faction?”
“Rebel? Based on what little we know, or think we know, about Jemmin society…probably not,” Styles shook his head doubtfully. “But dissident? It looks that way to me, Colonel.”
“So, the Vorr—” Jenkins steepled his fingers contemplatively. “—learned about this a few decades ago and…what?”
“Alerted DIE that there was something worth investigating down here,” Styles suggested, “and asked them to establish a mining operation so they could clandestin
ely retrieve whatever’s down there without violating interstellar law. The Jemmin found out, and...”
“Wait.” Jenkins sat forward in alarm. “Are you suggesting that whatever’s down there is related to the Vorr withdrawal from the Illumination League?”
Styles seemed genuinely uncertain, but more than that, he looked uncomfortable following what appeared to be the inevitable train of thought associated with his theory. “I’m saying,” he began carefully, “that the timelines match up enough to suggest it.”
Jenkins sat back in his chair, wondering just how deep this hole he’d lunged head-first into went. “Which means we might have been brought here…” He stopped, unable to finish the thought.
“…to form an anti-Jemmin alliance with the Vorr and whatever this third species is,” Styles finished somberly. “If the Jemmin suspected as much, they would have driven the Vorr off as soon as possible.”
“While leaving a contingent here to drive us off,” Jenkins muttered in disbelief, “or, if necessary, to destroy us.”
“The actions we’ve seen suggest this is the case. It’s easier to deal with the fall-out from a ‘rogue’ warship’s actions than to face an alliance which consists of Vorr, Terran, and whatever these insectoids are,” Styles said with finality. “They left that one ship here so they could claim plausible deniability for its aggression.”
“It’s too transparent,” Jenkins rejected. “There’s no way it passes the sniff test…is there?”
“Stranger things have happened.” Styles shrugged. “But this is all still conjecture. I have no hard evidence.”
“It’s the best we’ve got to work with,” Jenkins mused, “and it explains why the Jemmin are willing to go to such lengths to drive us off Shiva’s Wrath, including irradiating the planet in violation of most interstellar treaties.” He gritted his teeth and flashed a wolfish grin. “Which means leaving is not an option.”
“Do you think we should present any of this to the general?” Styles asked.