by Matt Levin
First step: meet with the local militia leader, a young ex-EDF soldier named Will Figgin that Russ had recommended for the position. Second: touch base with the mayor to fill him in on the deep shit they were about to be in. On the final descent into the settlement, Russ forced himself to pay attention to the planet.
It was harshly beautiful, he had to admit. He wasn’t a big fan of the gushing, poetic descriptions of Calimor Nadia had flooded their comm channels with, but he couldn’t deny the appeal of the planet’s awesome blankets of dust storms, or the monumental mountain ranges.
Russ hoped that the settlers who had been living here for a few months had developed an even greater attachment to the landscape. Because they might just need to fight for it, and it was always easier asking soldiers to die on home soil.
The shuttle landed in one of the outlying hangars at the periphery of the settlement. As soon as the pilot confirmed that oxygen was flowing in the hangar, the door to the shuttle craft opened. Russ hopped out and immediately headed for the security office.
Russ figured it wasn’t a good sign that anyone could land without so much as a background check. Sure, they were reliant on a constant stream of traders and merchants coming in from off-world, but without a screening process in place, that meant anyone could basically walk into the settlement.
But that was an issue he’d address on another day. He had bigger problems on his plate at the moment.
It was easy enough to follow the signs to the security office. Russ hadn’t seen New Arcena before Nadia and her crew had gotten it up and running, but he was impressed at how little it resembled the ghost colony he had pictured.
The walls were spotless, not a single stray piece of debris anywhere. Clean lighting flooded the halls, and well-marked signs efficiently directed farmers and maintenance crew to their assigned destinations. Sure, the corridor walls resembled a motley patchwork of various construction materials, but he barely noticed it after a few minutes.
The deeper he walked into the complex, the more his eyes started drooping. He forced himself to stay awake, even pinching the skin on his wrist. He had been running on nothing but pure adrenaline, the anxiety had been making it hard to breathe, and it felt like his body was about to fall apart on him. Get yourself together, he told himself. Just a little bit further.
He approached a T-intersection and took the left-hand side, following signs pointing to the militia center. The corridors, which really felt more like tunnels in their circular design, spat Russ out at the entrance to the settlement’s security wing. The main offices were just ahead, with a gym and training facility off to the right, and a corridor leading to an outside courtyard off to the left.
He barged in through the main office’s door. It was hardly more glamorous than the dorm room he had worked out of during his first few months in the system. It looked like the militia leader had his own cubicle, whereas three others sat at cramped desks along the walls.
“Um, hello?” one of the three desk workers said. “Who are—”
Russ ignored her and strode into the militia leader’s cubicle. A broad-shouldered man with light blond hair was reviewing what looked like a series of accuracy drill reports on his terminal. Russ walked in, barked “Figgin!” and the other man’s eyes shot up immediately. His eyes went from surprise to confusion to recognition.
“You’re Russell Kama,” the man said, standing up to shake Russ’ hand.
“It’s just Russ,” he said, shaking Will’s hand. “I’ve got some bad news for you. Your job is about to become a lot less hypothetical.”
Russ launched into a concise explanation of the Offspring infiltration of the Union government and the potential threat to the colony. Then he moved on to how the Union had sent in soldiers to capture Isadora and the rest of the leadership. Will nodded and followed along, his eyes getting wider as Russ continued.
“The training’s over,” Russ concluded, gritting his teeth. “We’re about to be in the middle of a real fight. I assume you’ve been conducting the drills I asked you to?”
Will fumbled to pass over the datapad he was looking at earlier. Russ scanned the document. Considering that most of the militia members were EDF reservists, he hoped basic skills like how to shoot a damn gun wouldn’t be too hard. But a century in cryo had a way of freezing the muscle memory out of you. And Russ knew that the Zol-CARs had a steep learning curve. Still, the projections were heartening. Most militia members were performing well enough.
Russ skimmed through the rest of the document. Will had done a good job organizing the militia into fireteams and platoons, each with its own commanding officer. Still, their numbers were limited. New Arcena had only grown to about a thousand settlers, and only half of them were part of the militia. A small battalion, in other words.
If—when—it came down to a fight with the Union, they’d be hilariously outnumbered. Not to mention outgunned. The only thing they had was their knowledge of the territory. And the faint hope that the Union would follow its own laws restraining the use of nuclear weapons.
“We need to get a good feel for the layout of the battlefield yesterday,” Russ said. “How far out have you conducted drills from the settlement?”
“Well...a lot of our initial month was just spent in the courtyard here,” Will said. “But we’ve done a couple of field runs. And we’ve spent the last month mapping out the power tunnels, trying to get a sense of how to defend them.”
Russ furrowed his brow. Nadia had mentioned something in her damnably vague reports about an underground power grid that ran beneath the settlement, but he had just pictured a small network of cables in his head. Will passed him another datapad that included detailed schematics of the tunnels, with dimensions giving a sense of just how large they were.
Sometime in the future, Russ was going to have to have a talk with Nadia about how to write a damn report.
But the tunnels gave him a sense of cold relief. That would give them a huge advantage if—again, when—the Union sent troops down. He figured he could draw out a guerrilla war in those tunnels for months on end.
In a straight-up fight with the government, they’d lose. But stalling out the Union war machine, imposing costs every time they sent more troops in...outlasting the Union’s will to fight might just work. Even if they lost almost everyone. A handful of survivors could still pick up the pieces.
“You’ve done good, Figgin,” Russ said, shaking Will’s hand. The man looked young. Uncomfortably so, given the weight of what Russ figured was about to happen. But this was who they had to work with. Most anyone with actual combat experience would have died during the Hegemony attack on Mars. He had scanned the dossiers of every EDF member aboard the Preserver. He knew just how rare someone with Riley’s experience was.
He was making do with reservists and green-around-the-ears recruits. Maybe a few who had been lucky enough to have escaped the Hegemony bombardment, like him. It was a desperate situation, but he knew there was no sense cursing the circumstances. All he could do was move forward with what he had.
Will returned to his desk, a fearful look transfixed on his face.
“I’m gonna talk to whoever is in charge here,” Russ said. “It’s time to prioritize defense. I want you to double your drills. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you have the people.”
Will nodded. “Right. Yes. Sir,” he added, giving Russ a salute.
Russ gave the younger man a grim look and headed out of the office suite.
As Russ headed back for the T-intersection, it felt like his heart rate was exploding. This was exactly how he had felt back in the Sol System, with the Hegemony fleets bearing down on Earth and Mars while he couldn’t do anything but wait.
The entirety of his actual combat experience had been fighting small insurgent pockets back on Earth. Nothing like staring down all the gun barrels and missile silos a spacefaring empire could throw at you. How am I possibly cut out for this? he wondered, placing a hand on the wall to steady hims
elf.
Cut this weak shit out, he said, steeling his nerves. No one was ever ready for something like this. Whining about it was hardly productive. Maybe he couldn’t save everyone—hell, he probably wouldn’t save most people—but he’d make sure there was still someone left to crawl out of the ashes.
And at least the Union didn’t appear to be gunning for the Preserver. He knew ships were on their way to Calimor, but the Union navy had left the cryo vessel alone so far. Probably because it was so far out they’d have to pass into Horde territory to get there. Maybe those vicious frontier settlers were good for something after all.
Russ continued down the hallway, following signs for the mayor’s office. He arrived at the mayor’s door and forced it open. Morris Oxatur, a man big enough to make his desk look small by comparison, looked up from a datapad he was reviewing. The mayor squinted his eyes at him before a look of recognition crossed the man’s face. Even if they had never met, he figured Morris would have reviewed dossiers on all key personnel on Isadora’s leadership team. “Russell Kama?” Morris asked. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s just Russ,” Russ said, wondering if he should have just worn a fucking name tag. He walked forward to shake the man’s hand. “I’m here because the colony is under grave threat. Or it will be soon. I’m here to coordinate the defense of New Arcena.”
Morris didn’t express as much credulity as the militia head. He crossed his thick fingers and sat forward in his chair. “You realize we’re a spice farming colony on the ragged edge of the frontier, right? We get into a fight, and I only see it going one way.”
“A spice farming colony on the ragged edge of the frontier with a well-run militia composed of plenty of good people with military experience,” Russ countered. “The situation isn’t hopeless.”
“Mind telling me a bit about who we’re fighting, then?” Morris asked with a sigh.
“The Union.”
“No way in hell,” Morris laughed incredulously. “We’ll all be dead in an hour if we go toe-to-toe with them.”
Russ frowned and asked Morris if he could borrow his console. The mayor grudgingly allowed him to. Russ input a series of commands, syncing up the console’s screen with the rudimentary system scanning technology from the Preserver.
The display screen showed the Natonus System’s nine planets, the asteroid belt between Enther and Calimor, and thousands of small blips marking spacecraft in transit. Russ used his thumb and his pointer finger to zoom in on a region of space between the planets Rhavego and Enther.
There was a group of blips huddled in orbit of Rhavego, whereas two blips had broken off on a trajectory toward Calimor. “That’s the Union navy’s Fourth Fleet,” Russ said, pointing at the blob orbiting Rhavego. “And that’s a detachment of warships they’re sending right for us,” he added, pointing to the two renegade blips.
That finally got to Morris. He unlaced his fingers and covered his mouth with one of his hands.
“We’re taking people off of spice cultivation duty and putting everyone we can into militia training,” Russ continued. “Anyone who can hold a gun, will hold a gun. And when the Union gets here, if they really want to get into a fight with us, we’ll give ‘em as much hell as we can raise. Maybe we’ll get lucky and have a couple dozen of us get out of this thing alive.”
Morris looked back and forth between the projection on his terminal and Russ. “Look, I’m a reasonable man. I appreciate that security has to come first. But—”
“—no buts,” Russ interrupted. “And effective immediately, I’m taking control of the colony.”
Morris gave him an intense stare. “You can’t be serious. I’m the mayor. I’m in charge.”
“Isadora Satoro is in charge. And she isn’t here right now. As her chief defense adviser, I am taking over in her name. It’s the chain of command, all the way down.”
Russ stared Morris back just as intensely. Eventually, Morris blinked. “Okay. You win. I know who my boss is.”
“Good,” Russ said, feeling the tension in his neck and his arms subside. “Call all your workers together. We’ll announce the change of plans in a joint statement.”
Morris nodded and began typing on his terminal. “What should I tell them?” he asked, his fingers hovering in midair.
Russ grimaced. “Tell them we’re going to war.”
CHAPTER 35
* * *
The worst part about camping was waking up while everyone else was still asleep. There wasn’t much for Nadia to do other than to wrap herself more tightly around the heat lamp in her tent, listening to the wind as it whistled through the nearby forest. She looked out the mesh toward Boyd and Derek’s own tents. Neither had stirred.
But that was about it in terms of Nadia’s complaints. Everything else had been perfect.
She and her team had been surveying the Ikkren backcountry for the better part of the last three weeks, shuttling between potential settlement sites in the Exemplar, and camping out while they assessed things like water access or proximity to vital resources. Then they made climate projections, which either meant really cold or you’ve-got-to-be-shitting-me cold on a planet like Ikkren.
Still, they had found a few suitable sites, especially the one where they were camped out now. Nadia was surprised at how much real estate was still available on Ikkren. Maybe it was because no one else had been desperate enough to settle in the Horde’s backyard. That, at least, had been Boyd’s analysis.
Nadia had been keeping up with the Horde leader all throughout her survey efforts. She would submit any final decision on a settlement effort to Tori Hyrak for approval. And then, once greenlit, she’d submit that to Isadora for approval. Bureaucracy, she thought with a chuckle.
And then, after all that, maybe they’d wake up another couple hundred colonists on the Preserver and send them out here. I hope they remembered to pack a parka, Nadia thought. It would’ve been easy to spend their nights aboard the climate-controlled interior of the Exemplar, but if she was asking people to actually live out here, she figured she owed it to any future colonists to spend the nights outdoors. She cuddled her heat lamp harder as another gust of wind blew past. The outer flap of her tent went wild.
Plus, there was something romantic about camping. The last time Nadia had spent this much time outdoors had been during her earliest years, back on Earth. That being said, it still caused her no small amount of restlessness as Boyd and Derek continued to snooze the morning away while she tossed and turned.
Deciding that getting up and moving around would be a better way of generating heat, Nadia pushed herself up, made sure she had properly fastened her enviro-suit, and unzipped the mesh flap to her tent.
She tiptoed past the two men’s tents. They had earned their rest. Boyd’s architecture background had helped immensely while they were scouring the backcountry for settlement sites. He could provide useful estimates for a colony’s land use requirements, and had a critical eye for things Nadia might have overlooked, such as keeping everything within a certain elevation range.
And Derek, meanwhile, had a childhood’s worth of familiarity with the planet that no survey map could match. He had suggested sites for settlement that Nadia hadn’t even thought of based on the geographic data she had downloaded. The site they were at now came from Derek’s background knowledge, not the data. And so far, it seemed like the most promising one yet.
Nadia had also found a silver lining to her companions’ tendencies to stay up and sleep in late. Although they had maintained their frosty attitudes toward each other for the first week, they gradually struck up conversations after Nadia would go to bed. Some nights, she’d stay awake for as long as possible to listen to what they were talking about.
Derek would ask Boyd what it was like growing up on Calimor, and how it had felt to leave it all behind. Boyd would ask Derek about his opinions on the Horde and the broader political situation on Ikkren. Derek would complain, sometimes passionately, about the p
lanet’s isolationism, or its hostility to outsiders. From what Nadia could tell, that had slowly started making Boyd more comfortable around him.
She walked away from their campsite, the Exemplar still visible across the tundra to the left, and headed for the nearby forests. The trees on Ikkren were beautiful, unlike anything Nadia had ever seen before. Most of the trees resembled conifers, although their needles were a shade of frosty blue instead of green. They featured large, spiral-shaped pine cones that drooped down from the tree branches.
Nadia loved the way the wind bellowed as it swept through Ikkren’s dense forests. Or the way it got caught on each individual pine needle, like it was whistling a symphony as it meandered its way through the brush. And the trees—she wondered, briefly, if “everblues” would be the right word to use—provided a welcome respite from the wind’s violence for anyone on the ground. The smell of resin got more intense the closer she got.
The day was overcast, like most of them on Ikkren. But Nadia could still make out the shape of the Natonus sun behind the clouds. Every once in a while, the clouds shifted enough to let a ray through. The forest floor looked like a marble of light and shadow.
And in the middle of all that peace, her wrister beeped.
“Damn it,” she said. Normally, she would save the message until later, but this one was a priority message. Pulling up her wrist device, she suddenly seemed to notice the cold all the more. It had been too easy to forget while she had been enjoying the landscape.
To her surprise, the message was from Morris Oxatur. She hadn’t heard from the mayor since departing Calimor well over a month ago. Wondering what he had to say, she opened the message.
A holographic image of the man’s face appeared. Expecting the kindly eyes and serene expression she had known him for, she was all the more disturbed when the mayor wore a grim expression on his face. “Nadia,” Morris began, “I’m contacting you because I don’t know who else to go to. Apparently, we’re not allowed to send any transmissions to Isadora Satoro at the moment.”