The tawt had come on so quickly that if my stomach had sunk or my vision had narrowed, I didn’t notice. We materialized about seven hundred million kilometers from Lalande 21185, a dim red dwarf star 8.1 light-years from Earth. What gained my attention and Lan’s were the multiple missile strikes from an Eastern Alliance destroyer that had targeted us from a range of two hundred and ten thousand kilometers. Our co-pilot went on to say that we had made orbit of planet Gatewood-Callista but that a carrier group had been waiting for us with a pair of destroyers spearheading the formation. For the time being, the only evidence of that harsh reality was the awful drumming on the hull, but that would change quickly.
“Skin up!” I ordered in preparation for a hull breach. “Set for squad frequencies. Remember to report directly to your corporals.” I winced over that last order; it was more than a little obvious.
“We’re still under fire. Insertion locked in,” cried the pilot. “They’ve set up a few SAM sites. Countermeasures away!”
A horrific bellow from the stern drowned out the pilot’s last word, and I felt the wind of escaping atmosphere jerk my head despite the skin’s protection. A gaping seam had been torn in the overhead. Beyond the hole lay a smoky tunnel of darkness whose sides lightened and swirled as the pilot plunged into Gatewood-Callista’s deep cloud layers, stained blue by an abundance of methane. Not unlike Exeter, Callista orbited a gas giant, in this case Lalande 21185 b, whose mass was similar to Jupiter’s and whose planetary rings extended several million kilometers from the planet.
“Skin damage to stern,” reported the pilot. “Hull breach. I still have control.”
“All right,” the co-pilot said. “Here comes the SAM fire.”
For a second, I was paralyzed, imagining the Triumph rolling, climbing, and diving to avoid the incoming missiles, their warheads designed to eat through the ship’s reinforced skin and alloy hull. Then I wondered if I could take my thoughts into the mesosphere and recognize the bonds of those missiles. What if I could sever those bonds?
Buffeted violently by the pilot’s evasive maneuvers, I closed my eyes and called upon that strange new sense.
“First missile prematurely detonating,” hollered the co-pilot. “Same for the second. And the third.”
“Fourth missile locked on,” said the pilot. “It’s going to—”
I guess the missile was quicker than me, or the conditioning had failed. The missile struck the troopship head-on, shucking off the last of her skin and blasting apart the cockpit. Past the toothy, sparking remnants of the bow, a grayish brown plain blanketed in frozen methane shone through the moon’s perpetual twilight and hurtled toward us. I estimated our altitude at five hundred meters and decreasing fast.
“On your feet!” ordered Sergeant Lan.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Sir, preparing for a crash-landing, sir! Platoon, reach for the ceiling.”
Then I understood. Our crash would actually involve three impacts: the ship hitting the ground, our bodies hitting whatever was around us, and our organs slamming against our insides. We would first strike the surface with a force that would probably snap our straps and pull our seats from the deck. While we were skinned, we could sustain that force, though we would need to transfer the kinetic energy by bouncing up and down between the deck and ceiling. That would help ease the third and often fatal impact. I remembered Pope telling us about those cadets who had jumped from Whore Face, only to bounce themselves into IDOs. Lan had chosen a controlled version of the same. It might work.
We slammed into the surface at a fifty-two-degree angle, then the entire fuselage unexpectedly flipped over, tossing us toward the ceiling. Our skins registered the blow with a sharp rebound that sent us caroming haphazardly toward our seats. I figured Lan had hand-and-boot rebounds in mind when she suggested that we reach out, but as I spun back in midair, having just smashed into my seat shoulder-first, I gazed across a sea of tangled limbs.
A rock the size of my head shot through the hold, missing me by less than a quarter of a meter but colliding with a private in the rear. While his skin deadened most of the impact, the rock still drove him back into his comrades. Six privates in all tumbled toward the breach in the stern.
The inverted fuselage finally hit the surface, though it skated on via inertia. The bulkheads shook and thundered. More debris filtered in from the tear, and by the time the ship finally stopped, there was so much dust in the cabin that I ordered everyone to infrared. Too busy to worry about leadership issues, I monitored the squad frequencies as privates sounded off to their corporals and reported injuries.
My biggest concern was getting my people out of that wreck. We were a ripe target for Alliance atmoattack fighters, whose pilots might very well zero in on and finish us. As the corporals began issuing their reports to Lan, I put all three staff sergeants on evacuation detail—Douglas at the breach in the stern, Pariseau at what was left of the bow, and Holmes at the standard side hatch, which a private had managed to key open.
“Go! Go! Go!” I roared. “Fall back to the ridgeline west of us. Make sure your tacs are set for autoenvironment.”
I hoped that everyone heeded that last admonishment. If there was one thing I knew, it was the change of Gatewood-Callista’s surface. Methane melts at a temperature of -182.5°C, and our skins needed to account for that fact to provide us with traction and keep us warm in Gatewood-Callista’s balmy mid-day temperature of -199.6°C. Free of the limitations of a conventional suit, our skins would adjust to meet other demands, like the .899 gravity and an atmosphere so thin that it exerted a pressure on the surface one hundred thousand times weaker than Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level.
As I hustled through the bow breach, nearly tripping over a torn conduit, I realized that I had larger worries than skin settings. We had crash-landed in a rocky vale, and Global Positioning System reports in my HUV indicated that we were two kilometers south of our designated drop zone. We had landed just a quarter kilometer northeast of Ro’s main spaceport, two kilometers of tarmac with a cluster of six heavily shielded control spheres rotating atop a five-hundred-meter-tall arbor. The rest of the mining colony lay below, safe from micrometeorite bombardment. We were supposed to come in from behind the port, blast our way into a maintenance tunnel, pass through several airlocks, then fan out to engage in close-quarters urban combat against a force that had already staked out prime defensive positions. Satellite surveillance piped directly into my viewer indicated that one of the two battalions occupying Ro had been left at the spaceport.
“Lieutenant St. Andrew? Report?” That from my company commander, Captain Elizabeth Bentley-Jones, whose signal originated from the designated drop zone.
“We’re on the ground, ma’am. Crash-landed.” A platoon report spilled across my display, uploaded to me by Lan, who realized I was linked to the captain and would need that information. I couldn’t fault the first sergeant’s efficiency. “Two CFs,” I told the captain. “Both from the Three-seven.” I hesitated as I read a familiar name: Van Buren, Juzza. He had been Chopra’s squad corporal. Audis Phrawphraikul, a descendant of Taiwanese ancestors and probably the most earnest and intense corpsman in my platoon, was the other combat fatality. We lost him when the hull had been breached; his seat straps had not been properly fastened. Damned stupid way to go. Van Buren, it turned out, had suffered a heart attack during insertion, and his skin had grown too weak to maintain an atmosphere.
“Ship’s crew?” the captain inquired.
“Pilots assumed dead, as are the gunners.”
“All right, Lieutenant. I want you to take that ridge and follow it north to grid one-nine, where you’ll meet Lieutenant Halitov’s platoon. I want both of you conditioned boys in first. Halitov’s DBT is already getting to work. He should be ready for you by the time you get there. You got two hours.”
“Ma’am, I concur, ma’am. ETA: two hours. We’re moving out.” I switched to Lan’s private channel. I could just make her out through the dim, crimson light. She hunkered near the ship, directing the last pair of privates toward the line. “Sergeant?”
“Sir, yes, sir?”
“We’ll regroup at the ride, then we’re going north.”
“Sir, I know, sir. I monitored the channel. Staff sergeants are already getting the squads moved out.”
“Very well. I’ll meet you up there.”
A moment prior I had admired Lan’s efficiency, but her eavesdropping and jumping ahead of me, well, I wondered how long I would let that go. She wasn’t doing anything I would not have done, but she seemed a little too comfortable giving orders that should have come from me. I gritted my teeth, found the bond, and bolted ahead of my rifle-toting troops, reaching the ridgeline minutes before them. Had any privates actually been paying attention to me, they would have seen a smear in their infrared displays, a smear that congealed into a human-shaped silhouette.
“Nice trick,” Lan said, once she joined me on the ridge. She gave me a dirty look as she tossed me my rifle, which I had forgotten to unclip from beneath my seat.
We looked down on the vale, about two hundred meters below. As a child, I had flown over that very landscape during one of my infrequent trips to the surface. Tunnel traffic was often so severe that people traveling from city to city would hire a surface taxi that would zip them to their destination in a matter of hours instead of days. But that luxury would cost you nearly ten times what you would spend traveling in a ground car through the tunnels. The trains ran regularly, but unless you were a soldier or armed, you would do best to avoid them. I doubted the trains were running now. I doubted anything was functioning normally.
The artillery fire began about twenty minutes into our hike. Conventional shells exploded west of us, releasing “smart schrap,” your garden variety sharp-edged, self-propelled projectiles that homed in on skin emissions, struck their targets, rebounded, then homed in again. Kind of like throwing a handful of needles at someone, needles that would repeatedly stick you until you fell.
Lan, Douglas, Holmes, and Pariseau ran near me at the head of the platoon. I detached myself as Chopra, Tamburro, and Stark waved on their squads. I thought I could find the source of that artillery and render the battery useless by cutting the bonds of its targeting computer.
But even as I closed my eyes, a shell went off twenty meters ahead. When I opened my eyes, I saw ten, maybe fifteen of my people floundering on the ground and shrieking as the smart schrap scintillated and poked their combat skins at a rate of one hundred thrusts per second. I watched one, two, three, four skins dwindle. Thankfully, the schrap killed those privates much faster than the hypoxia or low surface pressure would have.
More skins darkened. A half dozen privates ahead charged back to get a look for themselves. In fact, a small crowd of grimacing combatants gathered around the dead and dying.
And that’s when the inexperience of my troops really hit me. Didn’t they realize the enemy troops manning that battery had locked our location and would now fire for effect? I reached for the bond, came up empty.
I can’t recall what I screamed at my people, but my words did nothing. Another round struck about fifteen meters below us, burrowed into the mountain wall, and heaved a great fountain of debris that rained down and booted the loiterers back on course.
Every corporal and two privates in each squad were field medic certified, as was I, though I wouldn’t discover that until hours later. We didn’t need medical help for those fifteen. Assessing their injuries took three seconds: penetrating trauma to every major organ. We left the bodies behind, but their names burned brilliantly in my viewer: Barker, Borkman, Chastain, Currie, Dehart, Dzoba, Gonzalez, Hyatt, Koris, Shionoi, Silberberg, Ubanhe, Vardikos, Wong, and Yilmaz.
Half my platoon gone. And one of them, Silberberg, looked a lot like Jarrett.
I had spent a week training with them and had reviewed each of their records and registered much more than the mathematics of their loss. I imagined their parents receiving the news and became even more determined to find my own father—if he was still alive.
By the time we reached grid one-nine, I had lost two more troops to artillery fire: Privates Romer and Hussain of the Three-nine, who had been pulling up the rear when the shell struck. My gorge had risen as I watched their deaths.
The grid itself turned out to be a ravine into which Halitov’s Drill and Blast Team had burrowed a four-meter-wide hole by employing a trio of extremely powerful particle borers. I stood next to my fellow Callistan as he showed me the hole.
“Anchors are set,” he said. “We go about fifty meters down to the tunnel overhead. Beautiful call. We’re right in the middle of an airlock. Alloy’s the standard five-twenty. My drill team’s burning through now. I called for air support to take out that battery. They’re en route.” He sighed deeply and turned away. “Some fuckin’ insertion, huh? That carrier group screwed us. We didn’t crash like you guys, but we took a couple hits. Landed here, off the DZ. Hey, you all right?”
Had he noticed my trembling or the tears welling in my eyes? Maybe both. I studied what was left of my platoon. On my order they had strung themselves out along the west side of the ravine, sweeping the zone with their QQ90s. Six left in the Three-seven. Eight in the Three-eight. Six in the Three-nine. And then there was me and First Sergeant Lan. I told myself there was nothing I could have done. We crashed. I moved them out. The artillery struck. But if I had considered taking out the battery sooner, those people might still be alive, and Lan would have had less reason to do what she did.
“St. Andrew?” Halitov called again.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just lost half my platoon. What could possibly be wrong with me?”
He just shook his head. “The captain wants me and you to drop in first. We’ll secure the lock so the rest can rappel down.”
“It’s good to be home,” I mumbled.
“Fuck yeah, it is. Vosk team’s already penetrated the alliances’ perimeter. We’re kicking some ass over there, and no one in that regiment is conditioned. Of course, they’re betting a lot on our unreliable skills. Still, I think we’ll be all right. And you know what? My platoon doesn’t need yours. These people are committed. Better people than we had at South Point—whether they hate me or not. Hey, there’s my call. They’re finished burning. You ready?”
I nodded.
A private suddenly flew out of the hole, having set his skin’s gravity to one quarter. Two more followed him, and all three had riflelike drills balanced in the crooks of their arms. While still falling, they adjusted their tacs’ gravity to Earth standard and dropped heavily onto the ice. One hustled over to Halitov, saluted, and said. “Ready to blast, sir. Plates hanging on by threads.”
“Drop the bombs,” ordered Halitov. “Here that, everybody? We’re dropping. Fall back! Fall back!”
While he evacuated with his DBT to the east side of the ravine, where his people had found good purchase and cover within icy grooves, I rejoined my group, crouching beside Chopra. “Talk to me about morale, Sergeant.”
“Sir, funny you should ask, sir. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that myself.”
“I know they’re scared. I know you are. Hey, so am I. But it’s not like we can change our minds.”
“Sir, Lan’s been telling us that those people died on the ridge because of you.”
“What?”
“She said you ordered us to take that course. She said that was a mistake. She wanted to follow a course along the base, where we’d be better shielded from the artillery. I think she’s already won over the staff sergeants.”
“What do you mean by ‘won over’?”
The ground quaked and splintered as the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) bombs detonated below. All electronic equipment, including particle rifles and a long list of other ordnance within a .789-kilometer radius, would be rendered useless. Our skins, powered by our own life forces, were immune to the effect. Research into equipment powered by our life forces had already yielded short-duration links for pilots who could tap into their engines and fly through EMP zones. Weapons powered by our own bodies were still in development, though they would become available before the war’s end.
“St. Andrew?” Halitov beckoned. “Let’s go!”
I slung off my rifle, hit the manual release on my bayonet. The long, narrow blade shot out. Two-handing the weapon, I jogged toward the hole and met Halitov. “I go first,” he said.
“How do you feel?” I asked, questioning his link to the bond.
“I’m good. You’re going to see some stuff that’ll make Yakata look like an amateur.”
“Just jump.”
He took in a long breath and stepped into the darkness.
I waited another second before I took the leap and watched Halitov’s infrared-enhanced and skinned form drop away from me. He timed his descent well, slowing as he passed through the plate torn away by the EMP bombs, and alighted with surprising grace on the airlock’s deck. I landed about a meter to his left, though I stumbled a little, having misjudged my velocity.
The airlock was one of many linking a complex lattice-work of square freight tunnels through which trains hauled ore to pressurized and unpressurized zones for storage. Though the airlock breach would register on Alliance scans, we hoped that the battalion commander would dispatch no more than a squad to check it out. After all, that officer had only about seven hundred troops to keep order among a population of two million spread through several hundred kilometers of chasms and tunnels. The only thing the commander could rely on was the fact that projectile weapons were forbidden on colos. Sure, they would probably encounter a few rebels with illegal arms, maybe even a few with illegal tacs, but for the most part they were dealing with sheep.
Until our arrival.
As we turned toward a pair of transparent permaglass doors about ten meters away and standing twenty meters tall, forty wide, the doors rumbled open about two meters and froze. I exchanged a worried glance with Halitov, then we split up, he darting to the left wall, me the right.
An Alliance Marine, bayonet sticking from his rifle, skin glowing in a camouflage pattern of gray and brown, hustled through the gap, followed by another, who edged furtively along the door until he reached the corner. No doubt more Marines lay behind the doors, probably stretched out on their bellies.
Halitov stole his way along the lock, running on the wall, then leaping down in front of the stunned Marine. He slammed the Marine’s rifle out of the way with his own, then, exploiting the bond to circumvent the rebound of skins, he gutted the man with an angry cry that drowned out his victim’s shrieking.
I frowned at him for a second before realizing that the other Marine was mine. I charged up on the soldier, who blinked and opened her mouth as I materialized improbably before her. I shook with the notion that I had to kill her, that I should ignore her beautiful blue eyes, high cheekbones, and the fact that somewhere out there was a mother and father. I had seen Halitov kill with impunity. This was my job. My duty. And my failure in the past had resulted in Pope’s death. I should have killed that guard—the way I would kill this Marine.
I lowered my rifle, then brought it up, sensing the bond and pushing the bayonet through the Marine’s skin and into her heart. One of her ribs scraped along my blade as I drove it deeper and watched blood gurgle up and leak past her lips. She shed her dimming skin and dropped to her knees, one hand wrapped around the barrel of my rifle. I jabbed her again, and her head slumped. She fell onto her side, freeing my blade.
I took one more look at her, then lowered to my knees and puked over my utilities.
Halitov shouted something.
An unfamiliar voice resounded behind me. “Halt!”
There, a meter back to my right, stood another Marine, a tall Hispanic young man with a thin mustache. The tip of his bayonet barely touched the skin over my neck as Halitov arrived in a blur behind him, then punched his back with his blade. I pulled away as the Marine collapsed.
“What the fuck you doing?” Halitov shouted, saliva bubbling around his lips. “There’s more behind the lock. Come on, motherfucker!”
I saw what he had—a potent, primordial rage that tainted his blood and set his temples throbbing—and at that moment I needed it. Or maybe I just needed to detach myself from the killing and function like the conditioned machine they wanted me to be. I found a scintilla of reconciliation in thinking about dead troops above. This was for them. I tossed down my rifle, pulled a K-bar from my right hip sheath, another from my left. I razored past Halitov, through the gap, and whirled to find eight more Marines lying behind the door. My entrance brought them quickly to their feet.
It’s difficult to describe the rest without portraying myself as a coldhearted and ruthless killer. I have no desire to glorify or condone what I did, or to paint myself as some war hero who deserves medals for, in the end, tearing apart families. I did not want to kill them. But I knew what would happen if I failed. I knew my duty. Truth was, they just worked for the wrong side. If I had met them in a bar, I would have bought them a drink. They would be my friends because, like me, they were soldiers.
Three Marines stood to my right along the airlock doors, with the other five behind me. I lunged for the first one ahead, with blades sticking from the ends of my fists. I slammed my right blade into the first one’s heart, then spun left and past him in a chak that pulled my right blade from him and drove it into the second. With my back facing that Marine, I caught the third with my left blade, listened to the revelatory hum of dying skins, then gaped at the five now in front of me.
Were it not for the EMP bombs, those Marines would have opened up with so much particle fire that I doubt I could have evaded it. But all they had now were their bayonets, their fists, and their desires to stay alive.
All five charged me.
I leapt above them, pivoted in a one-eighty, then came behind two, driving my blades down so hard that they penetrated the tops of their skulls and dug into their brains. They clanged heads and fell forward as I yanked free my K-bars.
Then, as the remaining three spun to face me, I dashed to their left, kicked up into a shoru, then slid by, arms and legs outstretched as I severed each of their jugulars. They dominoed to the deck, skins flickering as they clutched their necks and blood spurted between their fingers.
“Holy fuck,” said Halitov from somewhere behind me.
“Alert your staff sergeants,” I said evenly, not bothering to look at him. “The lock is secure.”
Rumors of how I and Halitov had “easily” taken out an entire squad spread through both platoons. I guess we should have policed up those bodies before allowing our people to pass through the lock. Then again, that kind of carnage did inspire fear. I reasoned I could use a little of that given Lan’s recent conspiring.
We humped for about fifteen hours through more of the freight tunnels, encountering only a few drifters who cheered at our entrance, then we finally reached the city limits of Metra, Ro’s main municipality, now a ghost town held under martial law, with citizens cowering in their apartments. The downtown district closely resembled big cities on an Earth of centuries past and had been built within a magnificent, circular chasm, two kilometers wide and about a kilometer high. Lights built into the rock helped to simulate daytime, as did a holographic sky operated by members of the artists’ guild, who created “weather” as they would a tableau on canvas. Presently, the holo shown a brilliant night sky that, after seeing the real vacuum, seemed exceedingly artificial to me. We kept close to the walls of buildings, darting forward in intervals, with Lan having volunteered to walk point. I had not spoken a word to her about what Chopra had told me. A right time had yet to present itself.
As we hustled across the intersection of L6 and G5 streets, I spotted the dilapidated old building where I had gone to elementary school. I remembered riding the train in from my family’s apartment in the narrow tunnels of suburbia. A new school had been constructed three streets down, the old one converted into miners’ low-income housing and obviously all but abandoned by the landlord. Even the Colonial Church of Christ’s diocese office next door had fallen into squalor.
“St. Andrew?” Halitov called on my private channel. His platoon continued its sweep several streets down to our east.
“Here.”
“Something’s wrong. Damn, I wish we had those EMPs. I’d drop one right now and not feel bad about it.”
“You send out a pulse wave, and there goes the life support system. Anyone without an e-suit is dead—and that’s most of the city and ’burbs, including my father. You do that, and trust me—I won’t be happy.”
“We’re gonna get ambushed. I know it. They got our tacs jammed up good. We’re just walking into a killing zone.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Only they’ll do the dying. You good?”
“Still on, though I don’t have enough magic to take out eight Marines. You’re a fuckin’ butcher, you bastard.”
I grimaced. “Just keep going. We’re only twenty blocks from the rest of the regiment.”
He started to say something, but a triplet of particle fire erupted on my chest. I rolled out of the next salvo to see an Alliance Marine leaning out of a fourth-story window across the street. “We’re taking fire,” I yelled to Halitov.
Perhaps twenty or thirty more Marines rolled to brace elbows on windowsills. So many beads shaved our paths that I ordered everyone into the office building behind us.
“Belay that order,” screamed Lan. “Douglas? Pariseau? String out along the avenue ahead. Holmes? Take your people down L-Eight. I’ll meet you there. We’ll see if we can catch them from behind.”
“Belay that order!” I shouted. “Everyone into the building. Now! Sergeant Lan? You’re relieved of duty. Fall back inside and wait for me.”
Her reply came in a whisper: “Fuck you.”
And as I retreated to the door behind me, Lan sprinted across the street and met up with Holmes’s people. They vanished behind the corner.
More particle fire chewed into the building around me as I swung open the door and ducked into a dark lobby to find Chopra and two other privates, Kim and Maz, with their backs pressed against the wall to my left.
“What’s she doing out there?” I asked the sergeant.
Chopra’s lip twisted. “Sir, it’s called mutiny, sir.”