The End of All Things Part 3: Can Long Endure
Date: 2015-06-23 22:29:57+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Science Fiction; Military; Space Opera; Humorous; Hard Science Fiction; General
Description: Can Long Endure is the third of four thrilling instalments of John Scalzi's The End of All Things. The full novel is also available to buy. Our fate is in their hands . . .The Colonial Union's Defence Force was formed to save humanity when aggressive alien species targeted our worlds. Now Lieutenant Harry Wilson has an urgent new mission, as a hostile universe becomes ever more dangerous. He must investigate a sinister group, which lurks in the darkness of space playing different factions against one another. They'll target both humans and aliens, and their motives are unfathomable. The Defenc
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

THE END OF ALL THINGS

The Third Instalment

CAN LONG ENDURE

JOHN SCALZI

TOR

Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

About the Author

By John Scalzi

Copyright

To the production staff of Tor Books and at all my other publishers.

Thank you for making me look good.

PART ONE

It was Tuesday, and we had to murder a revolution.

“It is Tuesday, yeah?” Terrell Lambert asked. There were four of us in the squad for this mission, and we waited, slowly circling, in a shuttle twenty-five klicks above the planet surface.

In one way, it was a reasonable question. Days fade into each other in the Colonial Defense Forces, especially when you’re traveling from one mission to the next. One day is very much like another on a starship, there are no real “days off.” Tracking days might make sense if you were waiting for your term of service to end, but recently we’d been made aware that our terms of service were likely to be extended indefinitely. This is what happens when your sole source of soldiers has been taken from you and you have no way to get any more anytime soon.

That being the case, tracking specific days didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Was it Tuesday? It might be. Did it matter that it was Tuesday? Not as much as it might otherwise.

In another way it was a ridiculous question because every CDF soldier has a computer called a BrainPal in their head. The BrainPal is a marvelous piece of equipment which can tell you instantly what day it is, what time it is, what the ambient temperature around is, and every single mission spec—along with, really, anything else you might want or need, information-wise.

Lambert knew exactly what day it was, or could know. He wasn’t asking as a point of information. He was making an existentialist point about the nature of a life in the Colonial Defense Forces. It’s worth saying that it’s doubtful that Lambert was specifically intending to bring attention to the existential nature of his question. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Also, he asked because he was bored, waiting for our mission to begin. Boredom also happened a lot in the Colonial Defense Forces.

“Yeah, it’s Tuesday,” Sau Salcido replied. “Ask me how I know.”

“Because of your BrainPal?” Ilse Powell asked.

“No. Because yesterday was Pizza Day in the Tubingen mess. Pizza Day is always Monday. Therefore: It’s Tuesday.”

“That messes me up,” Lambert said.

“That it’s Tuesday?” Salcido asked.

“No, that Monday is Pizza Day. Back on Earth I was a custodian at an elementary school. Pizza Day was always on Friday. The teachers used it to keep the kids in line. ‘Behave yourself or you don’t get pizza on Friday.’ Having Monday be Pizza Day subverts the natural order of things.”

“You know what’s worse than that,” Powell said. “That Tubingen’s mess serves tacos on Wednesday.”

“When it should be on Tuesday,” Salcido said.

“Right, ‘Taco Tuesday.’ It’s right there.”

“Well, only in English,” Salcido pointed out. “If you speak Spanish, for example, it’s ‘martes de tacos,’ which isn’t alliterative at all. I think it’s ‘martes de tacos.’ I could be messing up the translation.”

“You could just check with your BrainPal,” Lambert said.

“And you could have checked with your BrainPal about what day it is, so what’s your point.”

“At the school we always had tacos on Thursday,” Lambert said, changing the subject.

“Why would you do that?” Powell asked.

“Why wouldn’t you? It’s still a day that starts with a ‘t’.”

“In English,” Salcido interjected.

“In English,” Lambert continued. “It’s still alliterative.”

“Technically it’s alliterative,” Powell said. “Functionally a ‘th’ sound and a hard ‘t’ aren’t alliterative at all.”

“Sure they are.”

“‘Thhhhhhhh,’” Powell hissed. “It’s nothing like ‘t’.”

“You’re reaching,” Lambert said.

“Help me out here,” Powell said, to Salcido.

“She’s got a point,” Salcido said, to Lambert.

“‘Taco Thursday’ still makes more sense than ‘Pizza Monday,’” Lambert said.

“Only in English,” Salcido said. “In Spanish it’s lunes. So ‘lunes de pizza.’ Which kind of makes sense.”

“That doesn’t make sense at all,” Lambert said. “Not even a little bit.”

“Sure it does,” Salcido said. “There’s that old song. ‘When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.’ ‘Lunes’ comes from ‘luna,’ which is moon. So there you go.”

“I have never once heard of this song,” Powell said. “You just made it up. This is a thing you just made up to win an argument.”

“Agreed,” Lambert said.

“I did not.”

“It’s complete bullshit.”

“No.”

“Vote,” Lambert said. His hand went up. So did Powell’s. “The motion passes. It’s bullshit.”

“I said it was an old song,” Salcido protested.

“Lieutenant,” Lambert said, “you’ve never heard of this pizza moon song, have you?”

“I am not being drawn into your stupid argument,” I said. “Or more accurately, another of your stupid arguments.”

“The lieutenant has never heard of your pizza moon song either,” Lambert said to Salcido. “And she was a musician. She would know.”

“There are a lot of different types of musicians,” Salcido said, only a little defensively.

A notification pinged in my view. “They’re done talking,” I said, to my squad. “We’re on. Forty-five seconds. Suit up.” I grabbed my gear, which in this case included a nanobot pack, a drone, and my Empee rifle.

“When we get back to the Tubingen I’m going to find that song,” Salcido said, grabbing his own gear. “I’m going to find it and I’m going to make all of you listen to it. You’ll see. You’ll all see.”

“Masks,” I said. I signaled my combat unitard to create a mask, covering my face. It crept up my head, obscuring my view until my BrainPal offered up a visual feed.

“What’s for lunch today?” Lambert asked, through his BrainPal, because his mouth was now snugly covered, like everyone else’s.

“Hamburgers,” Salcido said. “Because it’s Tuesday.”

The shuttle door opened, exposing us to the frigid temperatures of the upper atmosphere of Franklin.

“Out you go,” I said to the three. They jumped out of the shuttle without further prompting. I counted off thirty and then jumped out of the shuttle myself.

Franklin was close to the size and mass of the Earth, basically perfect for human life, and was one of the first few planets colonized, back in the early days of the Colonial Union. It was densely populated, with citizens whose ancestry ranged from first-wave North American colonists to recent refugees from the Indonesian civil war, most of them on the large, thin continent of Pennsylvania, which dominated the northern hemisphere. There were a number of provinces and sub-provinces, but New Philadelphia, the city above which I now found myself, was the home of the planet’s global government.

The global government which was, in a matter of minutes, about to vote on a bill to declare independence from the Colonial Union.

My BrainPal alerted me to the location of the other three members of my squad, some thousands of meters below me. They had a different mission objective than I did, although we were all headed for the same place: the global capitol building, affectionately (or perhaps not so affectionately) called “the glass slipper.” It was named so because the architect gave it a swooping, rising profile that vaguely resembled a shoe—very vaguely in my opinion—and because the building was clad in a transparent, glass-like material, designed, or so the architect said, to be a metaphor for the transparency of the Franklin government itself.

The primary entrance to the Franklin capitol was a large, open arch that led into a rotunda, from which, if you looked up, you could see the shoes of the global representatives, because on the highest level of the “slipper” was the legislative chamber, which boasted a lovely, sloping roof and a transparent floor which looked down into the rotunda. It was my understanding that it wasn’t until the construction that someone pointed out that the transparent floor meant visitors could look up and see the underwear (or not) of the legislators wearing open leg coverings like skirts and kilts, at which point piezoelectric opaquing elements were added to the floor at considerable additional expense. Someone also neglected to consider the fact that a large room whose walls were entirely composed of transparent elements might turn into something of a greenhouse during warmer months, leading to several early heat prostration events before the air-conditioning to the legislative chamber was improved.

Another thing no one had considered: that placing one’s global legislative chamber at the very top of a transparent building might make it uniquely vulnerable to attack from above. But then, with the exception of a single incursion by the Conclave right after the Colonial Union’s attack on their fleet at Roanoke, Franklin, as one of the core planets of the Colonial Union, hadn’t been meaningfully attacked by an alien species in decades. And by the Colonial Union itself, never. Why would it have been? It was a constituent part of the Colonial Union.

Until, possibly, today.

“We’re down,” Powell said to me. That meant that the three of them had landed and were heading toward the capitol rotunda, bristling with weapons and general menace. The idea was for them to draw the capitol security force—such as it was—to them, and to cause a lockdown of the legislative chamber, sealing all 751 representatives inside the room.

Which was where I was going.

I signaled to the Tubingen, the CDF ship on which I was stationed, that I was ready to begin. The Tubingen was currently floating directly above New Philadelphia. Normally Franklin’s planetary sensors would have spotted the Tubingen after it had skipped in literally (and dangerously) close to the planet’s upper atmosphere. The problem was that the planet’s sensor apparatus—from its satellites to its ground stations—were designed, installed, and still largely operated by, the Colonial Union. If the Colonial Union doesn’t want a ship to be seen, it won’t be. Someone would have to be looking directly for it to see it. And why would they be looking directly for it if the sensors didn’t say it was there?

The Tubingen acknowledged my hail and reported that it would begin in ten seconds, and that I should keep clear the beam. I agreed with this and acknowledged the warning. The capitol building was directly below me now. My BrainPal lit up a column that represented the incoming beam. If I were to wander into the path of the beam I might be uncomfortable just long enough for my brain to register the pain before I was turned into a floating pile of carbon dust. That was not on my schedule for the day. I kept myself well clear of its path.

A few seconds later my BrainPal visualized the high-energy beam, pulsing on and off faster than my eye could register, vaporizing a three-meter hole in the roof of the legislative chamber one micrometer at a time. The goal was to create the hole without shattering the roof or vaporizing the legislators directly below the beam. At this juncture of the mission we didn’t want anyone dead.

Path cleared, I thought. Time to make an impression.

“Here we go,” I said out loud, found the hole, and dove for it. I waited for the last few seconds to deploy my nanobots into a parachute form, braking with an abruptness that would have killed an unmodified human body. Fortunately, I don’t have an unmodified human body.

As it was, I dropped through the hole with enough velocity to make an impression, and to make my combat unitard stiffen to protect me from the impact.

There was a thump, and a mess, and a general cry of confusion as I seemingly appeared from nowhere. I raised myself up from impact position, looked at the elderly gentleman stunned to see me, and smiled. I had landed on the speaker’s podium, directly behind his desk, exactly where I had planned to. It’s nice when a bit of political theater such as the one I was about to attempt starts out so well.

“Speaker Haryanto,” I said, to the startled man. “A genuine pleasure to meet you. Excuse me for just one second.” I reached behind me, took the drone off of my back, and activated it via my BrainPal. It whirred to life and rose directly above my head. While it was doing so, I looked down through the floor—the speaker was wearing pants and had opted to keep his podium transparent, though tinted—and saw Powell, Lambert, and Salcido, weapons up, drones deployed, cautiously being encroached on by capitol security. They weren’t in any particular danger, or at least any that they couldn’t handle.

That done, I unstrapped my Empee, placed it on the speaker’s desk, and invited myself to the microphone, into which Speaker Haryanto had been intoning mere seconds earlier. I had my BrainPal pop up the notes I made earlier, because I knew I would have to give a speech.

“Speaker Haryanto, representatives of the Franklin global government, and all the citizens of Franklin who are watching this singular legislative event, at home or wherever you may be, greetings,” I began. “I am Lieutenant Heather Lee of the Colonial Defense Forces. I do apologize for my abrupt and unscheduled entrance to your session today, but time was of the essence. I bring you a message from the Colonial Union.

“The Colonial Union knows that today—in fact, right now—this chamber has begun a vote to declare independence from the Colonial Union. We also know that this vote is hotly contested, and is likely to be very close. This is for good reason, as your independence would leave you vulnerable to the predations of any number of alien species who are even now watching, as we are, the result of your vote.

“Through standard channels the Colonial Union has made the government of Franklin aware that we are opposed to this vote. We feel it is dangerous not only to the people and government of Franklin, but also to the Colonial Union at large. We also maintain that such a vote is illegal and that Franklin may not, through legal means, separate itself from the Colonial Union. These points have proved to be unpersuasive to many of you, hence this vote that Speaker Haryanto was about to commence.

“You may believe that I have come here to stop this vote on behalf of the Colonial Union. I have not. The representatives of Franklin, or at least the minority required to bring this vote to the floor, have asked for this vote. The Colonial Union will allow it to proceed. What I am here to do is make you aware of the consequences of this action.”

I paused for effect, just long enough to make them wonder about the consequences, and then began again. “During the lead up to this historic vote, some of you in this chamber—in a manner you believe fitting, given that the name of this colony is taken from the United States of America revolutionary figure Benjamin Franklin—have quoted the United States’ Declaration of Independence, and specifically how you, like those revolutionaries who signed that document, would pledge your lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honors to your own independence.

“Very well.”

I pointed to the drone hovering above my head. “As I have been speaking to you, this drone has identified and targeted every representative in this room, and has fed the information to a Colonial Union ship, which by now has trained high-energy particle weapons on each of you. As the Colonial Union has already declared that this vote is illegal, if and when you vote for independence, you will be offering up an act of treason to the Colonial Union. In doing so, you will lose your sacred honor.

“As you will be committing treason, the Colonial Union will freeze all your financial accounts, to restrict your ability, or the ability of others, to commit further treason with them. So you will lose your fortunes. And once you vote, confirming your treason, you will be summarily sentenced to death by the Colonial Union, with the sentence to be carried out immediately; as I said you are already tracked and targeted. So you will lose your life.

“Now, then,” I said, turning back to Speaker Haryanto. “You may proceed with your vote.”

“After you have threatened all of us with death?” Haryanto said, incredulously.

“Yes,” I said. “Or more precisely, after the Colonial Union agreed with the principles you have already set out—that this action was worth your life, fortune, and honor. What you may not have expected is that it would cost all these things as quickly as it will. But these are not the days of the American Revolution, and the Colonial Union is not the British Empire, an ocean and several months away. We are here now. It’s time to find out who among you is willing to make the sacrifice for independence that you have declared you will make. Time to find out who means what they say, and who was simply posturing because you thought your posturing was consequence free—or at least, consequence free for you.”

“But you won’t give us our independence even if we vote for it!” someone yelled from the floor.

“Is this a surprise to you?” I asked. “Did you not think there would be a struggle to follow? Did you not believe the words you said? Or did you believe the repercussions of your actions would be shouldered by others—by the citizens who will be pressed into service to defend the so-called independence you wish to give them? The fellow citizens of Franklin who will die by the millions as other species claim this planet for their own when the Colonial Union is not here to defend it? Where did you think you would be when that happened? Why did you think you would not be asked to answer for your vote?

“No, my dear representatives of Franklin. You are being given an opportunity. You will be called to answer for your actions before any other citizen of Franklin. You will not evade this responsibility, as much as you may wish it. Your vote is being broadcast across this globe. You cannot hide now. You will not hide now. You will vote your conscience. And your fellow citizens will find out now whether you believe their so-called independence is worth your life.”

“So, let’s begin,” I said, and nodded to Haryanto. “You first, speaker.”

* * *

“We’re off the clock now, yeah?” Lambert asked.

“Since we’re on the shuttle back up to the Tubingen, I would say yes,” Salcido said.

“Then let me question the usefulness of that last stunt of ours.”

“I don’t know,” Powell said. “The declaration of independence was unanimously defeated, the entire planet of Franklin got to see its legislators revealed as cowards looking after their own skin, and we didn’t die. I thought it was pretty successful.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t successful,” Lambert said. “I said I question its usefulness.”

“I don’t see the difference,” Salcido said.

“The success of the mission depends on whether we achieve our mission goals. We did that—like Ilse said we killed the vote, embarrassed the politicians, didn’t get killed, and reminded the entire planet that the Colonial Union can come along and stomp them anytime it wants, so don’t screw with us. Which wasn’t explicitly in our mission parameters but was the subtext of the mission.”

“Wow, ‘subtext,’” Powell said. “For a former janitor you’re using big words there, Terrell.”

“This former janitor has a rhetoric degree, asshole,” Lambert said, and Powell smiled at this. “He just learned he could make more money as a janitor than as an adjunct professor. So yes. Successful. Great. But did it address the root causes? Did it address the underlying issues that required us to have to take the mission in the first place?”

“One, probably not, and two, do we care?” Powell asked.

“We should care,” Lambert said. “We should care because if we didn’t, then one day we’ll be back here dealing with this problem again.”

“I don’t know about that,” Salcido said. “We stomped on that vote pretty hard.”

“And we did it with a single fireteam,” Powell said, and then pointed at me. “Plus the fact that the Colonial Union sent a mere lieutenant to deal with a vote of global consequence probably said something. No offense, Lieutenant.”

“None taken,” I said.

“The whole point of the mission was to shake their confidence and make them consider their action,” Powell continued. “The Colonial Union was saying ‘Look what we can do with four common soldiers, so think about what we could do with more—and think about what we’re protecting you from.’”

“But it doesn’t address root causes,” Lambert said, again. “Look, the global legislature of an entire planet doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to vote for independence just for the fun of it. There was a lot going on before that point. Things we don’t know about because while it was all brewing, we were off doing other things.”

“Right,” Powell said. “And when the aftermath of this comes down, we’ll also be off again, doing other things, so why are you worked up about it?”

“I’m not worked up about it,” Lambert said. “I’m just asking if our so-called ‘successful’ mission actually helped.”

“It helped the Franklins,” Salcido said. “The ones who didn’t want independence, anyway.”

“Also the ones who didn’t want to get shot for treason,” Powell interjected.

“Them too,” Salcido agreed.

“Right, but I’m not convinced it helped the Colonial Union,” Lambert said. “The reasons the Franklins wanted independence, whatever they are, are still there. They haven’t been addressed.”

“Not our job,” Powell said.

“No, it’s not. I just wish whosever job it was had done it before we got there.”

“If they had then we wouldn’t have been there,” Powell said. “We would have been somewhere else and you would be trying to find deeper meaning about that.”

“So you’re saying the real problem is me,” Lambert said.

“I’m not saying the real problem isn’t you,” Powell said. "Me, I’m just glad to get through the thing alive. Call me uncomplicated."

“Uncomplicated.”

“Thank you. And you, Terrence, should stop overthinking the mission. Do it, get it done, go home. You’ll be happier.”

“I don’t know about that,” Lambert said.

“Fine, then I’ll be happier, because I won’t have to listen to you go on.”

“You’ll miss it when I’m gone.”

“Maybe,” Powell said. “I’m willing to find out.”

“Found it!” Salcido said.

“Found what?” Lambert asked.

“That song. The song you said didn’t exist.”

“The pizza moon song?” Powell asked.

“Bullshit,” Lambert said.

“Not bullshit!” Salcido exclaimed, triumphantly. “I’m putting it through the shuttle speakers now.”

The cabin of the shuttle was filled a song about moons, pizza, drool, and pasta.

“This is a terrible song,” Powell said, after a minute.

“It makes me hungry,” Lambert said.

Salcido smiled. “The good news is, we’ll be back in time for lunch.”

PART TWO

Wednesday—not one immediately following the events of Franklin—and we were hunting a sniper.

“Just drop the building on him,” Powell suggested, from behind our cover. She pointed to the apartment complex the rebel sniper had been using to take aim at the Kyoto security forces and the CDF that had been deployed to assist them. We were in Fushimi, the planet’s third-largest city and the center of recent unrest.

“We can’t,” I said.

“Sure we can,” Powell said. She pointed upward. “The Tubingen could level that entire building in six seconds. Pancake it into rubble. Sniper’s dead, we’re back on the ship in time for tacos.”

“And then have the Kyotans pissed off at us because several hundred of their people are homeless, surrounding buildings are damaged or possibly destroyed, infrastructure compromised, plus a big pile of shattered apartment complex dead in the middle of the street,” Lambert pointed out.

“You’re doing that thing where you think you’re thinking about long-term implications again, aren’t you, Lambert.”

“I’m pointing out flattening the building might be unsubtle and not the best course of action.”

“I prefer to think of it as a Gordian knot type of solution,” Powell said.

“The Gordian knot wasn’t twelve stories high,” Lambert countered. “With lots of people living in it.”

There was a sharp crack and the whirr of masonry shearing off a building forty meters up the road. The Kyoto security officers who had been peeking their heads around it very quickly unpeeked.

“He should have hit them from that distance,” Salcido said, unimpressed.

I motioned to the several dead Kyoto officers in the road in front of us. “He’s accurate enough,” I said. “Or she.”

“He or she’d be a lot less accurate with several stories of apartment building falling on their heads,” Powell said.

“We’re not destroying the building,” I said. “Get it out of your head.”

“Well, what do you want to do then, boss?” Salcido said.

I craned up to look at the building again. It was your basic concrete block sort of apartment complex. The complex had several corner and near-corner apartments that the sniper could use as vantage points for the road we were on. The apartments were difficult to see into visually and heat scanning wasn’t turning up anything; this sniper was using camo that made them difficult to spot across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Or was wearing a nice insulating jacket.

“We could land a squad on the roof,” Powell said. “Flush out the asshole.”

“If I were the sniper I’d have wired the roof,” I said.

“How much destructive power do you think this sniper has?”

“I’m willing to err on the side of caution, here.”

“So he can blow up the building but we can’t,” Powell said. “Well, that’s just perfect.”

“The point is to have no one blow up the building,” I said. “Suggest some other options, please.”

“Track for movement,” Salcido said. “Plug him the next time he takes a shot.”

“This differs from what we’ve been doing how?” Lambert said. “You can argue about whether this guy is a good shot, but he’s at least pretty good at not being seen until he takes a shot. And unless our return shot is immediate, we’re not going to hit him.”

“But we can track the shot,” I said. “I mean if the sniper takes a shot, our BrainPals can track its trajectory.”

“As long as we’re looking in the right place, sure, I guess,” Salcido said.

“We’d still have to return fire almost instantly,” Lambert said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe not.”

Lambert and Salcido looked at each other. “You’re being cryptic, Lieutenant.”

I looked at Salcido. “You’re the resident Empee expert,” I said.

“This is true,” he said, and he was. He could tell you trivia about the CDF’s standard rifle that you didn’t know you didn’t care about until he told it to you. “And?”

“The Empee builds its load on the fly out of nanobotic material.”

“Right,” Salcido said. “Keeps us from having to carry around six different types of weapons or ammo.”

“Okay,” I said. “I want to use the rocket launcher function, and I want to specify the payload of the rocket. Can I do that?”

“As long as the payload of the rocket is something that can be assembled almost instantly from the ammunition block, sure.”

“Then I want you to make a payload of trackers,” I said. “Tiny little trackers. The size of dust mites.”

Salcido looked at me quizzically for a couple of seconds until the light went on. “Oh, okay. Got it.”

“Can you do that?”

“Theoretically yes,” Salcido said. “Practically, it would take me more time than we have to make an original design. I’m looking to see if there’s anything on file that would work for our purposes.”

“You have five minutes,” I said.

“Of course, because any more time would make this too easy.”

“I missed a step,” Lambert said.

“I’m still for flattening the building,” said Powell.

“Quiet,” I said to Powell. And turned to Lambert. “We can track the shot but you said we’d have a problem accurately returning fire. And we don’t want to blow up the building.” I glanced back at Powell for this. “So rather than aiming for the sniper, we send a rocket filled with trackers into the apartment he’s shooting out of.”

“It busts open, covers the asshole with trackers, and then it doesn’t matter where he goes, we know where he is,” Powell said.

“Right,” I said. “And we don’t have to hit him head on, we just have to have him dusted.”

“Found it!” Salcido said. “I’ve got something that should work. Building up a round now.”

“So now all we have to do is wait for the next shot,” Lambert said.

“We’re not going to wait,” I said. “We’re going to draw his fire.”

“How do you suggest we do that?”

I motioned to my combat unitard. “These should be good for one round.”

“You’re going to go out there and let the asshole take a shot at you,” Lambert said.

“I didn’t say it was going to be me,” I replied.

“Well, I’m sure as shit not volunteering,” Powell said.

“For once I’m with Ilse.” Lambert jabbed a thumb at his squad mate.

“Sau?” I asked.

“You want me to build this Frankenstein rocket and take a slug to the head? Come on, boss. Cut me some slack here.”

“I’m the officer here,” I pointed out.

“And we’re all super inspired by your leadership, Lieutenant,” Powell said. “We’ll be right behind you.”

“Emphasis on ‘behind,’” Lambert said.

I looked at the both of them. “When we get back to the ship we’re going to have a little talk about military chain of command.”

“We’re looking forward to having that conversation if you survive, Lieutenant,” Powell promised.

“We might have it with me on one side of an airlock and the three of you on the other.”

“Seems fair,” Lambert said.

“Locked and loaded,” Salcido said, to me. “I’m already tracking the bots. Ready when you are.”

“Fine,” I said. I turned to Powell and Lambert. “You two make like you’re laying down fire for me as I make my way up the road. With any luck that asshole will miss me when he takes his shot. Be watching the building for the shot. Sync with each other and with Sau so you can triangulate. It will give Sau a better target for the rocket. Sau, call it in and let them know what we’re up to.”

“Got it.”

“We’ll keep him busy,” Lambert said. Powell nodded.

I had my combat unitard cover my face, loped out from behind cover, and started hoofing it up the street, Lambert and Powell’s cover fire rattling behind me.

I made it about forty meters before I was hit by a truck.

Colonial Defense Forces combat unitards are amazing things. They look like something you’d wear if you were performing Swan Lake, but the fabric, designed with the Colonial Union’s trademarked nanobotic trickery, protects its wearer better than anything short of a foot of steel. Probably better, since steel would fragment and spall and send shrapnel into your guts. The unitard doesn’t do that. It stiffens on projectile impact and dissipates the energy it receives, up to a point. It’s usually good for keeping your ass alive for a single direct hit of, say, a sniper’s bullet.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel the hit.

I felt it just fine. Felt the stiffening of the unitard make it feel as if my ribs were cracking, and they might have been, felt my feet lift up off the road, felt my body fly backward through the air a few yards and then crumple into a heap as gravity took hold again.

All of which was according to plan. There was a reason I ran straight on into the sniper’s sights. I wanted him to hit me center mass, where the unitard was best equipped to take the shot without killing me outright. If the sniper had been ambitious, he could have tried for a headshot, which I probably could have survived, but I wouldn’t have been happy or mobile for several days afterward.

But Salcido was right. The sniper wasn’t all that good. I figured—hoped might be the better word—that he’d go for the bigger, easier target. And he did.

Still hurt like hell.

I heard the poomp and hiss of Salcido’s rocket fizzing toward the sniper’s position, followed a few seconds later by a dull pop and the sound of glass shattering.

“Rocket hit,” Salcido said, talking to me through my BrainPal. “You alive, Lieutenant?”

“It’s debatable,” I said. “You tracking?”

“Yeah. Sending the feed over the squad channel.”

“That asshole still have a gun to my head?”

“No, he’s on the move now.”

I rolled and called up the squad feed and looked up at the building. The sniper was visible as a superimposed pattern of tiny dots, each representing a single, mite-size tracker. He was currently moving from one apartment to another.

“We going in after him?” Lambert asked.

“We don’t have to,” I said. “We just have to wait for him to position himself to take another shot. Then we take him.”

“How are we going to get him to take another shot?”

“Easy,” I said, and stood up.

“Your suit’s not going to take another direct hit,” Powell said.

“Then maybe the three of you should kill the shit out of him before he gets the chance to take another shot,” I said.

“On it.”

“Good.” I stood there in the street, watching the pixelated sniper settle into another apartment, a floor below his previous one, and over the course of a couple of minutes, carefully position himself by a window to take another shot at me.

“Got you,” I said.

The apartment building exploded.

More than a hundred meters away, I was knocked back by the crack of the pressure wave and then by the rush of heat and flying debris.

“What the fuck just happened?” I heard Salcido yell, followed by Powell and Lambert yelling at each other to get back. I rolled again, then looked up and saw a dirty wall of dust rolling toward me from the collapsing concrete. I ducked my head and held my breath despite my mouth being covered by my mask, and filtering my air for me.

After a minute the worst of the dust cleared and I stood up. There was a pile of rubble where the apartment building used to stand.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Wasn’t that what we didn’t want?” I heard Lambert yell, via my ears rather than my BrainPal. I looked back and saw him, Powell, and Salcido walking up on me.

“It looks like what we wanted and what the higher-ups wanted were two different things,” Powell said. “I told you we should have just called it in. We could have saved ourselves some trouble.”

“Shut up, Ilse,” I said, and she shut up. I turned to Salcido. “Find out if there was anyone in the building besides the sniper.”

“I’m pretty sure it was cleared out before we even got here.”

“Make sure,” I said. “If there are any civilians in there, we start digging them out.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lambert said. I turned to him to snap his head off for complaining about rescuing civilians, but he held his hand up. “Not about that,” he said. “Look at your feed. That goddamn sniper is still alive.”

I looked back at the building—or more accurately, at the pile of rubble. Near the periphery of the rubble, under about a meter of concrete, our sniper was trying to push a pile of concrete and rebar off of him.

“Come on,” I said.

We reached the spot where the sniper was buried. Salcido trained his Empee on where the sniper’s head would be while Powell and Lambert and I pulled chunks of building away from the hidden shooter. After a minute, I pried off a final slab, clearing a shot for Salcido.

“Jesus,” he said.

Our sniper was fifteen standard years old at best and she was covered in blood from where the fallen concrete had creased her skull. I glanced through the rubble as best I could and saw her left arm pinned and her right leg going off in a direction it shouldn’t.

“Get away from me,” she said, and her voice told me that at least one of her lungs had collapsed.

“We can get you out of there,” I said.

“Don’t want your help, green.”

I was confused by this until I figured out she meant me, with my green skin. I looked back at Salcido and his Empee. “Put that down and help us.” He looked doubtful but did as he was told. I turned back to the sniper. “We’re not going to hurt you,” I said.

“You brought a building down on me,” she wheezed.

“That wasn’t our intent,” I said. I skipped over the part where our intent was to shoot her in the head the moment she gave us a chance. “We’ll get you out.”

“No.”

“You don’t want to die here,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “This is where I lived. I lived here. And you destroyed it. Like you destroy everything.”

“How are we doing?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the girl.

“Almost there,” Powell said. Then she sent a message to me through her BrainPal. The chunk of concrete on her leg is the only thing keeping her from bleeding out, she said. If we move it, she dies. She’s dying anyway.

“Okay,” I said. Call in for a medic, I said through the BrainPal.

Why? Powell asked. You’re being awfully nice to someone who was just trying to kill you and who we were just trying to kill. She doesn’t even want our help. You should just let her die.

I gave you an order, I said. Powell visibly shrugged.

“We’re going to call for a medic,” I said, to the sniper.

“I don’t want a medic,” she said, and her eyes closed. “I don’t want you. Why don’t you leave. This isn’t your planet. It’s ours. We don’t want you here. Leave. Just leave.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

The girl didn’t say anything. About a minute later she was dead.

* * *

“Well?” Lambert asked. He, Powell, and Salcido were waiting for me outside the security offices in Fushimi, where I had gone for a discussion—to use the word euphemistically—of the sniper incident.

“I talked to Colonel Maxwell,” I said, naming the head of the CDF joint mission in Fushimi. “She tells me that it was the Kyotans who requested we drop the apartment building.”

“Why would they want that? I thought we were working on the assumption they didn’t want that. Thus, all the sneaking up and trying not to destroy it on our part.”

“The apartment block was apparently the local headquarters of the rebellion. Or more accurately, the local headquarters of the rebellion was in the apartment block.”

“So the building was chock full of agitators,” Powell said.

“Maxwell didn’t break down the ratio of agitators to normal humans,” I said. “And I didn’t get the impression from her that the Kyotan government much cared. They wanted to send a message.”

“How many other people did we kill getting out the message?” Lambert asked.

“None,” Salcido said, and looked at me. “Sorry, you asked me to find that out and I didn’t tell you because we got busy with other things. The Kyotan security forces did a sweep of the building a week ago and pulled everybody out. Block questioning and intimidation. That’s what started this whole set of riots we’re helping put down.”

“So if they weren’t all rebels before, they probably are now,” Powell said.

“You wanted to drop the building,” Lambert reminded her.

“The building got dropped,” Powell reminded him. “Although Lambert’s right. If they were just going to drop the building, why the hell did they send us in?”

“They sent us in before someone in the Kyoto security upper ranks remembered a CDF ship could level a building in a single shot, apparently,” I said.

“We could have been killed.”

“I guess they decided we were safe.”

“That’s reassuring,” Powell said.

“At least it wasn’t our idea,” Lambert said. “That girl hated us enough. And if she hated us, she had to have learned it from someone else.”

“It wasn’t our idea, but one of our ships did the honors,” I said. “I don’t think that distinction would matter much to her or to anyone else. We’re on the hook for this as much as the Kyoto government.”

“Did you get anything on the sniper?” Salcido asked me.

“Rana Armijo. Sixteen standard. Parents apparently in deep with the rebellion. No sign of them. Either they’re gone or the Kyotans already have them.”

“So she becomes a martyr for the rebellion,” Lambert said. “The government rounds up everyone in her apartment block, she stays behind, starts taking out security officers, and is so successful they have to drop the building on her head. It’s a good story.”

“It won’t do her much good,” Powell said.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work for martyrs.”

“So what now?” Salcido asked.

“We’re done here,” I said. “There’s ongoing rebel action in Sakyo and Yamashina, but the Tubingen has other orders. It’s someone else’s problem now.”

“It was already someone else’s problem,” Lambert said. “Then we made it ours, too.”

“Don’t start, Lambert,” Powell said. “It’s especially tiring today.”

“If it’s tiring for you, think how it feels to them.”

PART THREE

A Thursday this time, and we’re called upon to manage a protest.

“I’m not going to lie, I’m really curious to see these things in action,” Lambert said, as the hurricane funnels were set up around the Colonial Union administrative building in Kyiv.

The administrative building itself was a skyscraper deposited in the center of a hectare of land in the downtown district. The entire hectare was a flat plaza, featureless except for a single piece of abstract sculpture. That sculpture was currently populated by several protesters, as was a large chunk of the plaza. The skyscraper was ringed by Kyiv policemen and CDF soldiers and hastily assembled metal barriers.

The protesters had not taken it into their heads to try to rush the skyscraper, but it was early in the day yet. Rather than wait for the inevitable, and the inevitable casualties to both protester and security forces, the Colonial Union had decided to employ the latest in less than lethal protest management: the hurricane funnel. One was being placed directly in front of my squad.

“It looks like an Alp horn,” Powell said, as it was placed and started expanding out and up.

“Alpenhorn,” I said. I was a musician in my past life.

“That’s what I said,” Powell replied, and then turned to Salcido. “You’re the weapon nerd here. Explain this.”

Salcido pointed up, at the very long tube snaking up to the sky, now about two hundred feet up. “Air gets sucked into the thing from up there. It gets drawn down and accelerated as it goes. It hits the curve, gets an extra push, and out it goes that way.” He waved in the general direction of the protesters. “We set a perimeter length, and anytime one of them tries to get past it, the funnel ramps up a breeze and blows them down.”

“Which should be fun to see,” Lambert said. “Although these things are awfully inefficient, if we’re talking real crowd control. It’s like we’re daring them to try to cross that line.”

“They’re not supposed to be efficient,” I said. “They’re supposed to send a message.”

“What message? ‘We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your protest down’?”

“More like ‘We don’t even have to shoot you to render your protest utterly pointless.’”

“We seem to be sending a lot of messages recently,” Lambert noted. “I’m not sure the message we’re sending is the message they’re receiving.”

“The message this time will be a blast of wind that could knock over a house,” Salcido said. “It’ll get received.”

“And we’re not worried about getting sucked out into the rioters,” Powell said. “Because that would be bad.”

Salcido pointed upward again. “That’s why collection happens up there,” he said. “Plus there’s some airflow mitigation happening on this side of the thing.”

“All right,” Powell said.

“Just…”

“What? Just what?”

“Don’t get too close to the thing when it’s running.”

Powell looked sourly at Salcido. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you.”

“Yes. Yes I am. Fucking with you. You’re right, by all means, stand close to the thing when it goes off. Nothing bad will happen to you at all.”

“Lieutenant, I may have to shoot Sau.”

“Both of you, knock it off,” I said. I was watching the technicians finishing setting the thing up, which mostly consisted of them watching it, because like most things involving the Colonial Defense Forces, it was designed to operate with minimal assistance from humans, who were without exception the moving part most likely to fail. Left and right of where we were, other hurricane funnels were also unpacking themselves while technicians stood by. In all there were twenty-four of the things, circling the building.

When they were all set up the chief technician nodded to me; I nodded back and took control of the three funnels closest to me. I set the perimeter to thirty meters, which was ten meters further out than where the closest protesters were standing. I was pinged by the other seven CDF squads manning the other funnel stations, all of which I was commanding, letting me know they were online and also set at thirty meters. I stepped out in front of the funnels so the protesters could see me. They started jeering immediately, which was fine.

“Attention protesters,” I said, and my voice was amplified mightily by the funnel directly behind me, too loud for anyone to ignore. As close as I was to the thing I might have been deafened if I hadn’t already had my BrainPal dial down my hearing for a minute. “I am Colonial Defense Forces lieutenant Heather Lee. In one minute, I will be establishing a protest perimeter of thirty yards entirely around this building. Your voluntary cooperation with this goal would be greatly appreciated.”

This received the response that I entirely expected it would.

“Suit yourself,” I said, and stepped back behind the funnel. “Turn down your ears,” I instructed my squad. Then I turned to the commander of the Kyiv police and nodded to him; he yelled at all his officers to fall back behind the funnels. They did, taking the metal barriers with them. A cheer went up from the crowd and it started to surge forward. I turned on the funnels.

The output from the funnels went from zero to fifty kilometers per hour in about three seconds. The crowd, sensing a challenge, pressed forward with more determination. In another three seconds the funnels were blasting at a hundred klicks per hour; in another five seconds at one hundred and thirty. At one hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, the funnels also emitted a horrendous, eardrum-crushing note designed to encourage crowd dispersal. I turned my hearing up a little to listen.

It was a very low E.

Did I mention these things are REALLY LOUD? sent Salcido, over the squad’s BrainPal channel.

The crowd was pushed back despite their best efforts. Some of them flung bottles and other objects toward the funnels and were surprised when they shifted course right back at them. Apparently you don’t have to understand physics to protest.

When the last of the protesters were pushed back to the thirty-meter line the funnels ramped their output down to thirty kilometers an hour, and the low E dissipated. The crowd muttered and shouted, angry. The Kyiv police, no longer needed, filed into the administration building, where they went to the roof and were airlifted out.

And so it went. Over the next hour, occasionally one or two of the protesters would try to see if they could sprint to the barricade before the funnels could push them back. The answer: No.

“That kind of looks like fun, actually,” Lambert said, as the latest protester blew back across the plaza. His speaking voice was augmented in my ear by his BrainPal signal.

“Don’t be so sure.” Powell pointed to a streak of red on the plaza, where the protester’s head had connected with the concrete.

“Well, I don’t want to do that, obviously,” Lambert said. “The rest of it might be fun.”

“Hey, boss,” Salcido said, and pointed out into the crowd. “Something’s up.”

I looked out. In the distance the crowd was parting as a motor vehicle made its way up toward the front. I identified it with my BrainPal as a heavy truck of local manufacture, without the trailer that usually accompanied these types of haulers. As it moved closer to the front, the crowd started chanting and hollering.

“Why the hell didn’t the police stop that thing all the way at the back?” Lambert asked.

“We sent them home,” I said.

“We sent the ones up here home,” Lambert said. “I find it hard to believe at least some of the Kyiv police aren’t still on duty.”

“Sau,” I said. “Are these things going to stop that?”

“The funnels?”

“Yeah.”

“Lieutenant, these babies can blast out wind up to three hundred kilometers per hour,” Salcido said. “They won’t just stop the truck. They’ll pick it up and toss it.”

“Right back into the crowd,” Lambert noted.

“There is that,” Salcido agreed. “That is, the part of the crowd that is not also tossed straight up into the air, along with anything else that isn’t nailed down, and probably some stuff that is.” He pointed down the plaza at the sculpture. “If these things go top speed, I wouldn’t count on that staying put.”

“Maybe these things weren’t such a great idea after all,” Lambert said.

The truck, at the front of the crowd now, started blinking its lights, as if to threaten us. The crowd cheered.

“Standard electric engine for something that size, if it’s not modified,” Salcido said. He’d pulled up the same manufacturer ID I had. “It’s gonna take it a couple of seconds to get up to ramming speed.”

The driver of the truck let loose on his horn, issuing a blast almost as loud as the funnels.

“This will be interesting,” Lambert said.

The wheels of the truck squealed as the driver floored it.

“Powell,” I said and sent at the same time.

The front of the truck blossomed into flame as Powell’s rocket shoved itself into the truck’s engine compartment and erupted, shattering the truck’s battery banks and puffing out the hood with an explosive crump. The spinning wheels, robbed of momentum before they could completely grip, lurched forward slightly and then stopped, barely moving a few meters. The driver of the truck bailed out of the cab and took off running, one of many protesters who decided they’d had enough for the day.

A few still stood near the truck, uncertain of what they should be doing next. Powell shoved another rocket into the truck, this time into the empty cab. It went up like the proverbial Roman candle. More protesters decided it was time to go home.

“Thank you, Powell,” I said.

“Took you long enough to ask,” she said, cradling her Empee.

* * *

“Those things aren’t exactly a long-term solution, now, are they?” Lambert asked. He nodded to the hurricane funnels, now five stories below us. The four of us were in a conference room that had been turned over as a rest area for the CDF recruited for guard work.

“It’s local midnight and that crowd out there’s not going anywhere,” Powell said. “I think the funnels might be a feature for a while.”

“It’s going to make going to work difficult for the Colonial Union folks who work in this building.”

“Maybe they’ll all telecommute,” Salcido said.

Lambert looked back out at the crowd. “Yeah. I would.”

“How much longer are we here?” Powell asked me.

“The technicians are training the Kyiv police on operating the things,” I said. “So a couple more days.”

“And then what? Off to the next planet to squash another protest or stomp on another building?”

“You wanted to stomp that building in Kyoto,” Lambert reminded Powell.

“I didn’t say otherwise,” Powell said, turning to Lambert. “I didn’t mind putting a rocket through that truck today, either. The alternatives might have involved me getting hurt or killed. So, fine.” She turned back to me. “But this wasn’t the gig I signed up for.”

“Technically speaking, you didn’t know what the gig was when you signed up for it,” Salcido said. “None of us did. All we knew was we were getting off the planet Earth.”

“Sau can play lawyer all he wants, but you know what I mean, Lieutenant,” Powell said.

“Ilse’s right,” Lambert said. “This is our third mission in a row where we’re trying to keep a lid on people rebelling against the Colonial Union.”

“These sort of missions have always been part of the deal,” I said. “Before you three came on I and the Tubingen were called on to squash an uprising on Zhong Guo. Some people there got it in their head that they wanted an alliance with Earth.”

“Did they tell the Earth about that?” Salcido asked.

“Don’t think they did,” I said, and then motioned out the window, to the protest. “My point is that this is, in fact, our mission. Part of it, anyway.”

“Okay, but three in a row,” Lambert said.

“What about it?”

“Has that happened before, in your experience? Ever?”

“No.”

“And you’ve been in the CDF how long, now? Six years?”

“Seven,” I said. “And three months.”

“Not that you’re counting,” Powell said.

“If you don’t you lose track,” I said. I turned back to Lambert. “All right, yes, it’s unusual.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?” Lambert asked. “Wait—I phrased that poorly. I mean to say, you don’t find it troublesome? Because when Ilse here, our current queen of the ‘who gives a shit’ line of thinking, is starting to get tired of our act, there might be a problem.”

“I didn’t say I was tired of it,” Powell said. “I said it’s not what I signed up for.”

“There’s a distinction in your brain between the two,” Lambert said.

“Yeah, there is,” Powell said. “I’m not tired of this. I can do this shit in my sleep. But I don’t see it as my job. My job is shooting the hell out of aliens who are trying to kill us.”

“Amen to that,” Salcido said.

“What we’re doing here, I mean, really, who gives a shit?” Powell said. She waved out the window. “These people are protesting. So what? Let them protest. They want to break up with the Colonial Union, let them.”

“When the other species come down to scrape them off the planet, then your job would get harder,” I pointed out.

“No it wouldn’t, because they’re not part of the Colonial Union anymore. Fuck ’em.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much, and in a twisted way, I assure you, I admire your commitment to amorality,” Lambert said.

“It’s not amoral,” Powell said. “If they’re part of the Colonial Union, I’ll defend them. That’s my job. If they want to go their own way, fine. I don’t see it as my job to stop them. But I also won’t stop the aliens from shoving them into a pot if they do, either.”

“Maybe that’s what we need,” Salcido said. “One of these planets to go it alone and get the hell kicked out of them. That would bring the rest of them back into line.”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Lambert said. “It’s not just one of them. Not just one planet. It’s a bunch of them, all at the same time.”

“It’s that thing,” Salcido said. “That group. Equilibrium. Showing up and doing that data dump.”

“What about it?” Powell asked.

“Well, it makes sense. All of these planets with people getting worked up all of a sudden.”

“They’re not getting worked up all of a sudden,” Lambert said. “That rebellion in Kyoto was long-cooking. And the lieutenant here made the point about putting down a rebellion a year ago, on … where?”

“Zhong Guo,” I said.

“Thank you. Maybe that Equilibrium thing is crystallizing action now, but whatever it’s tapping into has been there already for years.”

“Then the Colonial Union should have been preparing for this for years,” Powell said, bored now with this conversation. “But it didn’t, and now we and everyone else on the Tubingen are shuttling from one stupid internal crisis to the next. It’s stupid and it’s a waste.”

“No, it makes sense,” Lambert said.

“You figure? How’s that.”

“We’re not attached to this place. We’re not attached to Kyoto. We weren’t attached to Franklin. We’re not attached to any of the colonies because we originally came from Earth. So it’s not difficult for us to come in and stomp around if we have to.”

“We’re handing off the work here to the Kyiv police,” Salcido pointed out.

“Right, after we handled the hard part. That’s our job. Handling the hard parts.”

“But you just said that this isn’t a long-term solution,” Salcido said, waving out to the funnels. “In which case the hard part is still here, which means we’ll be back. Or someone like us.”

“Yeah, funny, I remember talking about not addressing root causes a couple of weeks ago, and got shouted down with ‘who cares’ and a song about pizza.”

“It was a great song.”

“If you say so.”

“All I’m saying is that what we’re doing now is increasingly full of bullshit,” Powell said, bringing the discussion around. “If this is what we’re doing now, fine. So be it. But I’d rather be shooting aliens. I think everyone else would too.”

“She’s not wrong,” Salcido said, to me.

“No, she’s not,” Lambert agreed.

“I know,” I said.

PART FOUR

Friday.

“Root causes,” Lambert was saying. “You all kept mocking me for talking about them and now look where we are. Another colony planet. Another uprising. Except this time the planet’s already declared independence.”

The shuttle rocked on the way through Khartoum’s atmosphere. This time it was not only the four of us but my entire platoon, as it was on Rus. We weren’t doing protest suppression this time. This time we were making a surgical strike on Khartoum’s prime minister, who had declared the planet independent, encouraged mobs to occupy Colonial Union buildings, and then hidden himself, with a circle of advisors, in an undisclosed location, presumably because he knew that the Colonial Union wasn’t going to be particularly happy with him.

Indeed it wasn’t. It wasn’t happy with him, or in fact any of his party’s leadership, all of which had endorsed the independence—without, it should be noted, actually presenting it to the entire parliament for ratification.

“They learned from Franklin,” Lambert continued. “This time they knew not to give us a chance to respond first.”

“Which makes their independence illegal,” Salcido noted. He was sitting next to Lambert.

“It was always going to be illegal,” Lambert said. “By which I mean there was no possible way the Colonial Union would accept the legality of their independence. So there was no reason for them to put it up to a vote.”

“But now it’s also illegal by their own system of government.”

“No, because the prime minister had his cabinet approve a declaration of emergency powers and dissolved the current government,” Lambert said. “All legal as can be.”

“For what little good it’s going to do him,” Powell said. She was down a bit from Lambert and Salcido, on the other side of the shuttle, as was I.

“Oh, now, Ilse, he’ll be fine,” Salcido said. “He’s in an undisclosed location.”

“Which we’re on our way to right now. Another high-altitude drop and destroy.”

“We need to get Prime Minister Okada alive,” I reminded Powell.

“High-altitude drop, snatch, and then destroy,” Powell corrected.

“Which begs the question of how we know where this undisclosed location is,” Lambert said, to me.

“Okada’s had nano-transmitters in his blood since he became prime minister,” I said.

“I assume he doesn’t know that.”

“Probably not.”

“How did they get there, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“No idea,” I said. “If I had to guess, I imagine at some point or another he had a meal at the Colonial Union compound, and they were slipped to him then.”

“And we wonder why the Colonial Union isn’t looked on with great enthusiasm,” Lambert said.

Powell rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”

“You can snark at me all you want, Ilse,” Lambert said, and then disappeared as a hole in the shuttle appeared behind him and he was sucked out into Khartoum’s upper atmosphere, along with Salcido and the soldiers on either side of them. My combat suit, sensing pressure drop and shuttle damage, immediately snuck its mask over my head and started drawing oxygen out of what remained of the air in the shuttle cabin. Simultaneously as platoon leader I was patched into the shuttle’s systems, which told me what I already knew: The shuttle had been hit and was no longer in full control of its descent.

I fought down the urge to panic and focused on damage assessment. The pilot was trying to keep the shuttle from tumbling, fighting with the now damaged controls. Four soldiers out the growing hole in the side of the shuttle. Five others dead or mortally injured, another five seriously injured but alive. Fifteen uninjured and me.

The shuttle was declaring it was being tracked; whoever hit us wasn’t done.

I connected to the shuttle and authorized the shuttle doors to open. Everybody out now, I said, through the platoon BrainPal feed. My simulated voice made me sound more calm than I was.

We were all already suited up to jump out of the shuttle. We were just doing it earlier now.

By fireteams. Let’s go.

The remainder of the platoon started out the doors. Powell stayed back with me, yelling at stragglers. The pilot kept the shuttle steady as possible. Powell and I got out of the door just before some sort of kinetic round tore the shuttle apart. I did a quick ping on the pilot’s uniform’s system feed. There was nothing there.

Lieutenant, Powell sent. She was falling about one hundred meters away from me and sent to me via tightbeam. Look down.

I looked down and saw flickering beams shooting up into the evening sky. They weren’t going all the way up into the atmosphere; they were terminating on points below me.

They were hitting my soldiers. Killing them.

Full camo chaos dive, I sent over the platoon channel, to everyone still alive. Then I ordered my suit to seal me in, went dark on communication, and made myself as close to a hole in the atmosphere as I could. The suit’s camo function would hide me visually and would do what it could to scatter any electromagnetic waves that would be sweeping over me, trying to bounce back to a receiver set on targeting me. My suit was also making subtle movements and sending out extensions to move me around randomly, changing my speed and direction of descent, almost making it harder to target me. Every platoon member who heard my order was now doing the same.

Chaos diving could kill an unmodified human with the jerks and turns. My suit stiffened up at the neck and other joints to minimize the potential injury. It didn’t mean I didn’t feel my insides strain. But it wasn’t meant to be comfortable. It was meant to keep you alive.

One other thing: The electromagnetic-scattering camouflage effectively makes you blind. You fall, relying on the data your suit polled before you turned it on to allow it to track where you were and how far you had fallen, factoring in all the shifts in direction and descent speed and feeding that into your BrainPal. The camo was designed to give me a visual feed again one klick up—just enough time to assess and plan a final descent path.

Unless there was an error, in which case I would see the ground just before I smacked straight into it. Or I might never see the ground at all. There would just be a sudden thump.

Also: I wouldn’t know if one of those beams had found me until it started frying me.

The point is that you don’t do a full camo chaos dive unless you absolutely have to. But that’s where we were at the moment. Me and every other soldier in the platoon.

It also meant that when we landed, we would be scattered all across the countryside, coms quiet to avoid detection. In our briefing I had given the platoon an alternative extraction point in case something went wrong, but having the shuttle shot out from under us so far up and then performing a chaos dive meant that the remainder of the platoon was likely to be scattered over an area a hundred klicks to a side. When we landed, we were going to be alone, and hunted.

I had several minutes to contemplate all of this as I fell.

I also had several minutes to think about what had happened. Simply put, there should have been no way for the shuttle to have been shot out of Khartoum’s upper atmosphere. Khartoum had defenses like any Colonial Union planet would, to prevent alien species from attempting an attack. But as they had been on Franklin and every other planet we’d visited recently, these defenses were built and run by the Colonial Union itself. Even if these installations had been attacked by Khartoum’s citizens and abandoned by their CU operators, anyone trying to operate them would have been locked out by a nested set of security measures. Unless the CU operators had gone over to the other side—possible but not likely—those were someone else’s beams.

Another wrinkle: The Tubingen should have been tracking the shuttle’s descent and alerting us to, and defending us from, any ground-based attacks. If it hadn’t, it would have been because it was otherwise occupied. Which is to say, that it was being attacked, either from the surface of the planet or above it. In either case, also not from the Colonial Union.

If this was correct, then it meant a couple of things. It meant that whatever was happening on Khartoum, it wasn’t just about the planet’s independence—the planet had aligned itself with enemies of the Colonial Union. And then it laid a trap for us. Not for the Tubingen itself—whoever was doing this didn’t know which among the Colonial Dense Forces ships were going to respond. The Tubingen, its shuttle, and my platoon were all incidental in this. No, the trap was for the Colonial Union itself.

But why, and for what purpose?

My visual feed kicked on and I was a klick above the ground. In the distance were lights which suggested some form of civilization. Directly below me was dark, hilly, and full of vegetation. I waited as long as possible and deployed breaking nanobots, which spread out widely to catch the air. I landed hard and rolled and then stayed on my back for a moment, catching my breath and looking up at the sky. It was local night and the darkness of the vegetation combined with my Colonial Union-designed eyes meant I could see the stars in all their local constellations. I sighted several and, with local time and date, calculated my position.

I checked with my BrainPal to see if there was any signal from the Tubingen. I didn’t want to try to signal them, in case anyone was listening, but if they were sending to us they might have information we survivors could use.

Nothing. That wasn’t good.

I stood up, visual camo still on, and walked to where I could again see the lights in the distance. I applied the visual to the data for ground maps I had in my BrainPal for the mission. I checked that against the position of the stars in the sky. I was in the foothills above the suburbs of Omdurman, Khartoum’s capital city. I was forty-five klicks southeast of the city’s capital district, thirty-eight klicks south of the “undisclosed location” where I knew the prime minister to be, and twenty-three klicks southwest of the secondary extraction point where I hoped any survivors of my platoon were now heading.

I wasn’t interested in any of those at the moment. Instead I called up my visual cache of the last hour and tracked back to a visual of one of the beams targeting a soldier of mine, and started using the visual information, along with my descent data, to track back the location of whatever was creating that beam.

Sixteen klicks due almost directly north, also in the foothills, near an abandoned reservoir.

“Got you,” I said, bumped up my low-light visual acuity as much as possible to avoid falling into a hole, and started jogging toward the target. As I did I had my BrainPal play me music, so I would be distracted from thinking about Lambert, or Salcido, or Powell, or any other members of my platoon.

I would think about them later. I would grieve them later. Right now I needed to find out who shot them down.

* * *

Six klicks from the target, something knocked me off my feet and threw me to the ground. I immediately pushed off and rolled, confused because I had my visual camo on, and because whatever hit me and tossed me to the ground was nowhere to be seen. I had been shoved by a ghost.

Lieutenant.

It took me a second to realize that the voice I heard was through my BrainPal, not my ears.

Directly in front of you, the voice said. Tightbeam me. I don’t know if we’re still being tracked.

Powell? I said, via tightbeam, incredulous.

Yes, she said. She sent me visual permissions on her suit, which allowed my BrainPal to model where her body would be. She was indeed a meter directly in front of me. I tightbeamed her similar permissions.

Sorry about tackling you, she said.

How did you do that? I asked. I mean, how did you know that I was there?

Are you listening to music?

I was, I said. So?

You were singing as you ran.

Jesus, I said.

You didn’t know?

No. But I’m not surprised. When I was a musician they had to turn off my microphone at gigs because I would sing along. I can play any stringed instrument you can name, but I can’t sing worth a damn.

I noticed that much, Powell said, and I smiled despite myself. Powell motioned back, to the southeast. I came down that direction and started heading this way and began hearing you a couple of klicks back. I waited until I was sure it was you.

You could have tightbeamed me instead of tackling me.

It seemed safer this way. If you were on the ground there was less chance of you grabbing your Empee and spraying the brush out of surprise.

Point. Why are you headed this way, though? The secondary extraction point is not this way.

No. But the assholes who shot us down are.

I smiled again. It does not at all surprise me to hear you say that.

Of course it doesn’t. Just as I’m not surprised to find you on the way there.

No, I suppose not.

Shall we go?

Yes, I said. We both stood up.

Just to be clear, I plan to kill the shit out of every single one of them we find, Powell said.

We may want one or two for questioning, I said.

Your call. You better point out which ones you want ahead of time.

I will. Also, Ilse?

Yes, Lieutenant?

What was your job back on Earth? I’ve always been curious.

I taught eighth-grade math in Tallahassee.

Huh, I said. That’s not what I expected.

Are you kidding? Powell said back. You try teaching algebra to a bunch of little shitheads for thirty-eight years straight. The way I figure it I’ve got about another decade before my rage from that gets entirely burned up.

Whatever works. Ready?

Yes I am, Powell said. I’ve got some anger to work out. And not just from teaching.

* * *

Well, this is definitely not good, Powell said to me.

The two of us, still in full camo, lay two hundred meters out from a large concrete slab, itself on the edge of a disused reservoir. On the slab were two missile launchers, an electromagnetic mass driver, and two beam weapons. One of the launchers was missing two of its missiles, and next to it two specialists had hauled over new weapons to load onto it. The specialists were not human.

Fucking Rraey, Powell said, naming the species. What are they doing here?

Shooting down our shuttles, I said.

But why? How did they even get onto this planet?

I think they were invited.

By the prime minister? I’m going to shoot him twice now.

We still need to bring him in alive, I said.

I didn’t say I was going to kill him, Powell replied. Just that I was going to shoot him twice.

Let’s focus on what we’re doing here first.

All right, Powell said. How do you want to do this?

I looked again at the slab. Each of the weapon platforms had its own set of technicians and operators, which amounted to four Rraey each. Each of the platforms also had its own power source, the largest being attached to the mass driver, which had to pull some serious energy into its electromagnets. The platforms were spaced haphazardly, as if they were hastily installed and meant to be equally hastily removed. And indeed toward the back of the platform were a set of trucks large enough to pack up the platforms and drive them away. There was a fifth truck as well, smaller than the rest, out of the top of which sprouted various communications receivers. Inside of it were several Rraey, visible through windows. Command and communications. Finally, two Rraey with rifles walked the perimeter of the slab. Security, such as it was.

I see about twenty-four Rraey, I said, to Powell.

I check your math, she said.

I want at least a couple alive.

Fine. Anyone in particular?

Let’s keep the C&C staff breathing for now.

You’re the boss.

You take the security and the trucks, and knock out the C&C power.

Some of them will still have handhelds.

Don’t give them time to use them.

You said you wanted them unharmed.

I said I wanted them breathing.

Oh, okay, Powell said. That makes things easier.

I’ll take the weapons crews.

That’s a lot.

I have a plan.

Yeah? What is it?

Watch this, I said, set my Empee for a particle beam, and it shot into one of the missiles the weapons crew was trying to install into the launcher. I aimed not for the payload, but the fuel.

It went up like holiday fireworks, taking the launcher, its missiles, its crew, and the crews of the adjoining platforms with it. Everything on the slab crumpled, including any Rraey unfortunate enough to be outside when the missile platform went up. It was a good thing we still had our masks on; they protected our ears from the blast.

“I thought you might do that,” Powell said out loud, breaking cover and standing up.

“You’re not worried about them seeing you?” I asked.

“Lieutenant, at this point I want them to see me coming,” she said, and stalked off, Empee up.

I smiled, stayed crouched, and waited for any of the Rraey on the slab to start moving again. From time to time one would start to move away. I stopped them from continuing to do so.

There was a soft thudding sound; Powell had taken out the command truck’s power source. I saw her stalk across the slab, toward the truck, shooting truck drivers as she went. Behind her, one of the Rraey truck drivers had grabbed a weapon and was maneuvering around its truck to get a shot. I dealt with it.

You missed one, I sent to her.

I knew he was there, she sent back. I knew you were there too.

A Rraey appeared out the door of the command truck’s cabin. Powell shot it in the leg; it went down squawking.

Keep a couple alive, I said.

That depends on them, Powell sent back. She reached the truck, grabbed the squawking Rraey, and pushed it in front of her as she went through the cabin door.

Things were quiet, at least from my point of view, for a couple of minutes afterward.

I left a couple alive, Powell said, after those couple of minutes had passed. But you might want to hurry.

I hurried down.

The inside of the command truck was a mess. There were three dead Rraey in it, including the one Powell had shot in the leg. Two more Rraey were at the back of the cabin, keening. From what little I knew of Rraey physiology, they were both sporting broken limbs. Powell had stripped them of their personal electronics; the rest of the cabin’s electronics were down. Light in the cabin consisted of a couple of small emergency lights.

“Any trouble?” I asked Powell as she entered.

“No,” she said. “They’re not very good at close quarters.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said.

Powell nodded and pointed to one of the survivors. “I think that’s the one in charge,” she said. “At least that’s the one everyone tried to keep me from getting at.”

I went over to the Rraey, who was looking up at me. I accessed my BrainPal, which had translation modules for the couple hundred species we humans had encountered the most often; the Rraey were in there. Their language contained sounds that we can’t make, but the BrainPal would pick words that suited our mouths and throats. I’d tell the BrainPal what I wanted to say and it would offer me a suitable translation.

“Are you in charge here?” I asked the Rraey Powell had pointed out to me.

“I will not answer your questions,” the Rraey said to me, in its language, which my BrainPal translated for me.

“I could break something else,” Powell said. She was listening in.

“Torture isn’t useful to get information,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything about getting information.”

I looked back to her. “Give me a minute here, please,” I said. Powell snorted.

I turned back to the Rraey. “You are hurt,” I said, in its language. “Let us help you get better.”

“We’re hurt because of that animal over there,” the Rraey said, jerking its head to Powell.

“You are hurt because you attacked us,” I said. “You cannot attack us and expect nothing to happen in return.”

The creature said nothing to this.

“You are here on a planet you should not be,” I said. “Helping humans, which you should not do. You need to tell me why.”

“I will not.”

“We can help you. We will help you and your soldier here,” I said, pointing to the other injured Rraey. “You will not survive if you do not get help.”

“I will gladly die.”

“But will you ask this soldier to die too?” I said. “Have you asked this soldier what it wants?”

“You’re doing that thing where you’re trying to be nice to someone you were just trying to kill,” Powell said. “It doesn’t work, because they remember you were trying to kill them five minutes ago.”

“Ilse.”

“I’m just pointing this out. Someone needs to say it.”

I ignored her and turned back to the Rraey. “I am Lieutenant Heather Lee of the Colonial Defense Forces,” I said. “I promise you that from this point forward you will not be harmed. It’s a promise whether you help me or not. But if you help me, then I may say to my superiors that you have been useful. And they will treat you better.”

“We know how you treat your prisoners,” the Rraey said.

“And we know how you treat yours,” I said. “We can change things now.”

“Kill me and get it over with,” the Rraey said.

“I don’t want to die,” said the other Rraey.

The first Rraey squawked something at his underling, which my BrainPal translated as “[Silence/You are making a shameful utterance].”

“You won’t,” I said, turning my attention to it. “Help me, solider. Help me and you will live. I promise you.”

“I am Specialist Ketrin Se Lau,” it said. It motioned with its head to the other Rraey. “This is Commander Frui Ko Tvann. We are here on behalf of Equilibrium. We are here because the government of Khartoum has struck a deal with us.”

“What’s the deal?”

“Protection,” it said. “Once the Colonial Union falls, Equilibrium will protect it from species who will try to raid or take over.”

“In exchange for what?”

Commander Tvann squawked again and tried to strike Lau. Powell crossed the distance between the two and held her Empee on Tvann.

“In exchange for what?” I repeated.

“You won’t kill us,” Lau asked. “You promise.”

“Yes, I promise. Neither of you.”

“You won’t torture us.”

“We won’t. We’re going to help you. I promise, Specialist Lau.”

“Protection in exchange for laying a trap,” Lau said. “For luring you here.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Powell said. “The Colonial Union only sent one ship. Even if the Tubingen is destroyed we’ll just send more. A lot more. This uprising will fail and then we’ll go after the Rraey for helping them.”

“Unless there’s more to it,” I said, and turned back to Lau. “What else is there?”

“I don’t know,” Lau said. “I’m a specialist. They only told me what I had to know for my part.”

I turned to Tvann. “And I don’t expect you want to fill me in.” Tvann turned its head from me.

“So we have a dead end here,” Powell said.

“No,” I said, and then cut off as the Tubingen opened a feed, searching for us. It had been attacked and damaged but had survived and with the help of another ship had destroyed the two ships attacking it. It was now asking for status reports.

“Well, at least we’re not entirely screwed,” Powell said.

“Call it in,” I said to her. “Let them know we need immediate medical evac for two Rraey prisoners of war. Tell them I’ve promised they won’t be further harmed.”

“That’s going to go over well.”

“Just do it.”

“Anything else?”

“Tell them to send another shuttle for the two of us. We have another mission to finish.”

* * *

On the way back, our shuttle was diverted from the Tubingen to the other Colonial Union ship.

“I haven’t heard of the Chandler before,” Powell said.

“It’s a State Department ship, not a CDF ship,” I said.

“A State Department ship with a fully operational offensive weapons system.”

“Times have changed,” I said.

“These constraints are hurting my arms,” said Masahiko Okada, the now-former prime minister of Khartoum. It’s possible that he might still be considered the prime minister by some, but from a practical matter his days in charge of things were now over. “I’m very uncomfortable.”

“And several of my friends are dead,” Powell said, to Okada. “So maybe you should think you’re getting the better end of the deal and shut up.”

Okada turned to me. “If you don’t think people will know about how you’re treating me—”

“Let me throw him out,” Powell said, to me.

Okada turned back to Powell. “What?”

“Let me throw him out,” Powell repeated to me. “This shitbucket is the reason Lambert and Salcido are dead. Not to mention everyone else in the platoon.”

“Not everyone else is dead,” I reminded her. “Gould and DeConnick survived, too.”

“Gould and DeConnick are both in critical condition,” Powell said. “They might survive. And if they don’t that leaves just you and me. Out of an entire fucking platoon.” She jabbed a finger at Okada. “I think that rates him getting a space walk without a suit.”

I turned to Okada. “Your thoughts, Mr. Prime Minister?”

“It’s the Colonial Union that instigated this rebellion, not the government of Khartoum,” Okada began.

“Oh, that is it,” Powell interrupted, and stood up. “Time for you to breathe some vacuum, motherfucker.” Okada visibly shrunk away from Powell.

I held up a hand. Powell stopped advancing on Okada. “New plan,” I said. I pointed to Okada. “You don’t say another single word until after we dock with the Chandler,” I glanced back to Powell, “and you don’t toss him into space.”

Okada said nothing more, even after we had landed and some of the Chandler’s crew took him away.

“He seems quiet,” the Chandler crewmember who approached me said, nodding over to Okada. Unlike all the others, he was green, which meant he was CDF.

“He was sufficiently motivated,” I said.

“It appears so,” he said. “Now, then. Do you remember me, Lieutenant Lee?”

“I do, Lieutenant Wilson,” I said. I motioned to Powell. “This is my sergeant, Ilse Powell.”

“Sergeant,” Wilson said, and turned his attention back to me. “I’m glad you remember me. I’m supposed to debrief you and catch you up with things.”

“What we’d really like to do is get back to the Tubingen,” I said.

“Well,” Wilson said. “About that.”

“What is it?”

“Maybe we should find someplace to sit down and chat.”

“Maybe you should just tell me right now because otherwise I might punch you, Wilson.”

He smiled. “You definitely haven’t changed. All right, here it is: The Tubingen survived the attack on her, but ‘survive’ is a relative term. She’s essentially dead in orbit. She might have been entirely destroyed but we managed to get here in time and help her fight off the ships attacking her.”

“And how did you do that?” I asked. “Arrive in the nick of time.”

“We had a hunch,” Wilson said, “and that’s all I can say about that right now, here, out in the open in a shuttle bay.”

“Hmmmm.”

“My point is that if you really want to head back to the Tubingen you may after we’re done debriefing. But you won’t be staying there. At best you’ll have time to collect any personal belongings that weren’t destroyed in the battle before the John Henry and other ships arrive to take you and all the other survivors of the Tubingen back to Phoenix Station for reassignment. You might as well stay here. We can have your effects brought to you.”

“How many people died in the attack on the Tubingen?” Powell asked.

“Two hundred fifteen dead, another several dozen injured. That’s not counting your platoon. Sorry about that. We’ve retrieved them, by the way.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“They’re in one of the mess coolers at the moment.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“I don’t recommend that. It’s not very dignified. How they are being stored, I mean.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll have it arranged, then.”

“I also want to know about the two Rraey I sent back.”

“They’re in our brig, and receiving medical attention, inasmuch as we can give it to them,” Wilson said. “Their injuries were substantial but thankfully not terribly complicated. Mostly broken bones, which we could set and tend. Which one of you did that, by the way?”

“That would be me,” Powell said.

“You’re fun,” Wilson said.

“You should see me on the second date.”

Wilson smiled at this and turned his attention back to me. “We received your instruction that they were not to be further harmed. That was not a problem because we had no intention of doing so. You do understand we will need to question them.”

“You can question them without harming them,” I said.

“Yes we can,” Wilson said. “I just want you to be clear that the questioning is likely to be aggressive, even if it’s not physical. Particularly of Commander Tvann, who is interesting to us for other reasons than just his involvement here.”

“Who’s going to do the questioning?”

“Well, here it’s going to be me.”

“Commander Tvann doesn’t seem very forthcoming.”

“Don’t worry, I think I can get him to talk without breaking anything else in his body. I’ve worked with Rraey before. Trust me.”

“All right. Thank you,” I said. I nodded in the direction of where Okada went. “What’s going to happen with him?”

“Him, I’m not going to make too many promises about,” Wilson said. “He’s managed to perform a neat little trick. Not only has he betrayed the Colonial Union, he’s also betrayed his own rebellion.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that there were ten Colonial Union planets that were supposed to announce their independence from the CU simultaneously, and that Khartoum was one of them. But Khartoum jumped the gun, announced early, and then lured the Tubingen into a trap.”

“Why would they do that?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Wilson said. “What he tells us is going to make a difference in how the Colonial Union as a whole deals with these rebellious planets.”

“Do you think he’ll talk?” Powell asked.

“By the time we get done with him, getting him to talk won’t be the problem. It’ll be getting him to shut up. Now, are you ready for the formal debriefing?”

“Actually, I would like to see my soldiers first,” I said.

“All right,” Wilson said.

* * *

I found Lambert waist high in a stack of dead bodies near the back of the mess cooler. Salcido I found two stacks over, closer to the floor. They did not bear close observation.

“Lambert was right, you know,” Powell said. She was with me in the cooler. Wilson had walked us to the cooler, opened it, and then waited outside. The cooler had been cleared of shelves and the contents they usually stored; the latter were either restocked in a different cooler or being fed to the survivors of the Tubingen, who were in the mess itself, unhappily crowded together.

At least they weren’t crowded together in here.

“What was he right about?” I asked.

“Root causes,” Powell said.

“You of all people,” I said, almost smiling.

“I didn’t ever say he was wrong. I said ‘who cares.’”

“But now you do care.”

“I care more than I used to. What are we doing here, Lieutenant? We’re running around putting out fires. And fine, we’re the fire brigade. Our job is putting out the fires. Not worrying about how they got started, just putting them out. But at some point even the fire brigade has to start asking who is starting all these fires, and why it’s being left to us to continually put them out.”

“Lambert would be laughing his head off to hear you say that.”

“If he were here to laugh his head off, I wouldn’t be saying it. He’d be saying it. Again.” Powell motioned to where Salcido was. “And Sau would be geeking out over some point of trivia. And I would be sniping at both of them, and you would be playing referee. And we would all be one happy family again, instead of the two of us looking at the two of them in a meat locker.”

“You’ve lost friends before,” I said.

“Of course I have,” Powell said. “And so have you. It doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.”

We were silent for a moment.

“I have a speech running through my head,” I finally said, to Powell.

“One you were going to make?” Powell asked.

“No. One someone else made, that I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few weeks, when we’ve been running around putting out fires.”

“Which one is it?”

“It’s the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln. You remember it?”

Powell smirked. “I lived in America and taught in a junior high. I remember it.”

“It’s something like three hundred words long, and it wasn’t even well received when Lincoln gave it. The part I’m thinking about is where he says ‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.’”

Powell nodded. “You think we’re in a civil war right now.”

“I don’t know what we’re in right now,” I said. “It doesn’t feel like a real war. It’s too strung out. Too diffuse. It’s not battlefield after battlefield. It’s skirmish after skirmish.”

“Let me clear it up for you,” Powell said. “It’s a civil war. We lost the Earth. The Colonial Union only has so long before it has to turn to all the colonies to support it with the things it used to get for free from the Earth. The colonies are asking if what they get from the Colonial Union is worth the cost, and worth the cost of having the Colonial Union keep running things. Sounds like the answer for at least some of them is no. And it seems like now they think the arm the Colonial Union was using to shield them is now up against their throat. So they’re trying to get out before the whole thing falls down around them.”

“They’re not doing a good job of it,” I said.

“They don’t have to do a good job of it for it to be a civil war. And they’re not doing a good job of it so far.” Powell motioned around her. “But it looks like they’re learning. And it looks like they’re getting allies with this Equilibrium group.”

“I don’t think Equilibrium, whoever they are, are doing this out of the goodness of their own heart.”

“You’re not wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter from the point of view of this being a civil war. If they don’t think the Colonial Union has their interests at heart, then it’s a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

“That’s not a very smart strategy.”

“Smart has nothing to do with this. We could go around and around like this for hours, Lieutenant.”

“What do you think?” I said.

“About what?”

“About the Colonial Union,” I said. “About it controlling these planets. About how it responds to things like this.” I waved my hand around the room. “About all of this.”

Powell looked vaguely surprised. “The Colonial Union’s a fascistic shit show, boss. I knew that much from the first day I set foot on one of their boats to get away from Earth. Are you kidding? They control trade. They control communications. They don’t let the colonies protect themselves and they don’t let them do anything that doesn’t go through the Colonial Union itself. And let’s not forget everything they’ve done to Earth. They’ve been doing it for centuries. Shit, Lieutenant. I’m not surprised we have a civil war on our hands right now. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”

“And yet here we are,” I said. “You and me, in their uniform.”

“We didn’t want to die old,” Powell said. “I was seventy-five and I spent most of my whole life in Florida and I had bone cancer and never did the things I wanted to do and it was eating me up. You think I’m an asshole now, you should have seen me just before I left Earth. You would have pushed me off a building just on principle, and you wouldn’t have been wrong to do it.”

“Well, all right,” I said. “We didn’t know coming out here what we’d be getting ourselves into.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“But now you do know,” I said. “And if you knew then what you knew now, would you still do it?”

“Yes,” Powell said. “I still don’t want to die old.”

“But you just said the Colonial Union is a fascistic shit show.”

“It is, and right now it’s the only way we survive,” Powell said. “Look around. Look at the planets we’ve been on. Look at all the species out there we’ve had to fight. Do you really think any of these planets and the people on them won’t get carved up the first minute the Colonial Union disappears? They’ve never fought before. Not on the scale they would need to. They have no military infrastructure on the scale they’d have to have. And they would have no time to ramp any of that up. The Colonial Union is a monster, but the colonies are fucking baby deer in a forest full of predators.”

“Then how does any of that change?”

“Got me, boss, I just work here. What I do know is that it is going to change. It has to change because we don’t have the Earth anymore. The mechanics of the Colonial Union, what it was founded on, just don’t work anymore. It changes or we all die. And I’m doing my part to keep it together until then. The alternative is grim.”

“I suppose it might be,” I said.

“What about you? Would you do it again, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want to die old, you’re right.” I reached out and touched Lambert’s cold arm. “But there are worse ways to go.”

“He went mid-pontification,” Powell said. “I’m pretty sure that’s how he would have wanted to go.”

I laughed at that. “Fair enough,” I said. “I think my point is that I get it now. I get that there are worse things than to have lived a life and have most of it behind you. I wouldn’t be afraid of that anymore, I think.”

“Maybe. It’s easy to say that now that you look twenty years old and will live for another sixty even if you left the CDF today.”

“Again, a fair point.”

“This is why I told Lambert to stop going on about it, you know,” Powell said. “All the thinking about the steps beyond what we were directly doing. It never makes you happy. It never solves anything for you, right now.”

I smiled. “And yet you were the one to bring it up, here, now.”

“Yes, well.” Powell grimaced. “Think of it as a tribute. To our departed friend. I’ll never do it again.”

I motioned to Salcido. “And him?”

“Shit, I don’t know,” Powell said. “Maybe listen to that stupid pizza moon song again. Or think about what day it is in the mess. Which is complete bullshit, by the way. You can get pizza and tacos and hamburgers any day you want. It’s just which entrée they push out in front.”

“I know,” I said. “But that wasn’t the point of the conversation, was it.”

“No,” Powell said. “No, it wasn’t.”

PART FIVE

Why are we even here, Powell said to me, through her BrainPal. We and the rest of our platoon on the Uppsala were policing a protest on Erie, in the city of Galway. The protest was entirely peaceful. All the protesters were doing, all anyone was doings, as far as I could see, was lying down. Everywhere. There were at least 100,000 of them. She was thirty yards away from me, part of a defensive line in front of the Colonial Union offices.

We’re protecting Colonial Union property, I sent back.

What are they going to do, lay on it?

I seem to remember you recently complaining about people thinking too much about our missions, I said.

This seems like something the local police can handle.

Indeed, I said, and pointed at a woman lying about two meters from me, in a police uniform. There’s the chief of police. You can talk to her about it.

Even from thirty yards away I could hear Powell’s snort of derision.

The problem with Erie was not that the population had tried to declare its independence, or tried to burn down the Colonial Union local headquarters, or had invited less than entirely altruistic alien species to attack Colonial ships and soldiers. The problem was that Erie had gone on strike.

Not entirely on strike; the planet was still feeding itself and clothing itself and taking care of its own internal needs. But it had decided that, for now, it was no longer in the export business. This presented a problem for the Colonial Union because the Colonial Union bought a substantial amount from Erie, and Erie, as one of the earliest colonies, had one of the most developed export economies in the whole Colonial Union.

The Colonial Union trade representative for Erie had asked what the problem was. No problem, Erie (or more accurately its governor for trade) said. We’ve decided to get out of the export business.

The Colonial Union trade representative pointed out that doing so would trash Erie’s economy. Erie’s governor for trade noted that its economists said that the change would be difficult but weatherable as long as everyone made certain sacrifices.

The Colonial Union trade representative offered to raise the amount it offered for goods. Erie’s governor for trade politely declined.

The Colonial Union trade representative hinted that not doing business with them was tantamount to treason. Erie’s governor for trade asked what particular Colonial Union statute covered enforced, involuntary trade.

The Colonial Union trade representative then made a crack about the entire planet lying down on the job.

This is stupid, Powell said.

As stupid as the Colonial Union trade representative? I asked.

Close, Powell replied. We’re wasting our time here, boss. We’re not stopping anything, or saving anyone, or doing any good. We’re just walking around a bunch of people lying down, waving our Empees around like assholes.

They could spring up and attack us all.

Lieutenant, I’ve got a guy two meters from me who is fucking snoring.

I smiled at this. What do you suggest we do, Ilse? I asked.

I have no idea. I’m open to suggestion.

Okay, try this one on, I said, dropped my Empee and walked out into the crowd.

What are you doing? Powell asked.

Leaving, I said. I began to navigate around the prone bodies so I wouldn’t step on any.

Where to?

I have no idea.

I don’t think we’re allowed to do that, boss. I think the technical term for what you’re doing is “desertion.”

They can shoot me if they want.

They might!

Ilse, I said, stopped and looked back. I’ve been doing this for seven years. You know as well as I do that they’re not going to let me stop. They’ve stopped rotating us out because there are no more of us coming in. But I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. I turned and started walking again.

They will definitely shoot you.

They might, I agreed, echoing her earlier words. I made my way through the plaza and down to one of the side streets. I turned and looked back at Powell.

It’s not like they won’t know where you are, she said to me. You have a computer in your brain. It tracks your every movement. Hell, I’m pretty sure it can track your every thought.

I know.

They’ll come get you.

They probably will.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I won’t.

What will you do?

I used to be a pretty good musician, I said. I think I’d like to do that again. For a while, anyway.

You’re nuts, Lieutenant. I want it out there on the record that I said that.

Duly noted. Want to join me?

Hell, no, Powell said. We can’t all be deserters. And anyway there’s a lieutenant position opening up. I think I’m in line for a promotion.

I grinned. Good-bye, Ilse, I said.

Good-bye, Heather, she said, and then she waved.

I turned the corner and a building hid her from my view.

I walked down the street, found another street that looked interesting, and started walking down it into the first day of another life.

I think it was a Saturday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN SCALZI is one of the most popular and acclaimed SF authors to emerge in the last decade. His debut, Old Man’s War, won him science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, his most recent novel Lock In, and also Redshirts, which won 2013’s Hugo Award for Best Novel. Material from his widely read blog Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com) has earned him two other Hugo Awards as well. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

By John Scalzi

The Old Man’s War Series

Old Man’s War

The Ghost Brigades

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

The Human Division

The End of All Things

First published 2015 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

This electronic edition published 2015 by Tor
an imprint of Pan Macmillan

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ISBN 978-1-4472-9844-1

Copyright © John Scalzi, 2015

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