The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (3 page)

The turrets on the
s’ndar
APCs – armoured personnel carriers – rotated and began hammering heavy rounds towards the flatbeds, only to be hit by rocket-propelled grenades.

The APCs burned.

I couldn’t determine which of the attacking
s’ndar
had fired. In the panicked crowd, it was impossible to tell the attackers apart from the civilians. I saw the primary sergeant hunched and firing her rifle, so I got down on one knee and began firing likewise. Whoever she shot at, I could shoot at, at least according to the rules of engagement –
s’ndar
being better able to tell one another apart.

Corporal Kent was taking care of the squad. Her bellowing voice was comforting through the speakers in my headset.

Using the laser sight on my weapon, I drew a bead on a
s’ndar
moving hurriedly towards me, while the crowd scrambled in the opposite direction. My finger gave a near-motionless trigger pull and my target’s carapace cracked hideously as the jacketed round tore through its thorax.

I fired at another one, also moving against the crowd. And another. And another.

There were so many trying to converge on us at once!

The senator! I thought. They’re after the senator!

His armoured car was in flames along with the militia’s APCs, and I heard the popping of the Secret Service’s pistols, punctuated by the occasional rip of their sub-machine guns.

From somewhere in the chaos of the crowd, numerous small objects catapulted. For an instant they looked like opaque mason jars, then one was smashing onto the pavement two metres from me.

Grenades?

I stopped firing and turned to see other such objects cascading across our sandbagged position.

I crouched down and began to move towards my people when I caught a deep whiff of a sickly sweet chemical. The contents of the mason jars had spilled wetly on the ground, vapours pluming, and I suddenly found myself rolling helplessly onto my side, arms and legs twitching sporadically.

The
s’ndar
had never used chemical weapons against us before. Neural agents which were effective against
s’ndar
didn’t work against humans, and vice versa.

Until now, anyway.

My instinct was to reach for the unused protective mask in my thigh pouch, but the pouch was pinned under my bodyweight and I didn’t have the strength to roll over. It was as if all the signals travelling from my brain to my body had been roadblocked.

Darkness began closing in on me from all sides, and I thought about how stupid it was to be snuffed like this.

The screams of my squad fell quickly silent, and the last thing I remembered was the murky shape of a
s’ndar
leaning over me.

It was not a member of the militia.

* * *

“Staff Sergeant?”

I didn’t move.

“Staff Sergeant!”

I still didn’t move. The neutered voice did not compute.

Something like a tree branch raked my face.

That
computed.

I reflexively opened my eyes and tried to bring my arms forwards in self-defence, only to find them shackled over my head. Short, rusted iron chains kept me pinned against a cold wall. A single hole in the high ceiling allowed a broad-based shaft of sunlight to penetrate, forming a too bright circle on the cracked cement floor, and leaving the perimeter of the room in near darkness.

A sudden wave of nausea hit, and I coughed violently, my nose and eyes running – doubtless a final reaction to the residue of the chemical attack.

For a second I thought I was going to pass out again, but the nausea slowly subsided and I began blinking the tears from my eyes.

“He is alert,” said the mechanical voice. “Go inform the others.”

I kept blinking until a
s’ndar
silhouette took shape before me. The rotund, beetle-like being was resting on its lower motile legs with one utensil arm poised, ready to strike. The stiff hairs along that arm had stung mightily when it swiped me the first time. I’d have been happy to swing back, if only I wasn’t chained.

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

My TAD scratched out a translation. I was thankful that both the device and its requisite headset were still on my person. That meant my captors wanted to talk, not just kill me.

“I am not authorized to tell you,” answered the
s’ndar
, its own TAD turning clickety-clackety mandible movements into human speech.

“The timing of your ambush couldn’t have been accidental.”

“You are correct.”

“What has happened to Senator Petersen and my squad?”

“No one has been harmed,” the creature said. “You must realize that if we’d wanted to we could have killed you where you stood.”

“OK, you could have killed us and you didn’t,” I said. “What now?”

The
s’ndar
turned and left my cell for a moment, the crude iron door hanging wide open, then returned with several others, including a larger, older female who wore the colourful cloth raiment of a priestess.

Great, I thought. Someone who knows God is on her side.

Among the usual squabbling of the various hives, there was a particularly absolutist sect of
s’ndar
fanatics who considered the human presence on their world to be a literal desecration. They were the ones still fighting guerrilla-style even when most of the other resistors had been bought off at the bargaining table, or beaten down into submission by the Expeditionary Force.

“We are holding your senator,” said the priestess. “Do you understand what this means?”

“Yes,” I said. Capture or assassination of the leader of a rival hive was a time-honoured tradition among the
s’ndar
. Kill or incapacitate the queen bee, and the hive falls apart. A simple yet effective strategy – if you grew up in a hive. “But I don’t think
you
understand what it means.”

The
s’ndar
remained silent, watching me with alien incomprehension.

“When word gets back to Earth that the senator has been taken hostage or, worse yet, killed, there will be a demand for justice.”

“Justice,” the priestess repeated. “By whose definition? How many thousands of innocent
s’ndar
are dead because of humans?”

“The Conglomerate seems to think that if we hadn’t been sent in to stop your civil war for you, there’d be
millions
dead.”

“The human presence on
S’ndar-khk
is immoral,” she replied. “By intervening in our affairs, you deny us our divine right to order our own lives and our world according to
s’ndaran
destiny.”

“You won’t get any argument from me,” I said. “I couldn’t care less about you
or
your fucking planet. But seizing the senator won’t get the Expeditionary Force to budge. They’ll come after you with everything they’ve got.”

My own words surprised me. I didn’t owe the senator anything. But he’d seemed an earnest man, and I’d already seen too many friends die. Somebody had to pay.

As if sensing my rising anger, the two
s’ndar
flanking the priestess suddenly exposed and charged their weapons.

“Are you threatening me, Staff Sergeant?” said the priestess.

“I’m in no position to threaten you,” I told her. “I’m just stating a fact.”

The priestess stared at me for several seconds then turned and left the cell, guards in tow.

They locked the cell door behind them, and I was left alone.

My left arm ached. It wasn’t from the chains. There was a scabbed set of fresh stitches directly over where my Conglomerate-made ID chip had been implanted before leaving Earth. Every member of the military had one, to prevent us from going Missing-in-Action. But these
s’ndar
had been smart enough to cut the device out of me, lest it give my position away to the Conglomerate satellites in orbit.

I sighed. No hope of a quick rescue now.

Minutes crept by in silence. I shouted, hoping to get a response from any other human that might hear me.

No response.

It’s amazing how long an hour becomes when you are deprived of typical sensory input. The cell became deathly quiet. There was no noise from beyond the iron door, no music, no human or alien speech, nothing to look at except the circle of light that slowly inched across the cement floor as the day dragged on and turned into night.

I grew thirsty. Only a prolonged and significant amount of clanging with my chains attracted the attention of the guards, who brought me a portable light and two buckets: one to fill up, and one to empty.

Guards removed the manacles from my wrists and ankles, and then brought an even longer chain, which they connected to a collar they placed around my neck. The other end of the long chain was attached to a cleat in the floor, and I was able to walk and move for the first time in almost twenty-four hours.

They left me in the dark again. When the sun came up the priestess reappeared, only this time without her escorts. She kept well away from me, but her posture expressed curiosity.

“What now?” I said.

“If seizing or killing your senator yields an effect opposite of what we desire, consideration must be taken as to how to proceed next. We do not ordinarily keep prisoners.”

“What’s
this
for then?” I demanded, yanking the chain on my collar.

“
Human
prisoners,” she replied.

“You have the senator,” I said, “so what happens to the rest of us?”

“We used forbearance during the ambush, at the cost of many
s’ndaran
lives. Your squad still lives because
I
wish it, in spite of the feelings of many others who would just as soon see you all dead. After all, you are
aliens
. Everything about you is alien. You have no business being here. We want you off our planet, but before that can happen there are a few of us who believe we must understand you first. The better we understand you, the better we will be able to determine by what leverage you are moved.”

I stared at her. “Seizing hostages won’t do it, that’s for damned sure. We’ll have every available troop scouring this planet for Senator Petersen. Once they find him, it won’t be very pleasant for his captors.”

“We will make your masters understand us,” the priestess said, advancing close to me. She stabbed a foreleg into my chest. “You do not belong here.”

“Tell that to the Conglomerate,” I said.

“You
are
the Conglomerate!”

“No, we’re just humans from Earth.”

She stared intently at me. “Explain.”

“It’s simple enough,” I said. “Earth’s government cut a deal with the Conglomerate.”

“What does that mean?”

I explained the essentials of the situation. Earth needed what the Conglomerate had to offer, and as long as that remained true, the United Nations would keep the Expeditionary Force on
S’ndar-khk
.

“We never knew any of this,” the priestess said.

“You never asked,” I said.

The next day of incarceration passed with numbing sameness. As did the next. And the one after that.

Then the priestess reappeared, only this time she had several other
s’ndar
with her. None of them were armed, though they hardly needed their weapons against a chained and defenceless prisoner. They all stood near the door, well out of the radius of the chain that kept me anchored to the cell floor.

“You were right,” the priestess informed me. “News of the senator’s abduction has caused human activity on
S’ndar-khk
to increase precipitously.”

“That’s hardly a surprise,” I said. “They’ll be looking for Petersen, me, and my whole squad. The Army doesn’t leave its men and women behind.”

“You are
that
valuable?”

“
Every
soldier is valuable,” I said.

“Even those who are inferior?”

“
Subordinate
, not
inferior
,” I said. “There’s a big difference.”

“We wish to know more of this deal humans have with the Conglomerate,” said one of the priestess’s companions. “At what point will it be satisfied?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Until someone in the Conglomerate decides the job is done, I suppose.”

The
s’ndar
began skittering and scratching excitedly, and my TAD muted due to overload.

“If you really want humans gone,” I said, “you could do yourselves a favour by not acting like such a bunch of bloodthirsty animals.”

“I do not expect you to understand the complexities of inter-hive politics,” she said, “nor do I expect you to grasp the richness and depth of my people. To us it is
you
who are the animals. You come without being invited or wanted, and enforce your version of ‘peace’.”

“Agreed,” said a different
s’ndar
.

“Like I said before,” I replied, “tell it to the Conglomerate.”

The priestess circled me, her forelimbs folded thoughtfully. “Our history with the Conglomerate is complicated,” she said. “When the Conglomerate made its first contact with us, many hives spurned its overtures, declaring that we have the right to live without alien interference. When its overtures became demands, we destroyed their probe ship in orbit. An additional series of probe ships were sent, and we destroyed them too. Then, a few years later, your human armies arrived.”

“But not by our own means,” I pointed out. “The Conglomerate
brought
us here to do a job. When they think it’s done, they’ll take us back home and you’ll never have to see another human again. If you weren’t so intent on slaughtering each other – and slaughtering humans in the process – we’d be gone by now.”

The group chattered and clacked, and the priestess faced me squarely.

“So strange,” she said. “You repulse and fascinate me at the same time.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I said.

She waited while we glared at one another, my human eyes and her multifaceted insect’s eyes. Then she clacked her mandibles once, very sharply. Suddenly the entire lot of them fell silent, and began filing out of the cell.