Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle (33 page)

Gina popped a last ball of rice into her mouth and smiled. She had chosen Chinese on purpose. His crack about marines and Faragut had struck a nerve. He wasn’t far wrong about her home world’s rep, not that she cared to learn what the current fashionable stereotype happened to be, but proving she knew a good menu when she saw one had suddenly become important. Hiller was her platoon’s gourmet, not her, but she had learned a thing or two over the years, and Hiller had added to her increasingly discriminating palette with trips to Stirlings in Petruso with their friends. She could hold her own with Eric, though she was betting he would wipe the floor with her where wine was concerned. Cliché it might be, but beer really was more her style. If Eric was a wine snob, well, she would deal, disappointing as that would be. She grinned.

“What’s funny?”

Gina shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Come on, you’ve thought of something.”

“No, really, it’s nothing,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

Eric shrugged. “Shoot.”

“You might not like it,” she warned, thinking it better than just blurting it out. “The San Luis op. Did you save the others aboard the dropship?”

Eric stared off into the distance remembering. “Did I save them?” He sounded grim. “We always tried to save people in the beginning. It seemed like that was our mission, but of course that changed. We went from saving people to avenging them in short order. Our missions became seek and destroy. We were like you once, Gina, all of us. Even the General was like you back then; a young captain determined to do the right thing, but he changed. We all had to, or go insane. You’ve only seen one side of him you know, but even so I think you’ve already started to wonder about him, haven’t you?”

Gina opened her mouth to answer, but no words would come out.

“No need to answer. Your loyalty to him and the regiment can remain unstrained a while longer. Just remember that there’ll come a day when you have to decide how much your honour is worth. I remember the first time I had to compromise mine for the good of the regiment. The General is fond of that saying. The good of the regiment. The problem is, the good of the regiment is what he says it is. The same goes for the good of the Alliance. Who decides? He does. He sends us out and we do what he orders because he says the Alliance will be better if this thing happens, or worse off if that thing does... this or that person must die, for the good of the Alliance.

“Well,” Eric shrugged. “I guess we do still trust him even after everything. Why else are we still doing his bidding? Maybe because we’re so old we don’t know any other way to live. Maybe we need someone to lead us because we can’t think for ourselves anymore.”

God he sounded bitter. “And maybe you’re just full of crap,” Gina said callously. “Maybe deep down you know he makes the hard choices, the choices you know must be made, and you’re secretly relieved because you don’t have the balls to make them yourself.”

Eric smiled gently. “Maybe so. You asked if I saved them that day. The truth is we saved each other every day back then. We didn’t keep count then and don’t now. Did I save them that time? I cut the fuel just as you did in your sim, and left them in hibernation. The SAR shuttles lifted them into orbit for repairs and redeployment. I know you’re wondering about the burned ones. They survived. They were even sane when they came back online, as much as any of us were after San Luis.

“San Luis was a defining moment for us. For vipers I mean, but also the Alliance. The entire regiment fought in those battles, something not done before that. It changed things. The General certainly became more aggressive after seeing the survivors, and I think that was when he began to ah...
manage
his superiors. I noticed at the time that our missions changed in surprising ways.”

Gina knew her history and agreed with Eric. Events could be explained in different ways of course, but if one were paranoid enough to assume there had, or could have been, one mind orchestrating things, then certainly that man had been General George Burgton. Vipers had exploded onto the scene after San Luis. They had suddenly been everywhere, given almost a free hand or so it seemed. No doubt Burgton had needed to negotiate or persuade his superiors to allow his men to perform those missions, but that was all behind the scenes. It had appeared very different on the surface. Vipers were sent in ahead of major land forces to break Merkiaari command and control structures, and wherever Merkiaari popped up, so too did the vipers, sometimes anticipating their incursions like the catastrophe at Bethany’s World.

“Well,” Gina said. “I’m glad you did save them.”

Eric shrugged as if it meant nothing.

She drank her coffee and tried to think of something else to talk about. Eric just sat there watching her, and she couldn’t think of anything but work to fill the silence. She was about to bring up tomorrow’s itinerary when he broke the silence, but his choice of subject didn’t please her.

“Faragut,” Eric said. “You were born there.”

She nodded but he hadn’t asked a question so she restricted herself to the nod.

Eric’s lips twitched but he didn’t laugh. “Tell me about it.”

“Nothing to tell. I was born there, eighteen years later I left. Never went back.”

“Hmmm, family?”

“Nope.”

“None?”

“None I know of, and no I didn’t look.”

“Why not?”

Gina sighed and put her cup aside. “You ever visit Faragut?”

Eric nodded.

“Then you know what it’s like. Faragut is a throwback. It’s barely a democracy. I’m amazed that the Alliance accepted their form of government at all. Constitutional monarchy for Chrissakes,” Gina snorted. “Would
you
go back there?”

“I’ve always liked the romance of monarchies,” Eric mused seriously. “Feudal lords beholden to the crown governing their lands in peace and prosperity. It sounds idyllic. The lords have a social contract with their people to govern honourably. There are worse governments out there, Gina. When I was there, Faragut was stable and its people had a high standard of living. King Richard was beloved; his heir was doing his duty in the Alliance Navy.”

Gina grimaced. “Spoken like a tourist. The government serves the crown. The King as head of state makes broad policy, and the House of Lords and House of Commons debate and wrangle over the details. It’s a democracy because the commoners vote for their representative to sit in the lower house, but it’s a democracy in name only. The King can dissolve Parliament at any time. He rules Faragut, and he’s commander in chief of Faragut’s armed forces. Parliament serves him by carrying out his edicts.”

“I get all that, Gina, I knew it before, but what has that to do with you? You were a commoner I assume?”

“Orphan, but yes. I was looked after and educated in a state crèche.”

“Ah,” Eric said more subdued. “That explains it.”

She nodded. The crèche system was a great idea in theory. It amounted to state run orphanages that cared for unwanted children. They cared, clothed, taught, and trained them to be useful members of society. A worthy goal one would think, but come the age of majority—eighteen on Faragut—the young adults had to pay back the state with national service either in the military or in the factories. The only way to avoid what amounted to a fifteen-year hitch of legalised slavery was to emigrate. Emigration takes money, making that an impossible dream. She had chosen another route off world with a five-year hitch with the Alliance marines. She had left and never looked back, and loved the life, re-upping with the marines twice more until Colonel Flowers seduced her away and into the regiment.

“So you hate your homeworld.”

“I don’t hate it, Eric. I have no feelings for it one way or the other. I wouldn’t retire there, I wouldn’t want to live there, but plenty of people do and happily at that. Good luck to them.”

“Hmmm,” Eric didn’t seem convinced. “What do you think of their military?”

“Professional in the main, well trained rankers from what I saw on the Shan homeworld, but the officers are mostly nobles. It’s very hard for commoners to enter the academy on Faragut. The officers walk about like they have a stick up their butts. They act as if everyone else was born to serve them. Kate told me the same problem exists on Bethany.”

Eric nodded. “Bethany doesn’t have nobles, but they have founding families, which are about the same. It’s not what you know but who you know with them. Hiller is a rare exception among them in that he was born with some common sense.”

Gina snorted.

“Tomorrow we check out Landing,” Eric said changing the subject. “If it looks promising I want to go to phase two by the end of the day. Thoughts?”

“One of us flies back to
Hobbs
at the earliest opportunity to collect the base camp habitats and all the gear the engineers need.”

“Good. We’ll check out things together. If it looks okay, you go back upstairs and get Liz and her people and all their gear. They’re engineers. They can use that expertise to build their own camp.”

Gina grinned. “Good.”

* * *

Landing City, Kushiel

Gina surveyed the blasted and broken city buildings and took another reading. The city was hot as they had thought it would be, but not dangerous to someone wearing an environmental suit with canned air. The habitats were like very big environmental suits in the way they protected the inhabitants, so as long as they washed off contaminants from their suits before entering, they were all good. She reported that to Eric. He was on the other side of the city checking out the structures there.

“Sounds good, but I haven’t found a good place to set up yet. You?”

“Not yet,” Gina replied. “I’m heading to the site I saw on my shuttle’s sensors next. I have a good feeling about it.”

“Okay, but I’m not sure why you think a hot spring is important.”

Gina just shrugged not caring that he couldn’t see it. Eric seemed to feel the hot spot was a natural occurrence, and that could be true, but what if it wasn’t?

“Maybe something interesting there,” she said and signed off.

She couldn’t drive to her point of interest. The city had been severely hammered during the war and its streets were clogged with rubble and fallen buildings. She doubted the thieves had “salvaged” anything here. There really wasn’t anything left, and that was going to be a problem. She knew how she had felt when she saw the destruction, and knew Eric must feel the same way. With such devastation it would be a miracle if what they sought was recoverable. Still, they had to look and be sure before they pulled out. Liz wouldn’t accept anything but positive proof of failure, and Gina felt the same. She knew how important Oracle was to the General.

She made her way by foot to the place she had marked on her internal map. It took hours of walking and backtracking when she found herself blocked, but finally she found the source of the heat her sensors said would be here.

She circled the ruined building trying to imagine it undamaged. She gave up after a very brief time. There was little point to the exercise, there was so little left to work with. Most of the walls had been blasted away. Literally. The nukes had not only irradiated the area, the air burst had wiped away entire blocks of buildings leaving a few nubs of walls and the foundations. That is what she had here. Foundations, melted steel, a wall here and there. The main feature was the remnants of the stairwells and elevator shafts. Gina switched to thermal imaging and confirmed her guess that it was the elevator shafts radiating heat.

“Okay, don’t get excited. It’s not hot springs, but it doesn’t mean you’ve found a power source.”

Or did it? She supposed a hot spring could have broken through into a basement of a building like this one, but she just didn’t believe it. Waste heat under a building escaping up an elevator shaft didn’t mean anything. Really. It didn’t mean for example that she had found the A.I, or its backup module. It only meant she had found a source of heat on a frozen world. That’s all. Just that and nothing else. She needed to investigate further.

“Eric,” she said not betraying her excitement.

“What have you got?”

“Well it’s not a hot spring, not in the basement of a building. I think we need to go down and check this one out. Bring climbing gear would you?”

“On my way,” Eric said. “Stay put and I’ll home on you.”

“‘kay,” Gina said and headed for the elevator shaft to see if climbing down would be a simple matter or whether they would need the engineers.

They needed the engineers, Gina thought, some hours later as she and Eric dangled from ropes down one of the shafts. They were stymied by what was left of the elevator winching mechanism and the car itself where it had fallen and jammed in the shaft. She didn’t know if the car had hit bottom or not. She tended to doubt it based upon the state of the emergency brakes. She could just make them out, and they had deployed clamping the car in place. The tangle of cable and pulleys was the problem. Why the hell hadn’t the builders used anti-grav cars?

“We need cutting equipment,” she said.

“Hmm, we could probably make do with the thermate,” Eric said studying the problem. “Just burn it into chunks and let it fall wherever.”