Outpost Hell Read online

  “Was it a human artifact?”

  She swallowed. “It was about a cubic meter in size.” They all knew what that meant – no human could cross the interstellar void in a craft that size; there simply wasn’t enough room inside for a person and the apparatus to keep a person alive. Which meant that it was either a probe or a nanofactory. Or something even worse.

  “Thank you, Recon Leader Tau Osella. I suppose I don’t need to remind you that you cannot speak to anyone outside this room about what you’ve seen?” the blocky general asked her.

  “Of course not, sir.”

  “Good. Please leave your recording chip on the table.”

  She saluted and left.

  ***

  Kan lowered herself into the steaming, bubbling bath and let out a sigh that was part released tension, part anxiety about what was coming, but mostly just pure physical happiness. The grime and sour, fearful sweat accumulated over the past four days had been weighing on her consciousness since she’d landed. The Recon vessel was equipped with an ultrasound bar and chemical cleansers, but it simply wasn’t large enough to carry the water required for bathing. She appreciated the tact of the council of elders, who’d made no mention of the way she must have smelled.

  So she luxuriated in the water, leaving her worry aside for the moment. She let her hair out of its captivity, felt the weight of the long dark tresses as they became waterlogged, felt the past few days melting away. She was proud of her hair, and expressed her vanity with an assortment of treatment products that most of her friends in the force tended to view with contempt – or at least bemusement. But then again, most of the other women on the force tended to be humorless fanatics who wore their hair cropped as close as the men, another group of humorless fanatics.

  She supposed they’d joined the force because of some overblown sense of responsibility, a feeling that humanity wouldn’t be able to survive without them. They were people who were able to ignore or belittle any mention of the Out Programs and explain at tortuous length the reason the Recon Force was so important.

  Kan smiled and slathered conditioner into her hair. She swore she could feel the stuff being sucked into the strands. Pure pleasure.

  And now the soap, something she’d been thinking about for nearly three days. Not bothering with lather, she simply passed the bar directly over her caramel-colored skin. It wasn’t as though she would be sharing that soap with anyone, after all.

  At that thought, a wave of guilt came over her. She’d promised to comm Wilde as soon as she landed. While that had been impossible for obvious reasons, she felt that, at the very least, she should have let him know she was back after the council meeting. Well, too late now. She was actually better off this way. He would have wanted to come over, to go out or something, and she just wasn’t in the mood for his attention – he was sweet, but could be overly clingy.

  She realized that her thoughts of Wilde had ruined the state of bliss, and a hard knot was threatening to form in her shoulder blades, and she forced herself to think about nothing other than the feel of the water against her skin.

  But it was no use. There was an undercurrent of nameless dread which, no matter how Kan positioned herself in the water, no matter what she did with the control for the water jets, stubbornly refused to disappear. So she gave in and tried to understand what was driving it.

  She came to the conclusion that what she knew, what was happening beyond the atmosphere, beyond the comforting kilometer of rock above her head, would never let her feel peace until she did something about it. She just couldn’t know what she did and remain inert, letting someone else deal with it. It went against her training, against everything she’d been taught. But most of all, it went against who she was.

  “Crap,” she said to the empty bathroom, as she pushed herself out of the tub. “There are people handling this. The council will be in meetings. There are procedures. People with experience, not twenty-five-year-old Recon Leaders, no matter how many tours of open-space duty they might have under their belts.”

  But it was no use. Maybe Wilde was right, and she needed to get a new job.

  If this blew over, she would think about it but, in the meantime, she forgot about sleep and headed towards the Recon control center. Maybe the news had filtered far enough that, even though she wasn’t permitted to talk about it, she might be able to hear the latest speculation.

  ***

  Greg shifted the weight from his left leg on to the right. His shift was nearly over, and he’d been standing at his post for seven and a half hours. More than enough to make his legs stiff, but nowhere near enough for him to need a break or to admit to the discomfort. He was a Marine, after all, and he wasn’t just showing his own toughness; the pride of the entire corps was at stake in his every action. He was one, but he represented many.

  Especially here. The Recon people were always going on about how ground troops were obsolete, how true war was fought in the icy depths of space or in the ferocious gravity wells of gas giants. They seemed to take some kind of perverse pleasure in stressing that, if a ground war was necessary, everything was already lost.

  Evidence, of course, tended to support this view. Over the past three centuries, human ground troops had been markedly ineffective against all enemies, whether they be insectoid Brillans, Blobs, or even Uploaders. Not only had they been massacred, but in the more recent engagements, they’d been unable to buy enough time to allow even partial evacuations. The services had been reorganized and merged into the Interstellar Marines, and tactics and weapons had come a long way since then, but the attitude towards them still hadn’t changed: they were cannon fodder useful only as a delaying tactic.

  Even so, there were a few good things about working security in the Recon Rooms. In the first place, he could always lord it over Recon’s own security personnel – soft cases relieved every six hours who were really little more than gussied-up civilians and promoted members of the ground crews. Knowing there was a real soldier on duty allowed them to fall asleep, take walks to stretch their legs, and even, much to Greg’s amusement, borrow a chair to sit in while on duty.

  Another benefit, more important, was the respect the pilots gave him. They might think that the Marines as an institution were an obsolete dinosaur, draining resources from where they would do most good, but they respected individual Marines for their bravery, knowing that, if it came to war, they would have what amounted to a suicide mission to keep the rest of the colony as safe as they could. Recon pilots, despite their superior attitude, understood bravery and respected it. He wasn’t required to salute officers of the Recon Force, but made an exception for the flyers.

  But the main reason he actually looked forward to guard duty here was now approaching, her long strides eating up great chunks of terrain as she advanced down the stark white corridor. Her hair, loose and perfect today, swayed to the rhythm of her body.

  Kan Tau Osella was, to Greg’s eye, the ideal Recon officer. Not only was she rumored to be on the fast track towards generalhood – she was already the youngest Recon Leader in the history of the Force – but she did it without seeming to care. She was brilliant without having to suck up, respected without having to take things to an extreme. She was the only woman in the force with long hair, the one who smiled most often, and the only one who ever gave him more than a short greeting. He told himself that the fact that she was a beautiful woman had nothing to do with it, which, of course, was a lie.

  “Good Morning, Recon Leader Tau Osella,” he said, giving her a crisp salute.

  She stopped in front of him. “Is it morning already?”

  “Yes, four o’clock,” he replied, trying to avoid sounding concerned.

  His worry must have gotten through anyway, because she smiled ruefully. “I’m fine. I just got in from a mission, had a bath, and came over. I didn’t really stop to think about the time.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” he replied, impassive. It wasn’t unheard of for pilots to retur
n from the timeless emptiness of space and not know what time the arbitrary clock in the base said it was, but it just didn’t seem like something Kan would do. The scanner to his left had already checked and verified her identity, so he moved out of the way to let her in, but she hesitated.

  “How are you today?” she asked him.

  “I’m fine. It was a bit of a slow night until about ten minutes ago. Six people came in during that time.” And now you, he didn’t say. He wanted to ask whether something was wrong, whether he should be afraid, but he knew better than that. He would be told what he needed to know, when he needed to know it.

  “Did the colonel come in?” she asked.

  “Just ahead of you,” he replied.

  “Thank you.” She saluted him and walked past.

  Greg now knew that something was very, very wrong. It wasn’t the salute itself, although it was unusual that any Recon Force officer would salute a Marine, especially just a grunt, but it was her eyes. Her eyes had been sad, downturned, and had said much more than she had probably intended.

  Kan Tau Osella had been saying goodbye.

  Siege is available from Amazon here.