Hope In One Hand

Dawn broke over their section of the ring. Sergeant Brett Kostersky hadn't been groundside long enough to figure out how that worked, yet. Either the ring turned on an axis, spinning so half of the megastructure's interior faced the local star at a time; or was tidally-locked, spinning its environments through day and night like a conveyor belt. He hadn't paid much attention to that detail in the briefing, and the few hours of daylight after their landing yesterday were too fraught with screams and running to keep track of their new sun.
On watch just inside the cave his squad sheltered in, Kostersky watched gold light somehow paint the nearest mountain's misty mantle pink. The thought of spinning through space on an artificial hula-hoop might've made him dizzy, but hell if its alien builders didn't have an eye for landscaping. Above the peak, a strip of green land and blue sea intermingled between two bands of steel. It stretched high into the heavens and circled back down to the other horizon, dividing the sky into two hemispheres dotted with stars even in the blue of day. Spoiling these vistas were the long, nodular spaceframes of Banished warships floating like turds in the toilet bowl of the Marines' lives lately.
A timer in his helmet's eyepiece reached zero and blinked in silence. The misty pines outside their shelter might've been quiet, but Kostersky'd quickly learned the aliens hunting them could be quiet, too. And their hearing was better than his.
Kostersky stood and—without taking his hands off the grip of an MA40—walked backwards up the tunnel, careful with his steps. Around a corner, he found what remained of his squad laying with their backs against the gently-curved walls. To members of the Corps, the sloping rock may as well have been hammocks shared with curvacious bodies in their preferred gender.
He didn't announce his return, or the next shift. The boys and girls needed their sleep. They'd spent hours making a tactical withdrawal—tactful term for running their fucking asses off—the day before. Not one of them lacked for bags under the eyes, himself included. Private Higgs' splinted leg was elevated on a cushy full rucksack, and the new bandage on Lance Corporal Vogel's head wasn't soaked with as much blood as her last one. He'd still had to make the sack-time an order, the tenacious bastards.
The adrenaline had them all hyped up, locked into fight-or-flight from the moment Infinity was attacked, but he couldn't blame them. God, it'd all been so fast. The Banished had been aboard minutes after the alarms went up, and made securing armories a priority. Brutes caught two of his squad before they'd even got their fighting pants on, dashing heads against walls and ripping arms from sockets. Kostersky had seen that kind of brutality during the big war, but these red baby kongs made savagery inconsequential where it'd been sport before. These ones knew how to take things seriously.
Security contingencies had crumbled under their assault, and two more of Kostersky's men caught fatal spike rounds before the evacuation was called. McGann wasn't quick enough to get through a sealed bulkhead, and unable to open it back up, he'd been left to his fate. That one stung Kostersky, but nothing like seeing the Banished fighters swat the escape pods ahead and behind theirs out of the sky. They burst like fiery pimples, snuffing out what could've been whole squads just like his. Top that off with waking up in the crashed lifepod to find Dougherty and Alaya taken by deceleration and inadequate crash harnesses. The fucking Bumblebees were supposed to crash, how could they not protect the people inside them?
Then had come the running, Higgs on Vogel's shoulder to make up for his broken leg and the unconscious Navy ensign between Garcia and the Bumblebee pilot. Scrambling up rain-slick hillsides and crawling over fallen trees. The Brutes were on them fast, howling like wolves as they gave chase and trying to pin them down for the kill. The Elite who caught Hiiragi never even decloaked, just lifted him kicking and shouting from behind the log he'd taken for a shooting position, then tossed him back to the Brutes. What followed was much more like what Kostersky had seen before.
And just like that, the pursuit stopped. Not with escape, but because they were let go. Kostersky told his squad, commanded them to believe, it was because they had bigger problems elsewhere. The Spartans, he said, were making them pay for Infinity. But nothing they could do would add up to losing Infinity, and the way the Brutes lumbered away so leisurely... no, if Kostersky were to bet, he'd say they were being saved for later. His squad had no way off this ring, and no resources on it to muster. It was the Banished's own private hunting reserve. Or maybe meat locker.
He'd gotten lost in his own thoughts so long, he hadn't noticed Garcia open her eyes. The whites around her coffee-colored irises glowed in the tunnel's dark, but she hadn't said a word yet. Her gaze darted the way he'd come from, fearing his silent retreat meant tangos lay right outside their little burrow like foxes cornering rabbits.
He shook his head. "Get back to sleep. I'll wake Vogel when the shift changes."
"Get to sleep yourself," Garcia hissed, "shift changed ten minutes ago."
"Yeah, well," he whispered back. "Vogel's got a concussion, so she can wait a few more."
"Like you don't. And that biofoam isn't going to hold forever."
Kostersky turned so she wouldn't see him grimace. "It stopped bleeding hours ago. Vogel can look me over after her shift and I've had a nap."
"It might not hold that long," she griped. When he didn't answer, she added, "I hope you're not thinking of going peacefully in your sleep. Squad leaders don't get off that easy."
He grinned and tried to think of a comeback about getting off, but his mind fixated on the shiver in Garcia's voice. She was afraid of losing her leader. Vogel was solid as next-in-line, and the el-tee and pod jockey should probably be leading their little band already, but looking to Kostersky was familiar. And right now, any of them would be clinging to scraps of the familiar.
It was all the worse for Garcia, because it was the first time for her. She wasn't exactly a kid, but she'd joined up after the big war. It hardly made sense to Kostersky there could be anyone in the Corps who hadn't gone through a glassing or two. But Garcia had a couple years in the right base garrisons and the right aptitude scores for a transfer to the Infinity. A bright girl who'd interface well with the science teams on a ship meant to explore the unknown as much as project humanity's newfound strength.
For Kostersky and Vogel and a few they'd lost today? Pfft. Old hat. Hopeless was the default after the Covenant had taken Cole, and Reach, and found Earth. His old units back then had said goodbye to lost loved ones, gritted their teeth, and marched off to go down swinging. Death was an extra squadmate, holding your helmet and asking to bum a smoke before the drop.
For Garcia, and the rest as young as her, the rug was being pulled out from under them for the first time. The promise of a bright future, snatched away. The feeling of cosmic unfairness was raw, its bitterness unfamiliar on the tongue. She all but confirmed it when she asked, "We're gonna die out here aren't we, sir?"
The question seemed to echo, not just off the cave wall, but off something lodged in Kostersky's memory. He tried to remember when he'd first asked that question. On Alluvion, holding a bunker as Wraith mortars fell all around? On Kholo, flattened in a ditch as Jackals waited to snipe whatever popped up? Sitting on a locker room bench before deployment as his old sergeant walked by? He couldn't remember getting an answer.
Garcia was a Marine, but she was also a human facing her own mortality. They could be taught to kill, to dehumanize an enemy—pretty easy when your enemy wasn't human in the first place—but to have that death you channeled turn around and stare you in the face was something else. How could he hope to tell her what'd taken him years of living in such fear to get past?
He thought about just telling her to hope. But every sentence he strung together sounded like a lie, and those saved no one. Folding his hands together and clutching pearls hadn't saved Alaya, or McGann, or any of the men and women who fell all around him on Sigma Octanus IV and Kholo. What had saved him? Dumb luck? Wasn't the kind of answer that'd keep Garcia's head where it needed to be. Damn, he was not the right guy to be giving advice.
In the end, honesty was all he could come up with.
"Maybe we will. They've got all the cards right now, that's for sure."
Garcia exhaled. Her whole body seemed to collapse in around her shrinking lungs. "Then why don't we just give up right now?"
"Because they don't take prisoners. And we haven't played the hand."
She stretched her empty, upturned palms toward him as if trying to make him grasp with her hands. "So what? We have nothing. If they'll kill us anyway, it'd save us all the trouble."
Kostersky shook his head. "Life's trouble. Gotta learn to enjoy it. They might have us, sure, but think: they planned out everything, threw all they had against us, executed perfectly. They killed the Infinity. But they didn't kill us. Long as there's one of us left, we've got a choice to make. We can give up, in which case we die. We can keep going, and maybe we'll still die. Maybe. That's the important bit. The other possibility is we live. There's no point choosing something without that possibility. So we seize on the chance and strangle the fucker as long as we can hold on."
He wished he could've said something more optimistic. Something that made Garcia's face light up and make her white teeth shine in the cave's darkness. He just didn't have something like that in him. But Garcia did take a long minute staring down at her curled-up knees, then rose and quietly replied, "I'll take next watch, Sergeant Kay."
Kostersky didn't have the energy to deny her. "Stay inside the tunnel mouth. Minimizes the angles their scanner tech can register you. We move out soon as I've got my beauty sleep."
Garcia made her way back down the tunnel, getting a grip on the Commando slung at her side.
When she was gone, Higgs piped up from under the cap he'd slid forward over his eyes. "You're shit at inspiring speeches, Sergeant."
"Yeah," Kostersky replied as he settled back against the wall, "I know."
Category:The Weekly