FORT LIBERTY: VOLUME ONE Page 2

  Voss stops short, glaring through the man’s visor, seeing nothing but a smooth expression under its gloss, unscarred skin, wide blue eyes. “She just suffered the loss of her parents, her entire life. Can that be calculated?”

  The aide holds up his gloved finger, wagging it as if chiding a dog. “No, that is not accurate. She had no parents, no life. Not here. She never belonged with these people. Since the War of Last Nations, they’ve only gotten worse on this planet. Don’t pretend you don’t know that. They don’t value people like her. They don’t value people at all. They clump into tribes and start wars. They torment the weak and fight tooth-and-nail for their barbaric feudalism. They understand nothing. They squander every resource. Do you disagree with any part of that?”

  Voss does and doesn’t. It’s true of the ones he faces in combat. It’s not true of the many others who live a ghostlike existence in the background.

  “I asked you a question, Colonel.”

  “I lost interest.”

  “Ach… you’re a useful man, but so difficult.”

  “Skilled killers are like that.”

  “Rhys Corp people… fanatics, all of you. Honor. Valor. Sacrifice. Yes, of course… but why is it, again, Colonel, that you’re still running ground missions at your… distinguished age?”

  “Not dead yet?”

  “You’re a fanatic, like the rest of your team, tattooed and unshaven. It’s fitting that Rhys Corp is based Earthbound.”

  “We’re Earthbound because we operate in this environment, because we can’t ship in from Mars, do our jobs huffing around in a gravity suspension suit, with barely enough strength to breathe.”

  “Soldier drones don’t need to breathe. And they stay clean.”

  “Soldier drones get hacked. And then they kill guys in white suits.”

  The aide rolls his eyes. “Prepare your team. We leave in four hours. You’re accompanying us to Fort Liberty.”

  Voss frowns. “Rhys Corp is Earthbound, remember? We don’t do long hauls. We don’t go to Mars with you.”

  “You do now.”

  “And you expect us to prepare for a trip like that in just four hours?”

  “Well, how long does it take for you to pack your guns? Really?”

  “It’s different duty… in space.”

  The aide jabs his finger toward the Light Bird, adamant. “That girl in there is part of a priority one level project. That means top level security, top level secrecy. She is desperately needed, and she must be delivered immediately.”

  “So?”

  “So, given the nature of her importance, it has been decided that Team Blackheart—oh so special—will provide additional security during transport. Your men already have the appropriate clearances, and have already seen the girl, so we can avoid adding unnecessary witnesses at this point. This is a sensitive operation, not one to be entrusted to mere cruiser guards.”

  “Or soldier drones, apparently.”

  The aide ignores this. “Your superiors have already accepted the contract, which was offered by President Wexler himself. Your orders will be presented to you momentarily.”

  Outstanding. Voss stifles a curse.

  Three weeks in the cold can at accelerator speeds, just to take a few pointless spins around the Red Planet and come back, weaker and sicker for the ride. It means being out of combat rotation for at least six months, and no one on the team is going to be happy about that. A soldier counts his years carefully, and those he’s fit for action, for the intense fights he lives for, go by quick enough without the company using him for mindless transport.

  “You’ll be paid triple for the time out, plus a small bonus for the year,” the aide adds, reading Voss’s reluctance as if it were as clear as a neon sign. Money, profits, the logic of payoffs and investments, that’s New Republic of Mars language, after all. If there’s one thing a NRM bureaucrat knows how to do, it’s negotiate, purchase a piece of someone’s life for the cost of fuel.

  Still, the offer will sell the mission to the team, no problem. It’s a bonus they didn’t expect, and it’s as good as they’re going to get. The language in their contracts is clear. Only the guys who accept the missions they’re given are granted NRM citizenship. Only the guys who perform to the top of their ability, and never waver from their assigned duties, get to retire in the clouds with a full pension and all the med care they could ask for.

  Ethos aside, no one fucks with that, especially not a man in Voss’s position, with decades of war behind him, hair turned silver before its time, and enough replacements to make him half-human—at best.

  He nods, accepting that the next three weeks will be spent babysitting soft cargo in reduced G, working out in spinning cages and eating slop that makes bland Earth food taste like steak and caviar. “We’ll pack our guns.”

  “Fucking Mars jump.” Logan’s bitching, disassembling his ground kit, sorting dormant skeetos, extra magazines and multi-sights, breachers, head-ups, kill cards, throwing knives, EMP grenades—this even before he gets to his favorite assault systems—an easy mil in equipment getting packed into plastic containers with nothing more than closure locks.

  He’s the youngest, and the team’s medic, ginger-haired and clean shaven because he still can’t grow a proper beard. His trauma kit, the one he’s carefully assembled with his own pay—the one a combat surgeon with twice the amount of contract years might envy—remains intact at his side.

  He shakes his head. “Big sky mission. Day one, watch stars. Day two, watch stars. Day three, watch stars. Day fifteen, snap own neck.”

  “Grade A pussy on Mars,” Gojo says, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips, curling smoke between racks. “Good girls raised on filter, clean air, clean water, pure thoughts… accustomed to stringy man-bitches with silly hands, only ever seen a real man in war documentaries.”

  Logan rolls his eyes. “Give me an honest whore any day.”

  “Oh they got those too,” Gojo replies, grinning. “In the willow houses, with little gardens, little sticks of incense, silk robes and a wet little tongue up your ass.”

  “Agh. You would like that.”

  “Oh, I like more than that.”

  “Save it, Go-poke, especially since I have to sleep in the lower rack and wake up to your cock swinging in my face every morning.”

  “Thing of beauty.”

  “In who’s mind?”

  Gojo shakes his head, his eyes crinkling with amusement. “Don’t you worry, son. You’ll mature someday, grow some real hair on that chinny chin chin and lay pipe just like the grown-ups.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Wyatt chuckles from the floor, his gear neatly arranged in straight lines, as if preparing to march into the containers all on its own, Sorcerer’s Apprentice set to a bugle call with dancing glass and ballistic armor.

  Assaulters are methodical and superstitious folk, heavy on the OCD when it comes to their own rituals. Weapons are always cleaned the same way, equipment checked the same way, organized and stowed the same way. It’s a mental process as well as a physical one, a way to soothe the natural state of agitation that drives the Type A. Comfort items find special places, the favorite pair of socks, the lucky shirt, the helmet that caught the round, or the vest with the hole burned through it, a career of triumphs and near misses chronicled in a spread of urban fatigues, lethal instruments and scarred armor.

  Voss has his own cache of oddities, and he packs them in silence, a few drives of pictures, some old letters and a handful of antique print books, a box of medals he shoves under his folded dress uniform, its pressed jacket tailor made for an endless line of funeral processions.

  “Don’t let him bullshit you,” Wyatt is telling Logan, weighing in as the team’s senior ranked sergeant on the complex issue of prostitutes. “Go-poke’s never seen the inside of a willow house. Those hookers got training. They make tea, and dance with fans and shit. Corporate skinnies don’t let beasts like us ruin their women for them. We’ll be lucky if
we’re allowed to set one foot off the boat. Ain’t no tattoos, or swearing, allowed inside those filters.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Logan replies, disgusted.

  “Yeah, like, Earth, what’s that? Oh, it’s where our factories are, where the consumers are, but hell, it’s kind of dirty, and it’s filled with assholes who blew themselves up in the last war, so let’s just pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  “Pfft.” Logan’s containers are filling up. He tosses some spec manuals out, making room for… whatever.

  “You’ll see,” Wyatt says. “Some of them will walk right up and thank you and everything, talk nice, shake your hand, say it’s an honor, but then it’s all like… please don’t bring your gun in here, please don’t talk about killing bad people and liking it, because life is so precious in this filter, so please don’t go nuts and wax us all, or blow your own brains out at the dinner table.”

  Voss locks down his containers and carries them into the corridor, stacking them along the flat bed of the cargo loader. He leaves the boys to their bullshit, going up-ladder to the roof, to his own personal smoking overlook, or at least the corner of the barrack’s roof he thinks of as his own.

  He’s got no helmet, no visor, breathing unfiltered, just like all the other Earthbounders do. It stinks, of course, the sky dark and thick, a toxic soup swirling in the red glow of the guard tower beacons. In the distance, a sea of lights stretches across the horizon, more neighborhoods with muddy rivers of sewage flowing through them, desperation, resignation, poverty.

  Voss fishes a box of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and shakes one out, sliding it between his lips. A scratch of flame dances from lighter to paper, and he’s lit, drawing a deep breath, letting the burn settle in his lungs.

  The aide sees what he wants to see, a war-torn trash heap, all of its power and most of its goods provided by, or managed by, the New Republic of Mars and its Block 12 companies. He sees a wasteland of savages, people victimizing their own, paying to keep the lights on with drug profits, beating each other down with oppressive religions. He doesn’t recognize the organized army that has risen out of that rage, or the small groups of Earthbound rich that are partnering up with them, just to make things even harder than they are.

  Why should an NRM presidential aide concern himself with that? After all, Earthbound rich is nothing like Mars rich, nothing like living in the big sky with the Block 12 companies raking in the profits and greasing the wheels, firmly in command of the cruisers and the stations, guarding the halls of culture and the massive brain trust, surrounded by power brokers and their monuments.

  The aide doesn’t have to worry about trash heap armies, or terrorists, or surf rebellions, because none of it exists where he comes from, and he has Rhys Corp to do his worrying for him when he’s Earthbound. He has ‘skilled killers’ to keep the violence from wiping out the last of Earth’s infrastructure, keep the survivors of the War of Last Nations living in whatever way they choose to, keep them building and consuming in whatever way they can.

  So what does the aide worry about? He worries about getting a girl, all 50 kilos of her, through some transport interference that might show up between here and the Red Planet. Why there should be such interference, and what role this girl is supposed to play in the NRM’s stated commitment to help Earth rebuild is—of course—going to remain a big secret.

  Voss exhales, letting the irritation slide out through his teeth.

  On the tarmac, five hundred meters out, a four-engine cloud puncher sits on the launch pad, vapor wafting from its hoses, its windowless metal capsule just big enough to carry his team, plus gear, plus the aide, plus girl, on an auto ascent to the docking station in orbit. It’s a quick trip, fifteen minutes, give or take.

  And then it’s on to a cruiser... and no more cigarettes.

  He drags another slow breath, smoke curling around his fingers, his eyes narrowed on the cloud puncher. Space. Big sky. Ft. Liberty. How many years has it been? Of course, he remembers, even though he doesn’t want to, can name at least a dozen Earthbound firefights, war wounds, he’d rather revisit instead.

  Movement streaks in the periphery and he turns, catching sight of the girl, Niri, running out of Airlock 4. She’s going hell for leather, as lithe and quick as cat, that shining braid lashing behind her.

  “And where do you think you’re going?” he mutters, watching as she heads straight for the cloud puncher. To do… what?

  He waits for a second, expecting the president’s aide to appear in his white suspension suit, plodding after her in triple the G he’s used to, pushing his lanky frame as fast as it can go, gasping for breath the entire way.

  Only he doesn’t. No one does. No one comes after her, like no one knows she’s missing. The thought astounds him, maybe even amuses him a little bit before the realization sets in. She’s going to make it to the cloud puncher, and she’s going to do whatever she’s going to do, while he sits there like an idiot and watches it happen.

  Flicking the cigarette into the darkness, he half-slides, half-leaps from the roof, setting off as soon as his boots hit the tarmac. Running comes easy, even after the femur rebuild, his body trained to the point of exhaustion every day, now lean, big on muscle, and stronger than it has to be. He sprints down the tarmac, heaving thick air, side holster biting against his hip. He catches up with her before she sees him coming, appearing on her flank when she’s got her eyes set dead ahead.

  She leaps up onto the launch pad, a flash of movement caught in the glare of xenon lamps, and charges for the fuel hoses, like she’s come to wreck everything, maybe kill them both in the process.

  Voss jumps after her, catching her around the waist and swinging her off-balance as gently as he can. She hits the grate, thrown onto her side with her palms down, cursing at him.

  “Get away!” she cries, her small chest heaving, sweat glossing her forehead, down her neck. “You have no right to take me.”

  Voss stands back from her, holding up his hands, a sign of surrender he hopes will placate her while he catches his breath. “You’re going home. You’re a citizen now. They’ll protect you, give you everything.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “You don’t know these people.”

  “Neither do you! You live here with the rest of us.”

  Ah, for fuck’s sake…

  She pushes to her feet, suddenly more woman than girl, her jaw set, her fists clenched tight at her sides. “Whatever they’ve told you, it’s not true.”

  “They told me that you’re gifted.”

  “I hear things. Terrible things. Is that a gift? They’ll destroy me. They’ll have no choice.”

  Hear things? It’s not what he expects, so it takes him a moment to respond. And when he does, it sounds like he’s grasping… because he is. “No… it doesn’t work like that. At this moment, you have more legal rights than I do. They can’t take that back. They can’t ‘destroy’ you. We clear on that?”

  “They will have to.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not a gift.”

  “Niri—”

  “You don’t know what I hear. Only my father said it was a gift, and he didn’t know… ” She looks lost, her bottom lip trembling. “Now he’s dead.”

  Voss rubs one hand over his jaw in frustration, knowing that this is his undoing, right here. Talking to men, to soldiers, is what he’s good at, conversations that rely on the heavy application of dominance, ridicule and bullshit. Talking to women, to this woman, right now, is a nightmarish prospect, a potential minefield of comfort cues and evasion techniques he can’t, doesn’t want to navigate.

  Just get her away from the cloud puncher…

  “He wasn’t supposed to die,” he says. “No one wanted it to happen like that. But you’re a citizen now, and that means clean air, clean clothes, clean food and water. Private quarters. Med care. Luxuries your father could never have dreamed of… and protection under the law. You’ll be with others like you,
working in the brain trust to innovate, make things better. You’ll have a good life, and he wanted you to have a good life.”

  She backs away from him, unable to take it in, hurting too much.

  At that moment, he knows she’s going to bolt. He can see it plain as day, her small body leaning toward the darkness, ready to break loose and force him to chase her under the guard towers all night.

  Voss reacts by taking a careful step forward, his hands still raised in the air, nothing threatening, just a little closer… “No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Not good enough.

  She tries to jump off the pad, but he catches her, swearing under his breath. But she doesn’t stop. No, she fights, twisting in his grasp until they’re face to face, her body crushed against his, the earthy scent of gutters still moist on her skin. She slams her knee into his groin, and he feels it, a burst of blinding pain.

  His grip lessens and she slips away, snatching the knife from his belt and landing on her feet. All of a sudden, she’s a threat, eyes glittering, teeth bared, holding the knife like she knows how to use it, like she can fillet him from tip to tail if she wants to.

  And maybe she does.

  “Niri,” he says her name, trying to bring her back.

  “They’ll destroy me,” she says. “And they’ll destroy you too, your men, all of you. You have to let me go.”

  They stare at each other, shadowed reflections trembling across the chromed steel blade between them, the red glow of the towers catching on its serrated edge.

  “Let me go,” she says.

  In one swipe, he knocks the knife from her hand. She ducks out of reach to retrieve the blade, grasping the handle and springing back to her feet.

  Only now his sidearm is drawn, the muzzle bearing down on her.

  She hesitates, breathless, then raises the damn knife again.

  You gotta be kidding.

  “I will fight,” she tells him, in case he hasn’t figured that part out already.

  “Niri—”

  The girl charges.

  He hits her with a stunner round.

  She crumples, a match flame extinguished by unseen breath, dropping to the tarmac at his feet. The knife goes clattering into the darkness.