Into The Red

WHAT if you were offered this choice - life in prison Earthside, or the chance to win a cushy state pension after serving in the Legion, Redside?

Would you take it, knowing that you need to rack up ninety-nine combat hours and only one in twenty recruits make it out the other end alive?

Would you take it, knowing you are going to be fighting against an Ancient foe who has forgotten more about war than man will ever know?

Would you go, knowing none of the men and women you are going to serve with is completely sane, since no sane person ever volunteered to serve Redside?

I did. And I'm keeping a journal about it, but given life expectancy Redside, this might be a very, very short story.

Disclaimer: unedited, raw creativity, my brain to this page ...

Redside

It starts with Antonia, and it ends with Antonia.

Don’t act surprised. You knew this story would be about love, blood and murder. Maybe not quite the love story you expect, or the murderer either. But the blood, well, there are no surprises there.

The Battle of Terra Sabea, you heard about that. But you never heard what went before, right? Syrtis Major? I bet you have no idea what happened at Tyrrhena Terra either. Isidis Planitia? Come on, you heard about that cluster. No? Here’s one, Margaritifer Terra? No? Seriously?

So apparently it is up to me to tell you. Things screw with your mind up here though, you know that. So I’m going to tell it the way I remember it but that doesn’t mean that’s the way it happened. It’s just the way it happened to me. That’s different to objective reality, if such a thing even exists. Ah, but you already know that the act of observing changes reality – particles to waves to particles – right? Some will accuse me of being an unreliable narrator, but you have to ask yourself, what’s in it for them? What do they gain from disputing my reality? Absolution maybe.

Well, I do not absolve them. Let my words condemn them to the hell of Thaumasia Planum for eternity.

Because here is the thing. They aren’t telling you the truth about who we are fighting against and what we are fighting for. The story you heard is that we were happily colonising The Red for 30 years and then suddenly we were attacked out of nowhere, right? By an insidious alien enemy that wants to hammer us back to the stone age. But what if the Lilin aren’t who you’ve been told they are? What if they don’t want to hammer us back to the stone age, but want to prepare us for what comes next? And what if I could tell you what that was?

Keep reading. Because I’m going to tell you. When both of us are good and ready. This isn’t a revelation you can rush.

Alright, there it is. My bias is out there. I wear it on my scarred breast like the medals they never gave me. Look in my eyes, you’ll see bias burned into my retinas by the flash of EMP weapons. Judge me for it when you are at the end of this tale. I’ll allow you that, and I’ll accept your judgement. Because I lived what I lived and you can believe me or not but you can’t make me unlive it. Time is remembered backwards, but it is only lived forwards, so you can’t undo what was done, only dread what is to come.

Or, if it was Antonia, relive it. Live those sweet and terrible moments a thousand times. A thousand times a day. How many minutes in a day, do you know? I do. I think about Antonia 1,440 times a day. Every minute roughly, sometimes more, sometimes less. Her sacrifice, her betrayal. The sex before, during and after both.

Let it go. You knew there had to be sex in here somewhere too. Or hoped. Or feared. Sex with Antonia terrified me at any rate. So rare. So terrible. So ineluctable.

It starts with Antonia, so let’s start there. Of course, I had a life before and after her. A lesser life. And how we met, that’s a different story. I might tell it later. Probably I won’t though. You haven’t earned it yet. So we will start here instead. The day Antonia betrayed me and the day I was sent to the Legion Praeda. Waves into particles. One day, two fates.

They brought her into the court in chains, with a gag around her mouth. Neither really existed, but she didn’t know that. The skull cap was telling her she had iron chains around her ankles, a rubber ball shoved into her mouth, held there with a leather thong that tied behind her head. I couldn’t know that just looking at her as they led her into the court in a dirty sheet with a hole cut in it for her head to go through of course, the skull cap over her shaved head. But I learned, later, when they did it to me.

I hate myself for this, but the sheet was loose. Her breasts, the side-swell of them anyway, just visible even though they had a rope tied around her waist to cinch the sheet closed. I remembered, tried not to, couldn’t help but remember, our last night together a few days, a week, a month earlier. Who even knew? Not me.

We had lain together all night, that I remember. We knew it couldn’t last. But I had no idea how imminent was our doom. We lay together in sweat and tears, our bodies crashing against each other so hard, so often, we cried in pain as much as in ecstasy. Then the morning light, the knock on the door. Well, not a knock, of course. A hammering. Black clad, exoskeletal monsters bursting through to rip us out of each others’ arms.

I could have fought them. I’m a big fucker. Implants, fully stimmed. I’d have taken one or two down, for sure. But not ten. I was ashamed I didn’t try. They might have killed me if I had, and that would have been better for everyone. Me. Them. Tiny, Fatfoot, Ostrich, Daedulus, the goddamn Lilin. Antonia. I would have done them all a favor dying that day. But I didn’t. I lived to curse them all and not least myself, because if I’d died I wouldn’t have learned it was Antonia who told them where to find me.

That was much later though. Are you keeping up? She told them where to find me, but at that moment, the moment they crashed through the door and beat me to the ground and hauled her naked to her feet and shoved her into the bathroom, at that moment, I was afraid for her. Yeah. You can laugh now. I really was that stupid.

I try to make this story in my head, where they break through the door and rip me out of her arms and she’s crying and she yells out ’No, Linus! No let him go!’ But she didn’t yell that, no matter how hard I try to sell it to myself. She was spitting and scratching and clawing like a wild cat and grabbed a sheet off our bed to wrap around herself and swore at them in a Peta dialect I had never heard her use, which is weird I remember that. Because a second or two later they clubbed me on the head and there was nothing more to remember.

I didn’t see her after that. If they put her in a cell they kept her separate. She didn’t have implants, so she couldn’t have talked to me unless we were face to face but they kept her somewhere else. Another cell, another prison? Or a gilded room with a view over the Aurora Chaos, what do I know or care? All I know is I was standing there in the dock, accused of desertion and they dragged her into court in a sheet, wearing a skull cap and they took it off and she saw me, with her own eyes, the fog of obscura lifted from her brain as they peeled the electrodes off and she saw me.

And wailed. ”Linus! No. I didn’t want this!”

Lies. Of course. She wanted it, or she wouldn’t have done it. She wanted a lot of it, anyway. Maybe not ending as a prisoner herself, not that part. The reward though: that she wanted for sure. The reward for turning in a deserter back then was a cool million. She could have bought herself a ticket Earthside for that. With change. The Legion needed its deserters back, even Hastati like me. They’d trained us, given us implants, shunted us to The Red, and they expected us to serve and die like we’d signed up to do. If we went AWOL it was cheaper to hunt us down and pay a reward than shunt some other dickwad up to the Red in our place.

My theory is that Antonia heard about the reward, and her love for Linus Vespasius became fungible. It suddenly had a value she had to weigh. I love him. But how much do I love him? Is my love worth a hundred thousand, five hundred? Is it worth a goddamn million?

They promised her a million to sell them meat to be fed into the grinder, meat already bought and paid for once. But then they were chewing through hastati pretty quick back then. Idiots like Tiny, Fatfoot, Ostrich, Daedulus, or me.

So many names. I had a name before I was called Linus Vespasius, and several afterward. But you don’t exist before you arrive on The Red. There was no you, there, until you stepped off the transport and got your tags and read what it said on them. The Tessarius handed them to you and then you found out who you were, or at least who you were going to be, and I was Decurius Linus Vespasius.

But then later you learned there were no new dog tags, and no new names. They just took the tags off corpses and re-used them. Mud movers like you shunted in, you got tagged, you got swatted, mulched and then the next one off the shunt was tagged 'Linus Vespasius' and so it continued. But you were new and stupid and it felt kind of cool, that name. The whole Roman Legion thing and the latin names for everything on The Red. Captains were Centurions; lieutenants were Decuriones; sergeants, Decani, staff sergeants, Tessaria, privates, Gregaria. You weren't marines, you were hastati, or 'spear forces'. You’d read about it as kid growing up, heard, saw, experienced it in the sims and it was just so freaking cool.

Why Latin? Who cares. I did once; wanted to know, don’t care now. Maybe the Chinese and Indians and Americans couldn’t decide and went with Latin because it was neutral. Maybe it was just because everything on The Red already had Latin names so why not keep going with that, like a messed up marketing thing for a product that would never have a buyer.

Anyway, why it doesn’t matter ... the Lilin didn’t give a rat’s tiny brown freckle what we called ourselves. We were nothing to the Lilin. A virus. A plague. They called us something else too, a name you won’t read that in your Histories. I heard it from a succubi myself. I don’t care if you believe that or not. It was at Terra Sabea and if you hang in until the end, I’ll tell you about that and screw you if you don’t believe me because really, why would I bother lying to a complete stranger about it?

Antonia though. Standing there in her sheet and they ask her, Is this man you know as Linus Vespasius? Which is stupid since they have my DNA but she has to put it on the record.

Yes, she says.

And did he admit to you that he was a deserter?

Again, yes. The same voice she used to use when she was with me, just a different timbre. Yes, Linus, yes, yes.

He was with you between Mensus Aprilus and Mensus Maius?

Yes. Always yes, only yes.

You are excused.

No, Antonia, you are not excused, I thought. But no one asked me.

I was sentenced to death for desertion, but that didn’t worry me. It was an empty threat. You are to be removed from this place to the Portum Oreintalum, you will be declared exul, thereafter to be executed, Gods Protect Your Soul.

No one ever was, first time. Executed for desertion, like. Meat was Money. We all knew it, though it was never a factor in the reckoning that drove the deeds of the damned. We were driven by lust, greed, madness in a million rainbow colors. But never by the thought that hey, they wont really kill me. Because, there are worse things than dying.

Like the Legion Praeda: Legion of The Prey.

Anker 1

Voeykov

It was not a difficult choice, not really. I’d already more or less signed up for it, when I signed up to go and fight Redside. I’d gone to basic training where I learned to pilot tanks, then officer school (accelerated), and then graduated. It was at my graduation ball that I’d met Antonia. Because, where else? And what perfect timing, a week before being shunted.

I chose to run from war. I chose love. And for that, I was caught, sentenced to death and shunted Redside anyway.

Don’t ask me to describe the experience of interplanetary travel. We were herded into a meat locker Earthside, stacked horizontally five deep, knocked out, and woke up nauseous and disoriented Redside.

They tried to break me as soon I got there. Everyone destined for the Legion Praeda spent six months being ’reducated’ in Voeykov.

You are nothing and no one. You arrived nothing and no one, and whatever drove you to believe you were something and someone only got you here. On The Red, in Voeykov, where you are nothing and no one.

They starved or beat us. I say ’or’ because the beating meant food, so we embraced it. Shuffled gap toothed and bruised toward it, when we were hungry. They were artisans in sadism. Could take a man who needed bread or water to the last calorie sustaining his soul and then administer the cut, punch or constriction that took him over the line into cardiac arrest or strangulation before they brought him back with the scent of an orange.

Do you know what the most terrible punishment in the world is for a starving gregarius in the hastati? I mean a person whose ribs weigh so heavily on his spine he or she must rest them on a flat horizontal surface lest they weigh down his chest so terribly he suffocates?

The scent of an orange.

The scent of an orange is a terrible promise. It promises to alleviate the thirst that never leaves you. It promises a pulpy goodness that even your emaciated stomach can keep down without vomiting. It promises vitamins and sucrose that might keep you alive a whole day, another, horrible day.

I saw a woman killed by the scent of an orange.

Her name was Livia. I don’t know the patronymic they gave her. It will never be remembered, is probably not even recorded anywhere. She had been sent for reducation at Voeykov some weeks before me and she helped me quickly learn the rules:

You are nothing and no-one and until you accept that you will never leave
Seek pain, because only through pain can you survive
No order is insane
Beware the scent of oranges

She lived all of her own rules but the last. Or, she resisted until the last, but then one night a guard promised her an orange and she went with him and she never returned.

He was an Incubus. How do I know? My implants were disabled, right, so I couldn’t possibly know. Trust me, I know. She was a smart woman. She would never have gone with just any dumb Praetorian guard. Ah, what does it matter. Believe me, or don’t.

She’s Red dirt now.

We heard about the war while we were inside the reducation camp at Voeykov. It is going well, we have taken Olani Chaos. It is going badly, we have lost Camp Newcome and Camp Bakhuysian. I had only been Redside for a year, I knew none of these names. There were no frontlines, that much I knew. There were LZs or Landing Zones, and around these, we had perimeters. We called the LZ Camp This or Camp That, and we called the perimeters Occupied Zones. Occupied by what or who was never clear because there was no occupying force but us dumb legionnaires, and they moved us from battle to battle so fast we never had time to even register where we were.

In the old wars, I heard they spent a lot of time in trains or trucks, getting moved from place to place and doing nothing. Wheeled transports, that travelled across the surface Earthside, and I imagine rolling though beautiful fields of mud or swamp. You could sleep in those transports, I bet, your cheek against the shoulder of your fellow gregarius, waking to find you were somewhere else where all you had to do was dig holes, or peel vegetables or stack boxes and nothing terrifying ever happened until the few rare times it did. And you died, and it that was it. Blissful darkness.

Not this eternity of LZ’s, one merging into the other, Terra This or Terra That, deplaning from your shunt and getting a leg sawn off or an organ punctured and then back to the LZ for medicinae incrementum, your leg or your kidney speed grown but not the full nerve-growback, because that took too much time, and you were needed back on the perimeter.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Livia. She had hollow cheeks and rotten teeth but damn, she had beautiful eyes. You can starve a person, you can make them work without radiation cover so often their hair falls out, but the eyes ... they will show you the person who was there right up until the light goes out and they turn to jelly. I never saw Livia’s eyes turn to jelly because she left me with a sparkle in her eyes.

”An orange, Linus,” she said to me. ”Imagine!” We couldn’t touch between the electrified walls of our cages but she held out her fingertips to me as though we were lovers. ”When I get back, I’ll hold the memory of it in my mouth and I’ll blow you a pubentes kiss.”

I close my eyes now, as I’m writing this, and I can taste that kiss.

Fuck Livia.

Voeykov camp was inside Camp Voeykov LZ, the perimeter maybe around 800 klicks north to south and about 200 east to west. When we were finished reducation, they told us we were being sent to a penal Legion at Flaugergues, east of Voeykov. East or west, up or down, we didn’t believe them. Even when they woke us and loaded us into a shunt and told us to sit down and shut up we didn’t believe them, because it was something they did with predictable monotony. Everyone awake, pack your personals! Form a line, stand here for hours, now march! Into this shunt. Sit down and shut up. You are being assigned to a penal legion! You are nothing, you deserve nothing. Wake up! Now get up and go back to your cages. You aren’t worthy of joining a penal legion.

But for once it was true. The shunt departed Voeykov with a hundred toothless skeletons aboard. Flaugergues was real. A Tessararius in a black uniform with grey flashes met us at the siding and scanned our tags as we filed out. “Vespasius, Linus, legionnaire rank gregarius,” he said, not even looking at me, just looking at his handheld. ”Praeda Legion. Tanks.” He grabbed my bony shoulder, painted a stripe on my dogtag and propelled me forward. ”Die well.”

Die well. How many times would I hear that salutation? I came to love it. After all, you only heard it if you were still alive. Lying eviscerated in a crater with a burned comrade beside you, no one ever told you to ’die well’ did they? They were usually too busy screaming. ’Die well’ was something only the living were greeted with. Those who were about to die, but not in the process of it, yet.

As we filed off the shunt in Flaugergues we knew none of us would make it Earthside again. The Praeda Legion was a meat grinder. The doomed like me were fed into one end and only recyclable protein came out the other. But we were survivors, and all the more dumb for it. We had survived Voeykov, right? Hundreds had starved, asphyxiated, succumbed to the lure of the orange and never returned, but not us. We were freaking immortal. Alright, not immortal immortal, since nearly every single soldier who ever was sent to Praeda Legion ended as mulch, and that was assuming there was enough of their body recoverable. But immortal as in we had been sentenced to death by asphyxiation and then reducated to within a calorie of our lives, and yet here we were, still alive, on The Red and about to be reassigned to a real fighting unit where we could die quickly. And while we wouldn’t live to enjoy our state pension at least our families would get our blood money.

Every doomed soul in the Legion had their own personal Antonias - people or things that got them where they were – but most of us had families too and we never forgot them, even if they had written us off the minute we were shunted Redside.

My tag told me to find Decanus Daedulus, Praeda Legion, Cohort III. You’d think in the chaos of Plauguegues – a new legion forming up and no one knowing who was who or where they should be – I could have just disappeared. Escaped. But where to? An airlock and a quick death on the surface of The Red? Tempting, yeah, but I was hungry. Find Daedalus, get food, that’s what my brain was telling me and my numbed feet were listening. I tramped around, dome to dome, asking for Decanus Daedulus, Cohort III, until someone pointed me at a tank park, and a dome behind some parked tanks.

I knocked on the door. A man wearing only undershorts, with red rings painted around his nipples opened it. The red rings looked disturbingly unlike Decanus stripes but close enough to them that I took a chance.

”Decanus Daedelus, legionnaire Vespasius, reporting for duty in Cohort III!” I said, heels clacking and hand slapping to my forehead in a malnourished salute.

He looked at me with disdain. ”Nonsense,” he said. ”We haven’t buried Termite yet, it’s too soon for a replacement. We’re still mourning.” And he slammed the door in my face.

I wasn’t fazed. I waited outside the door, somewhere between 11 and 15 Red minutes, which we’d learned at Camp Voeykov was the regulation time between admonition and renewed inquiry. Then I knocked again. The same man opened, looking seriously vexed. ”Decanus Daedelus, legionnaire Vespasius, reporting for duty in Cohort III!”

”Oh, hell, alright,” he said. He pointed to the step outside the dome. ”This is your duty. Stand here until relieved.”

I passed out from hunger about six hours later and woke in an infirmary with drip concentrate attached to my arm.

Daedalus was sitting at the end of my bed glaring, with the man I came to know as Fatfoot, sitting next to him, asleep. Daedulus was in uniform by then, unable to get permission to enter the infirmary in his undershorts. Just as well, since his short, skinny frame might have been mistaken for a cadaver and sent for mulching. Fatfoot was a gregarius, like me, and just happy to be accompanying his Decanus somewhere pointless where it was warm and no one was trying to kill him.

I could have killed them both. Right there. Drip in my arm and all. I was lying there thinking about it. The skinny one’s neck in the crook of my left arm. Squeeze. Dead. The one with the club foot, a little more solid but then again, asleep. Snap his head violently and goodbye, off to the mulcher with them both. You think about that kind of thing after six months in Voeykov, I’m sad to say. And you don’t think about the ’what next’ because usually there wasn’t one.

But Daedalus was glaring at me as though his focused disdain had just woken me, and maybe it had.

”You, are no Termite,” he said. "Our dear departed Termite could do twelve Red hours on that door and that was without pissing himself,” he said.

”No, Decanus,” I replied automatically. ”I am not even the mud in the crack of the ass of legionnaire Termite and if you asked me to locate his mulch and scoop it together and kiss his mulched ass I would have to refuse, because I am not worthy.”

He nodded with satisfaction. ”Too right you aren’t,” he said. He kicked the clubbed foot of the man snoring beside him. "Fatfoot, our new tanker has finally come around.” The boot on the man’s right foot was double the size of the boot on the left.

Fatfoot looked at me with one eye still closed; his left, probably because his left brain was still sleeping while his right was weighing me up. ”Are we taking him back with us or you want I should pillow him?” He was offering to smother me with a pillow, in case his commander wanted to go for a different replacement for their dead comrade Termite. I almost welcomed the thought of him trying.

”You want to go out today short a tanker?” Daedulus asked him.

He thought about it. ”No,” Fatfoot decided.

”Then we take him with us,” Daedalus said. He threw me a kit bag and I weakly swung my legs out of the bed and began gathering my uniform, which someone, probably a nurse, had folded and put on a chair.

Daedalus watched me. ”We used to have an AI did your job,” he said. ”Before Termite. If we could get the graphene chips, you wouldn’t be here.”

”No, Decanus,” I told him. ”I understand.”

”Yeah, no you don’t,” he said. ”That AI was a better tanker than you’ll ever be. But graphene is rare on The Red, and meat isn’t,” he said.

”Your tanks are Mark Vs. I was trained in Mark Vs. I’ll fit in,” I told him.

”Shut up, natum,” he said. ”You survive to next week, you can tell me how damn smart you are. Until then, you’re just another stain on the inside of my MCV I’m going to have to wipe off soon, like Termite.”

”Fucking Termite,” Flatfood nodded, muttering the universal oath of love for a fallen comrade.

But I had trained on Mark Vs. Before Voeykov and Flaugergues. Before Antonia. Like I said, I’d shipped Redside having gained the rank of Decurio, before I was busted back to gregarius because of Antonia. Or, well, for deserting, because of Antonia. You know what I mean.

I was trained to run a swarm of three MCVs or Mobile Command Vehicles, three MCV commanders like Daedalus connected to me by skullcap, 30 tanks all singing like a castrati choir. In exercises though, let’s get that straight.

Sit in the tanker seat in Daedalus’ MCV and maneuver just 10 Mark Vs? Any low level AI could do that, so the graphene shortage must be real bad if they were putting meat in the seat. That was new. Hadn’t been an issue before I was sentenced, because the Lilin were still planet bound and not interfering with Earthside shunts, before I went into Voeykov. That must have changed in six months, if we were taking tanks out with human pilots now. Had the Lilin found a way to project their special brand of harm into space and started disrupting our logistics chain?

It was the first signal the war was going sideways, looking back now.

In the hospital, I couldn’t find my socks. Someone had probably stolen them. So I put my feet into my boots and gathered up my uniform, still dressed in the hospital gown. Daedulus wasn’t going to wait for me to get dressed, he was already heading down the infirmary corridor to the exit.

The chubby man walking beside me held out his hand to shake mine. ”Fatfoot,” he said.

”Linus Vespasius,” I told him.

"Yeah, we don't use those names here," he said amiably. "Daedalus doesn't like it. You got a nickname?"

"I had a nickname in Voeykov," I told him. "Scabrous." I said it proudly, like it was a badge of honor. ”Thanks for coming to get me.”

“Shut up you two,” Daedalus said, and looked over his shoulder at Fatfoot. ”And don’t learn his stupid name yet. I keep telling you that, don’t I?” He stiff-armed the door out into the tube connecting the infirmary to the next dome. ”It’s bad luck. For him too. Look what happened to Termite. We learned his name, now he’s mulch.” He spat. “Screw Termite.”

Walking wasn’t easy for Daedalus, with his short, skinny frame. The magnetic soles on his boots were too sticky for his spindle legs and he had to slide them forward to break their grip so he could lift them, which gave him a sliding, shuffling walk. Fatfoot didn’t have the same problem, but his club foot didn’t help his gait, so he walked with a clop-thud, clop-thud, beside me.

”He don’t mean nothing by that,” Fatfoot said, with his hand theatrically covering his mouth. ”We lost two tankers already this Maius. He gets attached.”

”Termite was a good guy, huh?” I asked him.

He shrugged. ”I don’t know. I had like, maybe two conversations with him. He bragged he was sentenced to Praeda for diddling a Centurion’s wife. But that man woulda satisfied no Centurion’s wife, so that was bullshit. He died before I could find out the real reason, but here it’s like you don’t ask, so you have to wait for a guy to tell you, and guys don’t live long enough usually.”

”Shut up, I said,” Daedalus barked. We were at the entrance to the hangar dome where the machines were parked up. There were Mark Vs, the semi-autonomous escort tanks, and a bunch of MCVs, which doubled as troop carriers, loading hastati. A hundred hastati in every MCV, served up ready for the grinder. Ten vehicles to a cohort, three cavalry cohorts in the Legion.

Hastati, tip of the spear. First in, last out. First-grade mulch.

”Ah, we going somewhere?” I asked. I was still in my hospital gown and sockless boots. I coughed wetly.

Daedalus stopped and looked at me with his head tilted like he was sizing up a prize goose. ”Of course we are going somewhere. You think we came and got your diseased ass out of sick bay because we need a fifth guy for poker, gregarius?”

”No, Decanus!” I replied.

”No. Put on your thermals, I can see your stringy ballsack through that gown.” He turned to Fatfoot. ”Get down and see to the loading. We’re headed out to Margaritifer Terra.”

Fatfoot lost his casual demeanor. He looked like a man who had just trodden barefoot in fresh dung. ”Ah, shit,” he said.

”Yeah, ah shit,” Daedalus said. ”See who is going to die today.” He nodded toward me. ”My money is on ballsack here.”

I met the others inside the MCV, which was a the split level hovercraft type, with five of us in the cockpit up top in the bulbous nose and a hundred hastati down in the meat locker. Daedalus was the commander, Fatfoot the loadmaster. Tiny on sensors and Ostrich was engineer, meaning she ran around fixing the million things on the MCV that were fubar on any vehicle after two years on The Red. And I was Tanker, my job to run the ten machines that were circling around protecting our ass as we moved out of the LZ to probe the Lilin defenses at Margaritifer Terra – a base that had been ours, until the Lilin turned it.

I found out it wasn’t the first probe in the direction of Camp Margaritifer.

”Hit us sixty clicks from their perimeter, first time. Near Margaritifer Chaos,” Tiny said. He was nearly as big as me, could barely fit inside the cockpit. But he had small hands. Sensors and Tanks sat side by side, so we were rubbing shoulders.

”We tried to neutralize this LZ more than once before?” I asked. We were still pulling juice for our batteries from the fusion pump so we still had a few minutes before we went 'feet Red'.

”Two times,” Tiny said. The rising whine from the capacitors meant he had to shout because none of us had our skull caps on yet. You didn’t want to do that until you absolutely had to because if you were in the virtual and everyone else was still in the real, one, they couldn’t hear you and two, because you were blind to what was happening in the cockpit around you, they would mess you up and nothing you could do about it until you got your skull cap off again and had to deal with whatever dumb ass prank they played on you.

”How many patrol hours you guys got then?” I asked him.

He looked up, biting a lip, like he was doing complicated math. ”Me, ten forty, but I joined last.” He looked around the cockpit. ”Ostrich, she's on about twenty, at least. Daedalus and Fatfoot say they have double that, but time only counts from the moment you join the Legion, so Legion time they're about ten.” He picked up his skull cap, waiting for Daedalus to give the order to go virtual. “How about you?”

“Zero,” I told him. Ninety nine combat hours was the magical number that got you a pension and a shunt Earthside. Or a half-pension in our cases, since we were convicts. We could shoot for a full pension, but that meant surviving one forty nine hours. Since the average survival rate for a hastati in the Praeda Legion was 19 combat hours, only crazies tried for the higher target.

He frowned. ”I don’t think I heard you. How many?”

“Zero. Never been outside a perimeter except on repair duty.”

“Shit. Don’t tell anyone that,” Tiny said, looking worried. ”Lie.”

“Daedalus must know, he’s got access to my file.”

“Daedalus won’t read your file, I guarantee you. Says looking at our files is pointless since we all going to die.” Tiny grinned. ”Except himself of course. He’s convinced he’ll make ninety nine. Says he was close when he got sentenced, so why not again?”

”Pulling the plug, batteries at 87 percent, good as they’ll get,” Ostrich said. She hit a key on the console in front of her and the capacitor whine fell away. She had a broad face, jet black stubble on her head and almond eyes. I hadn’t seen her smile yet.

From down in the payload bay I heard Fatfoot's muffled voice. "Meat locker is buttoned up, we're good to go down here."

I turned to my own console, which showed nothing right now but a single colored light for each of our 10 tank wingmen. They were all green. “Tanks are go.”

Daedalus had a face that was all knuckles and wrinkles. It was impossible to guess his age, but if he’d done more than a hundred patrol hours, like he claimed, it meant he had probably been Redside for a couple years. The fact they all had so many hours but were here with me in Praeda Legion told me they hadn’t joined long before I had, or they’d already be dead.

“Flaugergues Control, Coterburnium 4, a hundred warm bodies and a belly full of harm, ready to dust,” Daedalus said, calling for permission to take off.

“Cot 4 you are cleared to dust. Die well.”

Anker 2

Margaritifer Terra

The turbines on the hovercraft began to roar and it lifted on its skirt. When he was satisfied he had full thrust, Daedalus pushed his twin sticks forward and the fans behind us pushed us out of the hangar and into a flying maelstrom of red sand. Cots 1 to 3 were ahead of us – we could see their dust clouds – but not moving fast, and we quickly reeled them in. Once we were moving at a decent clip, the dust started flowing behind instead of around us and I could see the desertscape ahead. We were heading out of our crater to a plateau about fifty klicks ahead. Climb out, get across the plateau, we had to get down another crater on the other side and then a hundred klicks further in before we got to the perimeter of what used to be Margaritifer Terra.

Well, I guess it still was, technically. More accurately, it used to be our Margaritifer Terra, but now it belonged to them.

“I got a good idea,” Ostrich said after we'd been driving for a while. “We can just call the new guy Termite.”

“How is that a good idea, Ostrich?” Daedalus asked, perched at his controls on a raised deck behind me. “Look at the guy. That’s disrespecting Termite.” He saw the look on my face. “No offense.”

“No, it’s a way of honoring Termite,” Ostrich insisted. “We can call all the replacements Termite. That way we’ll always remember Termite and we don’t have to bother to learn a new name every time one of them gets mulched.”

“Hey,” I said. “I’m right here.”

“I like it,” Tiny said and I gave him a dirty look too. “No offense,” he mumbled, looking away.

“Me too,” Daedalus said. He waved a hand in the air as though issuing an edict. “Hencewise, all replacements shall be known as Termite, in honor of our dear departed crewmate, god rest his soul.”

“I thought Termite was a woman?” Tiny said, frowning.

Daedalus frowned back at him, opened his mouth to reply, then changed his mind, fixing his gaze on me instead. “Ballsack, from this day forward …”

“My nickname is Scabrous,” I told him.

“Was. From this day forward Ballsack, you shall be known as … Termite!” he announced. “Termite is dead, long live Termite. Three cheers boys!”

“Hoozah, hoozah, hoozah!” they all yelled in unison, pumping their fists.

Termite was a better nickname than Ballsack, though not as good as Scabrous, if you asked me. Also, I saw a small flaw in the idea. “Wait, what if I’m not the one who gets killed? What if one of you does? Are we going to have two Termites?”

Tiny and Ostrich all looked at me like it was the stupidest question in the world. Daedalus at least gave it some thought.

“No. If someone else dies, you can go back to being Ballsack, and the new guy…”

“Or girl…” Tiny added. “Or other.”

“Or girl, or other … you get your old nickname back and the replacement will be called Termite.” He looked pleased at having decided the matter.

“I don’t think that …” I started to say, seeing another flaw in the logic - if the intent was to avoid having to learn new names - but I shut my trap. Arguing logic with this crew was going to be a losing game for all.

It had been decided anyway, and the conversation moved on.

Tiny had the easiest job in the cockpit since the sensor systems were almost completely automated and monitored by an AI. All he had to do was make sure the AI was online and relay information to the other members of the crew if the AI picked up anything on seismic, infrared, radar or optical sensors.

“So, Termite. What duty you reckon is worst?” Tiny asked. “Beacons or spikes?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “Beacons,” I told him.

“What I said,” Ostrich agreed. “I hate beacons. It’s the creepiest duty on the whole Red.”

“Didn’t ask you,” Tiny pointed out. He spun his chair to face mine. “Beacons, why?”

Beacons should have been my favorite. If we were sent out to clean the solar arrays on the perimeter beacons at Voeykov, we got an extra ration if we reported seeing anything odd or unusual. An extra half ration for just making it back alive, full stop. But that extra ration wasn’t enough, in my mind.

“Well, so, I don’t know how it is here, but at Camp Voeykov they’d send you out alone, wearing a skull cap telling us we had iron links around our ankles, making us walk like we were hobbled. They’d drop you out out there at dawn, pick up at dusk. Only water was whatever your suit recycled from your own breath, piss and sweat. No food, because why waste rations on someone who might not come back, right?”

“Yeah, but Spikes, you got to climb all the way to the top of the seismic tower to service the thumper. You up so high you can see the sandstorms coming, but you can’t get down fast enough to get out their way so you stuck up there choking and getting sandpapered and lots guys suits can’t take it so you die eating dust…” Tiny painted a pretty grim picture, and I’d seen the corpses of prisoners caught atop a spike in a sandstorm, yeah. The Seismic spikes were two hundred feet high. Kinetic hammers is what they were. A hammer was raised to the top of the spike, fell two hundred feet down to hammer on a plug inserted into the ground, and then sensors inside the perimeter searched the soundwaves for anomalies.

The Lilin had tried tunneling under our perimeter defenses and into the domes in the early days of the war, and the strategy had worked a few times, until the Spikes went up and we could see the tunnels. The attack vector had led to a theory that the Lilin lived underground, which a lot of people still believed, since there was no evidence of them anywhere else. Still, we’d surveyed the whole planet with ground penetrating radar down to 200 feet and found nothing but dirt, minerals, frozen water and rare earths, so if they were down there, they were a long way down.

I didn’t think they were. I had my own theory.

So, I’d seen the bodies of people who didn’t make it down. Suits ripped off by the force of the wind, flesh flayed to the bone. But of course, they’d suffocated a long time before that happened so how bad could it really be?

“No, but the beacons,” Ostrich said with a theatrical shudder. “You're out there all alone on the ground and suddenly there’s a Lilin right up in your face…”

Tiny held up his hand to stop her again. “I know what you think,” he said. “I’m asking Termite.”

I winced. The nickname was going to take some getting used to. Daedalus hadn’t been exaggerating. There was a blood stain on the floor beside my tanker’s seat.

“I was at Voeykov long enough we had one of every kind get through the perimeter,” I told them.

“Not an incubus,” Ostrich said.

I thought of Livia, lured with the scent of fruit. “Yeah, also an incubus,” I told him. "Saw it myself."

“You tell anyone?” Tiny asked. “You report it?”

“Guards wouldn’t have believed me. Half the prisoners didn’t either.”

“Oh shit,” Ostrich said. “So Voeykov’s gonna fall. Just a matter of time.”

“Stow that talk Ostrich,” Daedalus growled at us. “Isn’t any incubus inside Voeykov.” He glowered at me. “You see an aura?”

“No.” I had to admit, the guard who left with Livia had no aura. But that just meant he’d been inside the camp for quite a while, right?

“So you didn’t see no aura which means don't know for sure you saw an incubus.”

I knew. Anyway, it wasn’t what I saw. It was what I felt. What I smelled.

The guy came up to Livia on the other side of the wire, started talking to her. And I could hear him, his voice a deep bass that carried for meters. But the smell of him. I swear he smelled like apple pie. Livia was raving about oranges, but oranges aren’t my favorite fruit. Apples are, and this guy didn’t just smell like apples, he smelled like pie. He was built – wide shoulders, biceps, thighs – but he had a kind of androgynous face, could have been male, female, anything in between, just his praetorian uniform tilting his gender to where Livia would be interested. Hell, admit it. He’d asked me to go with him, I would have.

Like a fly trap, that’s an incubus. Putting out pheromones, drawing its victims to it. And then it beds them, stealing their precious genetic matter so that it can breed. Breed a viral vector it can use to infect more victims, and then suddenly you have two Lilin. Then four. Then eight. If they can hit critical mass before they are discovered, that’s it, game over. They kill everyone in the LZ who isn’t a Lilin yet and the LZ falls.

“You said there were more,” Tiny prompted. “Spies, saboteurs?”

“I fought an assassin.”

“Assassin? Holy shit?” Tiny said, wide eyed. “You fought, yourself?”

“Working on a beacon,” I told him. “Turn around, there’s one of the camp guards. Absolute bastard. I was just thinking about him, hoping he wasn’t on duty, turned around and there he was.”

“Shit.”

“More like bull-shit,” Daedalus said, spitting at his feet again. “I never met anyone actually saw a Lilin and this guy has seen two.”

“Yeah, well I’m not making this scar up, am I?” I said, pointing to a jagged ridge which ran from my hairline down to the entrance to my left ear.

“You fought it?”

“It must have just apparated,” I told him. “Pulled the image of that guard from my head. He started yelling at me to leave what I was doing and come back to camp with him…”

“Needed you to drop the perimeter so he could walk in with you,” Ostrich guessed. The perimeter magnetic field messed with implants and tech, so walking through it wearing implants flicked it off for the time it took to step through. Like a vampire being invited across a lintel, a Lilin could infiltrate if they went across the perimeter in the company of someone with implants.

Which is why some guys, when it happened, they said nothing. You couldn’t really be sure, after all, and you had to decide ... did you tell anyone? Or did you just let it ride? Because if you got the blame for letting in a Lillin, any kind, you were mulch. Like, if it was an assassin they sent it, us hastati were pretty safe. A Lilin assassin would go for an officer, right? A Centurion, or his or her Primus Pilus. So most guys who thought they might have let a Lilin through, they just kept their mouths shut and hoped whatever hell was about to be unleashed would slide by them. That they’d survive it maybe. Unless they had a conscience, in which case they'd make excuses to snoop around the LZ, sniffing for anything that seemed off,or they’d just own up to their mistake and take the consequences. Which is how most incubi or succubi were caught.

“Yeah, that was his plan, yell at me so I stopped working and walked him in. But he screwed up, because I was thinking about this one guard, but then I thought no, he can’t be on duty, I heard he was in iso with a virus. So when I saw him standing there, bawling at me, it didn’t feel right and sure enough …”

“Aura,” Ostrich said. “What’s it look like?”

Newly apparated Lilin have this weird glow around them. Can last hours, sometimes it lasts days. No one knows why, any more than we know how they apparate. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” isn’t that what the writer wrote? Well, we spilled a lot of blood learning to counter their magic. Built the Spikes to stop the tunnels. Captured and experimented on Lilin prisoners to discover a precious few things: they felt like flesh and blood and bone to the touch. They had skin, muscle, bones and organs but we tried looking at them right down to the molecular level and we had no idea what they were made of: it wasn’t any of the six common elements the human body is made of.

But strong magnetic fields caused them to scream in pain and beg for death.

We’d all seen the interviews – some would call them torture sessions – on the propaganda newscasts. I remember one in particular, a Lilin sitting in a chair with a skull cap on her head. Naked, beautiful, defiant.

“Why are you attacking us?” the interviewer asked. She was a succubus, a hacker of human genetic code, in human form. She looked, spoke and no doubt even smelled, human.

But she did not answer, until the skull cap started humming, generating a strong magnetic field, and she began begging for relief.

“Why are you attacking us?” the interviewer asked again, after explaining relief would only come with answers.

“You could be The Returned,” she said, through tears. “The Exiles. This is where it started. You cannot be allowed to establish here.” None of that made sense, back then. Does now.

“Where are you from?” he asked. “Where is your base?”

She couldn’t or wouldn’t answer that, no matter how much pain they applied. In fact, she didn’t appear to understand the concept of ‘base’, nor of ‘home’, or ‘headquarters’.

“Do you live below the surface of the planet?” he asked. “Underground?” Another question she found unanswerable, illogical, unfathomable.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“We are you,” she replied. Then screamed as the skull cap hummed, repeating herself, gesturing to her body. “Look at me! We are you!”

They did not live long in captivity. They refused to eat or drink. Or couldn't. They could not be force-fed. So they died, and their bodies decomposed over several days into inert gases.

“How did you know it was an assassin?” Tiny asked. “How did you know it wasn’t like, a saboteur?”

Saboteurs were more of a threat to ordinary hastati, so grunts feared them the most. A single Lilin saboteur who tricked their way through the perimeter could wreak total havoc in an LZ where the atmosphere was contained by membrane thin bubbles, where a faulty purifier could turn your air or water toxic, where a tank turned loose could lay waste to an entire fire base, where food could be contaminated or biowar pathogens spread.

“They can’t apparate with weapons … this guy was unarmed. He’s yelling at me, and something is off. I see the aura, right, and I grab the wrench I use for…”

“What’s it look like, the aura?” Ostrich asked, not letting the question go.

“Like a silvery outline … so I grab the wrench and he grabs up a rock, and we go at each other and I get a good hit in but it’s like hitting a rubber doll…”

“What’s that mean?”

“I mean, not like flesh and bone, I think the aura also protects them while it lasts, like my hits were bouncing off,” I say. “But I’ve still got my skull cap on right, my body acting like my ankles are chained together. So he smacked me with his rock, gave me this …” I pointed to the scar by my ear. “And knocked me out. Then he must have dragged my ass inside the perimeter to get himself across, because I woke up later covered in blood, about a half mile in, behind a water tank.”

“If he was an assassin, why didn’t he kill you?” Ostrich asked, skeptical.

“Yeah, and how did you know he was assassin again?” Tiny repeated.

“I don’t know why he didn’t kill me, and I know he was an assassin because two days later there’s a meeting of Primus Priori and someone releases a nerve gas into the air filtration system and kills them all.”

Tiny whistled, but Daedalus just looked away, out a cockpit window. “Could be coincidence, internal politics, who knows?”

“Yeah, or what’s more likely … my Lilin assassin,” I pointed out.

“Wait, you didn’t tell anyone you saw this guy?” Tiny asked, showing he was listening. “You didn’t, or they’d have turned the LZ up and down looking for him and had extra security on all the officers.”

I turned back to my tank console, checking they were all in position, no mechanical issues, no systems warnings. I spoke over my shoulder to Tiny. “Would I be here if I had?”

Tiny nodded. “Yeah, nah. You’d be mulch, for letting him through.”

“I told my Decanus I got cut in a fight over some booze and took the lashes instead.” We called them lashes, but there was no whip. Just an electrified prod they applied to your neck to fry your synapses. The burning pain was bad, but the three day headache afterward was worse.

“Lilin don’t kill you because they know you won’t tell,” Daedalus declared. “if they were to kill you, hide your body, someone finds it and there’s a general alarm. But they know that if they let you live, you probably won’t tell anyone. Sure, you could have let in a saboteur who was going to bring down the habitat, and kill you anyway, but that’s a chance nearly all guys take.”

Ostrich spun her chair around to face Daedalus. “I thought you didn’t believe him?”

“I’m not saying I do,” Daedalus said. “I’m just explaining why they don’t kill dumb legionnaires.”

"It's beyond creepy," Ostrich said, with an exaggerated shiver. "How they get in, cause mayhem, then if they don't get caught or killed, they just fade. Where do they go?"

"Where they came from," Daedalus told her. "Which is whothefuckknows." He pointed at Ostrich’s engineering console. “Cut the chatter. Eyes on systems.” Daedalus had cockpit windows up at his eye level, but we just looked into console displays and the tactical map projected on the flat angled wall of the cockpit in front of us.

It showed we’d caught up to the other nine MCVs, and we were all moving into line abreast formation for the coming assault, spaced about five klicks apart. Sorry, probe. Our MCV was out on the left wing. Last to join, most exposed position. The price of being slow out the gate.

“Tanks into chevron,” Daedalus ordered.

I punched some icons, putting our escorting tanks into a wedge shaped formation ahead of us, like a shield. It left our back exposed, but we were riding right inside the tip of the wedge, so our tanks gave us cover ahead and on our flanks. The Mark V had pretty good anti-air defenses too so we were protected against anything except an attack from down low, right on our six.

Knowing this MCV had taken a hit in the last attack and lost a crewman, the shield around us didn’t seem as convincing as it should have. But that was the thing about this war – you weren’t fighting some unknown enemy with unknown tech. You were fighting your own guys, and your own tech. Possessed by Lilin, but still our guys, using our strategies, tactics, weapons and …

“Hey,” I turned to Tiny, keeping my voice low so only he could hear it over the whine of our turbines. “How did you guys get hit last time?”

He leaned over. “It was in the middle of Margaritifer Chaos. We moved into attack formation, nothing on sensors, tanks in chevron, then they were all around us. We figure they had their tanks buried or in defilades where sensors couldn’t see them. They took out two of our flank escorts, we took a shot in the port side from an airborne plasma gunship.” He pointed to the plate next to my seat, which appeared newly replaced. “Penetrated the armor just enough to burn a hole in Termite, but not me.” He grinned. “I just got a tan.”

“Then you pulled back?”

“Hell yeah. Flew like geese from winter.”

I looked at my tactical map. I’d been Redside long enough to recognize names and places now. Margaritifer Terra was a huge cratered zone spanning several latitudes that anywhere else would have been called a sea. A Chaos was any zone inside a Terra where wind or ancient watercourses had worn away the surface to form valleys and mesas. If it was old enough, the mesas would have been ground down to hills, but inside the Margaritifer Chaos they were still deep valleys and towering mesas. Ideal defensive terrain, if your LZ was on a mesa, and the only approach was by air or through one of very few passable valleys. Which the LZ at Margaritifer Terra was. An air assault had been tried, and failed. So a ground assault was planned, and we were probing the enemy’s ground defenses to work out how well defended the valleys were, from various directions.

Twice so far, they’d proven very well defended. I thought about what Tiny said.

“Permission to raise a stupid question Decanus?” I shouted over my shoulder to Daedalus.

“I’d expect nothing else,” Daedalus said. “Amuse us all.”

“Why are we repeating the same tactic that didn’t work last time?”

Daedalus sighed. “Because we are the Praeda Legion, Termite. Born to die. Our job isn’t to win this coming battle, it is to force the enemy to show themselves, their force, their weapons, their tactics, so that our AIs can watch and learn, and the real soldiers can come in after us and take this LZ and all the glory.”

“So, what did we learn from the last defeat?” I asked.

“We learned to bring more infantry,” he said. “Which is why we have a bellyful of meat for the grinder. Soon as the enemy appears, we halt so they can dismount and deploy close-in defensive weapons. It won’t help much; if we survive, we are still going to withdraw in disarray with our panties on fire, but we’ll have learned a little more. It all adds up.” He nodded ahead of him. “And, we are making our ingress from a different direction. Plus, we can't be defeated today because our great commander, Legatus Augusti, is leading our attack. That concludes today’s lesson in grand strategy. Eyes front and execute your orders boy.”

I kept my eyes front, but as for executing my orders …

We were in a wide valley, towering mesas on each side of us but plenty of flat territory left and right of our formation. Without asking for permission, I thinned out the tanks on my right flank, where we had cover from our wingman, and left only two on that side. Daedalus was so occupied with holding the MCV in formation he didn’t notice. We had drones in the air ahead and around us – two of the MCVs in the formation were drone motherships, not pushing tanks. But that hadn’t helped us spot the ambush last time, apparently. It was our left flank that was vulnerable, and where they had taken the plasma round from last time. I put the three tanks I freed up onto our left flank, and pushed them well ahead of us so they were more like scouts than defenders. If there were enemies buried in the sand up ahead, I wanted to find them before they bushwhacked us.

Tiny noticed though. The MCVs sensors were networked, so that he was not only looking at data from the sensors on our own vehicle, but from every vehicle in the line, their tanks, the escort drones overhead and of course, our own tanks. He saw what I was doing, shot me a glance, but said nothing.

“Alright, on your toes people,” Daedalus said through clenched teeth, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence. “This is the range from the LZ where we caught it last time.”

But the moment came and went, and the breath I’d been holding without realizing escaped in an embarrassing wheeze since I still had some kind of infection in my lungs which I’d brought with me from Voeyzov.

Tiny looked over, kind of disgusted, opened his mouth to say something, and then everything started happening at once.

One of the tanks I’d pushed out on our far left flank exploded. I’d been watching in that direction through a hull mounted camera on our MCV and I saw a bright ball of light, and the icon for that tank simply disappeared from my screen. Every tank had its own 360 degree cameras and I jumped to its nearest buddy, scanning around it. Smoke rising, then wham. I lost that tank too. Swapped to the next in line – saw no drones, no advancing armor or infantry, just sand, and now, flame and smoke.

“Mines!” I decided. “Mine field ahead!”

“Brace for crash stop!” Daedalus called, and relayed my report to the Decurio in the lead MCV, one of the drone motherships. We skidded to a halt, as I pulled my remaining tanks back into a tight ring around us.

“This is bad,” Tiny muttered. “We’re sitting still, that’s what they want… we have to keep moving.”

“I know that, legionnaire!” Daedalus said, frustration in his voice. “But the whole formation has stopped. I need a direction to drive in, dammit.”

Sure enough, an alarm sounded inside the cockpit.

“Incoming artillery, brace for impact!” Daedalus yelled, speakers in the hold below relaying his warning so that the soldiers in our payload bay could tighten their harnesses, close their eyes, and pray. “Screw this,” he said. "Hang on down there Fatfoot!" He pulled his control sticks straight back, and the hovercraft started sliding backwards, before he split the controls, keeping one turbine at full forward thrust, and the other at full reverse thrust so that our MCV spun on its axis pointed back the way we had come from. Then he slammed both sticks forward and we were accelerating away from the ambush.

I pulled my tanks in even tighter. The shells coming toward us would be precision guided, with terminal optical homing capabilities. We needed every anti-air system on our tanks close enough it could put a shield of lasers, jamming energy and lead over our heads that no artillery could penetrate.

Daedalus was jinking the MCV left and right, which may have made him feel better, but just made me feel like throwing up and probably would have just amused the incoming artillery salvo, if the AI controlling it had a sense of humor.

“Impact in five,” Tiny yelled. “Three … two … one!”

I was watching through the lenses of one of my tanks, but Daedalus had a clear view through the cockpit glass to the green-brown sky above. And he ducked as the sky lit with incandescent white light and the inside of the cockpit strobed with explosion after explosion as the tanks’ multilayered defenses caught the projectiles in mid-flight. At least one of the shells aimed at us made it through though, and it slammed into the sand just behind us, sending a cloud of dust into the air around us and shoving us forward like a child shoving a toy car.

“Miss!” Tiny yelled gleefully.

But then the cloud of sand got sucked into our turbines and the portside turbine started coughing. “Shutting down port turbine!” Ostrich yelled. “Starboard is at eighty percent thrust and falling!”

“Shut ‘em both down and do a reverse blow,” Daedalus ordered her. “Clear the intakes.”

“But we’ll be …”

“Just do it!”

Ostrich killed both engines, and the hovercraft lost lift, settling onto its skirts before nosing down to a shuddering stop. If there was a second artillery salvo inbound, we’d be toast. Daedalus had bet everything that there wasn’t.

Ostrich sat watching her engine readings, waiting to restart the turbines in reverse thrust mode to try to blow the sand out of the engine intakes. It wouldn’t repair the damage that had already been done to delicate blades and compressors, but it might be enough to get us moving again.

It was suddenly quiet. Just the tick tick tick of hot engines cooling in the cold outside atmosphere.

“Come on, come on, come on …” Tiny whispered to himself.

“Running back blow,” Ostrich said, as the turbines whined to life again. The MCV shook, not lifting off the ground, since all the air generated by the turbines was being directed back through the air inlets. A cloud of fine sand like a marsh fog wrapped around the hovercraft and the tanks huddled around it like ducks around their mother.

Daedalus was on the line to the command vehicle. “Tiny, sitrep,” he ordered. “Command wants to know if we can rejoin and I want to know if there is anyone to rejoin with.”

I could almost hear the gears whirring in Daedalus skull. We were all still here because we were survivors. Bloody minded, never give up as long as there is the smallest chance, total desperados. Assuming we could restart our engines, Daedalus was weighing up whether to rejoin the formation and risk dying further down the line, or declare our MCV non-combat capable, and risk a death penalty court martial if we weren’t believed.

Tiny worked his console and refreshed the tactical image on the screen. “Three MCVs totalled, two heavily damaged, five intact or only light damage, including us.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Ostrich said. “We aren’t moving yet.”

“Five eh?” Daedalus said, scratching his chin. “That’s better than I expected.”

“Or worse,” Tiny said. “Depending how you look at it. Can we vote on this?”

From down in the meat locker, Fatfoot had been listening in. "I vote we take a vote too."

“No voting,” Daedalus said. “When you are a Decanus you can do everything by a bloody vote, see how long you last.”

“Back blow complete, you want I restart the turbines in drive mode?” Ostrich asked. The turbines ran down again until they were still. It was a fork in our fateline. Restart and if the engines were able to deliver enough power, rejoin the formation and the battle, or leave the engines shut down, call them dead and drop out of the fight, risking a death penalty.

“We already dodged a bullet once when we lost Termite and pulled out,” Daedalus said.

“We were on fire, with a dead tanker!” Tiny reminded him.

“I don’t think they’ll be too worried about that detail when they review our record,” Daedalus told him. “They’ll see two fights, two withdrawals. We won’t get a third chance.” He whirled a finger at Ostrich. “Spool ‘em up.”

She punched some icons on her console, and the engines began winding up again. I was biting my lip so hard I tasted blood. To be honest I wasn’t sure if I wanted them to work or not. But then it was taken out of my hands. Ostrich looked at some readouts. “I can give you fifty percent on the port turbine, seventy on the starboard. Any more than that, the vibration will rip the blades off and we’re done.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Daedalus said. “Moving both throttles to 50 percent, let me know if anything starts shaking loose once we’re moving.” He got onto his radio and sent word to the formation that he was rejoining, at half-speed, then let Fatfoot and the soldiers in the payload bay know too.

I didn’t hear any cheering.

We regrouped with the other MCVs. Not too close, in case there was a follow up artillery barrage, but close enough we could see across the line. Three machines were just smoking wrecks, a few of their tank escorts had been knocked out too. So that was thirty plus casualties right there. There were two other MCVs down on their skirts, knocked out, legionnaires milling around them, treating wounded, or moving combat capable troops to other MCVs. We could put another twenty hastati and their kit in our meat locker, standing room only, but it seemed we weren’t needed to take on extra troops, because we weren’t called any closer.

Then I found out why.

Daedalus was arguing with someone on the radio, then leaned back in his chair and punched the cockpit glass over his head with a gloved hand. He didn’t yell or scream, didn’t say anything at all for a minute. Then he got on the tween deck intercom. “Attention passengers, this is your Captain speaking. Unfortunately this is as far as we will be taking you today. We hope you have enjoyed your trip with Cohort III Transport Services and kindly ask you to think of us for all your future combat transport needs. Please check your seatback and overhead lockers for all explosive ordnance and remember to take it with you as you leave the MCV. Centurion, you are to disembark your men for redeployment on another transport. Fatfoot, report when you are ready to drop the ramp.” There must have been an immediate reply because Daedalus barked into his microphone. “Yeah, well, with respect, sir, consider yourself lucky to even be alive, for as long as that lasts!”

“Some people,” Ostrich shook her head. “Never happy.”

I was more interested in what was coming than what had just happened. So was Ostrich. “What’s the deal boss? We’re still combat capable. So why are we emptying the meat locker?”

Daedalus didn’t answer straight away. Just sat looking balefully out at the sand. Then he sighed. “Well, the Legatus in his wisdom doesn’t think we are as capable as we think we are. Says we’ll just hold everyone up, so while the others are redistributing the meat among themselves, we’re supposed to head for the hole that Termite’s tanks blew in the minefield and see if there is a way through.”

“Aw, that aint fair.”

“That’s exactly what the Lilin want us to do!” Tiny complained. “It’ll be a kill zone. They’ll have their artillery zeroed on that gap now, just waiting for us to push through it!”

“Air defense took down two surveillance drones in the firefight,” Ostrich said, pointing at a kill/loss summary on the tactical screen. “They might not have any more.”

“But they probably do,” Tiny moaned.

Daedalus was ignoring the whining, listening to his intercom. “Good. Drop the ramp Fatfoot.”

When every last pound of meat and high explosive had been disgorged, Daedalus ordered the ramp up and pushed forward on his sticks.

“You want one tank out front, the rest in trailing mode?” I asked him.

“Hey, Termite can read minds,” he said. “Yeah, exactly what I want. That minefield could be ten klicks deep for all we know. I want some metal out in front of us just in case.”

The valley hit another mesa about ten klicks ahead of us, and it seemed unlikely the enemy would have mined both arms of the fork as well, so we figured the minefield would go some of the way to the fork, then stop. I moved one tank out to hold station a hundred meters ahead of us, and the remaining six followed along behind us in a straight line like a row of ducklings. Not good for avoiding another artillery salvo, but it was a good idea to be driving in each others’ tracks inside a minefield. I programmed the lead tank to make slow, zig zagging turns inside six meter ‘guardrails’ since the tank was only three meters wide and our MCV was six. We needed the tank to squirrel along in front of us like it was deliberately trying to get blown up. There was still a chance though that we would go over an area of ground our pathfinder tank had not, and there would be a mine under it. So, put two tanks out front, you say? We didn’t have that many left, remember?

Minutes later we passed the two smoking wrecks of the tanks that had hit the mines. As we drew level with the second, Daedalus halted our MCV. “Alright boys and girl, grab your gonads and say your prayers.” He keyed his radio mike. “Command, Cot 4, moving forward.”

I read how old time tank crews driving through possible minefields used to take off their helmets and sit on them to protect their crown jewels. We didn’t have helmets, just skull caps with electrodes that clamped onto our shaved heads. The cockpit was supposedly an armored shell, inside a double hulled armored body fitted with reactive armor but that hadn’t been effective against a plasma bolt fired at point blank range, as the last Termite had found out. So whether it would be effective against a buried upwardly-firing-penetrator charge was doubtful. We knew from exercises the most likely scenario was the mine would disable our ‘blowers’ and shred our skirts so that we thumped onto the ground, inert, where we would make a juicy artillery or air attack target.

So yeah, prayers were probably the best protection we could hope for. But just in case, we all pulled out the breastplates from our armor, sat on them, and held our breath.

The meters ticked past, with Tiny giving us a running progress report. “Two klicks … two-k-twenty … two-k-forty …”

“How deep we usually sow a minefield?” I asked.

“Two to five klicks,” Daedalus said. “The deeper the field, the lower the density. So if we are still in the field now, the chances are lower we’ll…”

We heard the explosion through our hull despite the thin atmosphere, and the flash of light ahead of us was bright enough to fill the cockpit. Daedalus heaved the MCV to a halt, but left our turbines running.

“Tank 3 down,” I said, unnecessarily.

Tiny scratched his skull. “I hate this shit. Give me death over this, any day.”

“You may still get that wish,” Daedalus said. “Termite, bring another tank around, close as you can to the trail we already made. Choose a ground attack unit, I want to save our last air defense tank in case this is another ambush.”

I pulled one of my tanks out of the line behind us. The MCV left a rocky trail underneath it where it had blown the sand away from the small rocks that covered the surface, like a gravel road swept clean by a giant leaf blower. But to get ahead of us, the tank I selected would need to go around, where neither we or our last pathfinder tank had swept.

I piloted the tank manually using directional icons on my console, keeping it as close as I could to our hull and the swept path.

As it drew level with us, it detonated, rocking our MCV from side to side. Daedalus pulled his control sticks back, sliding the MCV backwards to get it out of the blast radius in case the ammunition in the tank cooked off. Which, ten seconds later, it did, in a firework display worthy of a Chinese new year.

“I can’t take it,” Tiny said. He had his head between his knees, hands over his head and was rocking back and forth. “I can’t take it!”

“Ostrich, tranq him,” Daedalus said.

Ostrich looked over her shoulder at Daedalus. “Tranq who?”

“Tiny. Tranq him.”

Tiny looked at Ostrich in alarm. “No, hey, I’m fine, sister.”

“My ass,” Daedalus said. “You heard me Ostrich, tranq him.”

“Sorry, brother,” Ostrich said, taking a syringe from her uniform pocket. The engineer was also nominally the crew medic, so she carried a range of basic meds from coagulant patches to stim modifiers. Our stim implants automatically pumped our bodies with sensory and reflex enhancing hormones during combat and they had to be counter-regulated when it came time to sleep or relax. But that took time to kick in and with the big guy clearly about to freak out, there was no time.

No one likes a jab. Whether it was an upper or a downer, the massive sudden influx of hormones and sedative gave you side effects you felt for days after. Nausea, fatigue, memory loss were just a few.

I stood in case Ostrich needed any help, since Tiny was trying to bat the syringe away from him, but with surprising strength she locked him down with an iron grip across his chest that pinned both arms, as she jabbed the auto-syringe into Tiny's neck. His body went slack, but not unconscious. Ostrich waited by him, watching his breathing for signs of distress. She snapped her fingers in front of Tiny's eyes. “You good, Tiny?”

Tiny turned to her and smiled. “So good, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Ostrich said and sat down, sliding the used syringe into a disposal bag by the side of her seat. I sat down again.

“Tiny, sensor scan!” Daedalus called, checking the guy was still mission capable.

He reached up, fingers tapping icons on his console. “Nothing on seismic or radar. I got some burning vehicles ahead and behind us on infrared and optical.” He sat back in his seat again. “But nothing new.” His voice was moronically calm, but that was better than high pitched and panicky, which could have triggered the rest of us into panicking too.

Satisfied, Daedalus did a stock take. “Alright. The fact we aren’t being bombarded right now tells me there’s no second ambush planned. We can push on. Termite, bring another tank around, same side. Chances are low we’ll get unlucky twice. You get it ahead of us, push those wrecks out the way and then we get moving again.”

I did as he ordered. And we set off again. Pathfinder tank ahead, then momma duck, and the remaining six tanks behind us.

We lost one more pathfinder to a mine, detonating again a hundred meters ahead of us. But though Tiny flinched, like all of us, he took it in his stride. At six clicks after entering the field, Daedalus decided we were through. We were just short of the fork in the valley. But we had to be sure. “Termite, clear a defensive field out to two hundred meters.”

I set the surviving tanks to circle around us, starting in close and spiraling outward until they were two hundred meters out and spread out with about fifty meter spacing. Nothing went boom.

“Command, Cop 4,” Daedalus said over the radio. “We are through the field, four tanks down, but you have your path.” All that the other MCVs had to do was motor over and pick up our trail, following closely along the path we’d swept. The target LZ, deep inside the Margaritifer Terra crater zone, was still about eighty klicks ahead of us, the other side of the Chaos.

I turned the cameras on one of my tanks around and looked behind us at the still smoking wrecks of my four tanks. Whoever had named the rutted ruins of valleys and mesas a ‘Chaos’, I had to take my skull cap off to them. The same went for the LZ at the other side of it. The whole area around the Mesa that the LZ sat on was one big series of kill zones.

The LZ was made to be near impregnable to an outside attack, but that of course was why the Lilin always attacked from within.

There were no more minefields. There was no more artillery. No airstrikes. The cohort's remaining five MCVs made it to the base of the LZ Mesa with us trailing a half hour behind because we were moving at half speed and the bastard Decurio in command of our Cot, or platoon, didn’t want to slow up the whole formation just to provide cover for us.

The mesa the LZ sat on was like a steep sided circular hill with a square pillar of rock planted on it. We were spread around it in a rough circle. I was looking up at it from a tank camera and it looked about five hundred meters high. I just barely make out some man-made observations platforms up top. The Legate's MCV tried hailing whoever was inside, but got no answer. So his Centurion sent up an uncrewed recon drone and we were all patched into the vision. All I saw was a wall of red rock skimming past until the drone broke into open air and zoomed up above the LZ.

It was a military firebase on the periphery of a settlement, so what it should have been, was a series of hardened habitat domes surrounded by landing pads for shunts, ringed with kinetic and plasma defense emplacements. Linking these should have been field generating beacons and a few seismic spikes. It wasn’t easy to tunnel up into a mesa, even for the Lilin, so you didn’t need as many spikes, but you needed the beacons to generate a magnetic field strong enough it messed with any Lilin trying to break through.

The beacons were down, of course. That was the first thing the Lilin did when they managed to turn a base. They got their human converts to bring down the beacon defenses, so they could move in and out without grabbing their heads and screaming. They turned off the spikes too, but that was just to save juice, since they were useless if a base had already been turned. Then they either did one of two things – they turned the LZ into a porcupine, beefing up the defenses so that any attempt to retake it would result in massive casualties. Or they would use it to stage an offensive, using the humans they’d turned as meat puppets, to attack a nearby camp.

By the time you’d weathered that storm and taken the LZ back, the battleground was littered with dead humans, turned and unturned, and there was not a Lilin to be found, anywhere.

Then they would rinse, and repeat. It was a bloody, brutal, attritional war against a foe that that appeared from nowhere and then ghosted.

Camp Margaritifer Terra had been a porcupine. Satellite surveillance showed it had been reinforced with extra layered defenses against aerial or space bombardment, and our probing attacks had been beaten back with carefully placed ambush forces. Or traps, like the minefield/artillery combo we’d just pushed through.

But see how I said ‘had been’ a porcupine? The MCV drone vision showed an LZ that had been laid to waste. Everything that could burn, melt, or blow up had been destroyed. Plasma cannon barrels split, habitat domes shredded. The desiccated human bodies of legionnaires and camp followers lay everywhere. As the drone swooped low, you could see a lot had been shot, but a lot had also just suffocated when their habitats were trashed, lying where they fell, some with their hands up where they’d clawed at their necks as they died.

“Holy mother of a frog-eyed goat,” Ostrich said. I was to learn she was a master of creative invective. “Wait, there’s one habitat left!” she said, pointing at a single small dome that stood untouched at the edge of the field of death and debris. “That must be the place they launched that last attack from.”

“Aye,” Daedalus said. He’d been on the radio with the Decurio. “And guess who they are sending up to check it out.”

That shook even Tiny out of his drug induced torpor. “That’s odd,” he said, with enhanced understatement. “We’re an MCV crew. Why don’t they send assault troops?”

Daedalus unbuckled himself from his pilot seat and stood, stretching. “Because after our performance at the minefield, where we lost four tanks and triggered an artillery attack, as the Decanus put it, he’ll be nominating us for a court martial when we get back.”

“So, we’re already dead far as he is concerned,” Ostrich observed. “He’s sending us to do the dirty work rather than sacrifice anyone else.”

I could have protested, I supposed. Refused. But Voeykov had done a job on me. I was nothing and no-one after all. Whether I died here, today, or somewhere else, tomorrow, what did it matter? Sure, I was still human. Voeykov had done its best to strip my humanity from me, but I would still fight against the dying of the light when it got down to that last moment. That didn’t mean I could summon up enough outrage to try to avoid that moment entirely yet.

“Grab your personal weapons, put on your breathers, form up outside,” Daedalus ordered. And before he was asked, he added. "Not you Fatfoot. You close up behind us and guard the MCV."

There was a personnel entry elevator at the base of the Mesa. It had of course been disabled. The only way up was a set of stairs that went up alongside the elevator shaft. Five hundred meters up. We started humping up the stairs.

It was good to have the skull caps off, but the breathers weren’t much better. They clamped onto your face almost exactly the same as a skullcap, and then sucked themselves onto your face. You pulled your thermal skin on over the top of your own skin, and that sucked itself onto your body, forming a seal over your ears and around your breather. Once you’d skinned up, you suited up. Suits were looser: a magnesium alloy weave that could stop most kinetic weapons and low power plasma bolts.

The combination was supposed to keep you warm, without needing a heat generator, out in the multi sub zero temperatures of The Red. But inside the stairwell, the skin and suit started to cook you. By about the hundredth step I wasn’t looking up anymore to see if there was an ambush waiting. I was hoping there was.

There wasn’t though. We made it all the way up about a half hour later and emerged onto the top of the mesa into late afternoon sunlight. A day Redside was about the same as a day Earthside, and I figured we still had about four hours of light left. The two moons, Phobos and Deimos, were just appearing over the western horizon. Phobos was closer and bigger and orbited faster, so it would soon overtake its smaller brother.

I could see why they picked this mesa for the LZ. You could see over just about the whole of the Margaritifer Terra, only a slight dust haze obscuring the artificial lights of the mines and refineries of the Meridiani Planum to the east. We circled around to the left, since the undamaged habitat dome we’d seen on the drone vision had been on the edge of the destroyed camp. The view didn’t get any less spectacular. As we edged around, expecting to be jumped at any moment, I saw the spindle topped mesas and ravines of the Aurorae Chaos and Xanthe Terra to the west. Beyond them lay the Da Vinci Crater LZ, but the Aurorae Chaos made an attack from that direction impossible, which is why we were sent out.

There were bodies everywhere. Most of those in suits had died from headshots since shooting through magnesium alloy weave isn’t easy, like I said.

Tiny inspected one of the bodies, turning the dead guy’s head side to side. “Close range, maybe even self inflicted?”

It was super creepy, all those headshots. But there were no pistols or other weapons near the bodies, which didn’t make sense if they were involuntary suicides.

“It looks like there were still hundreds of hastati here,” Ostrich observed. “Why kill them off like this? If you already turned them, why not use them for some kind of kamikaze attack?”

“I'm not complaining. Someone did our job for us.” I said, turning a legionnaire's body over with my boot. “Looks like these guys were slaughtered where they stood. Someone went around killing them and they didn't put up a fight.” Outside the habitat domes, the camp followers lay where they had fallen too, but they hadn’t had suits, so they’d frozen or suffocated. They were worse to look at since their faces weren’t hidden behind breathers. They had open, gasping mouths and bulging, gelatinous eyes, with frost on their lashes and lines of frozen blood or saliva running down their chins or cheeks.

There were a lot of theories about the Lilin, since we knew so little about them. One theory was about the reason they didn’t just attack us en masse, the reason they used subversion, assassination, sabotage and conversion, was that there weren’t that many of them. So they had to fight an asymmetrical guerilla war. I preferred that theory, since it implied we could win eventually, by sheer weight of numbers. I didn’t like the other theories so much, like the one that said the Lilin didn’t even have a base Redside, that they were shunting in from somewhere else entirely and their technology required so much energy they could only port a few bodies over at a time. That implied there could be millions of them out in the galaxy somewhere and if so, this was a war we had already lost.

“So where is this someone?” Ostrich asked, very reasonably.

“Shut up and prepare to breach the dome,” Daedalus said.

As Ostrich had pointed out, we weren’t any sort of elite assault squad. We weren’t elite anything, really. Daedalus wasn’t any sort of assault squad leader either. He was more or less making it up as he went along.

“Alright, Tiny, you open the airlock. Termite, you’re point on the entry. Me and Ostrich have your back, Tiny comes in last.”

I didn’t like the idea of being first through the door. “Why not let me open the lock, and put Tiny on point?” I asked. “He’s the biggest. We can hide behind him.”

“Hey, I aint your meat shield,” Tiny objected.

Daedalus waved us all to silence and glared at me. “Last in, first out. As long as you are the new guy, you’ll be point. We get a new Termite, and they’ll be point and you can go back to being Ballsack, so stop bitching and get ready to breach.”

I couldn’t fight the logic.

When we had formed up into a snake beside the door, Tiny palmed the airlock control, the door hissed open and I went in. The airlock was big enough for two, but no one followed me in. So much for having my back. I waited for the outer door to close, the pressure to equalize and the inner door to the habitat to hiss open. We should have just blown it from the outside and let whoever is in here perish, I thought. But they could be a camp follower – a cook, entertainer or sex worker – and they might not have been turned yet. The Legionnaires of Praeda Legion were a lot of things, but murderers of innocents we weren’t.

For lack of a better idea, as the inner door slid open I threw myself though it and lay prone, scanning around me with my plasma rifle.

OK, some kind of environmental support dome. I saw air and water purifiers, solar capacitors. Wiring, piping. It was laid out in a ring around a central raised platform with a single control desk.

Left and right of me were bodies. These had died in atmosphere and they hadn’t been suffocated, frozen or shot. They didn’t look putrid or bloated either, so I figured they had died not too long ago. How? I wasn’t about to conduct any autopsy. There was a person sitting in a seat at the control desk, looking down at me. And she was still alive. She blinked and gave me a small, creepy wave.

I gave her a small, creepy wave back.

Then I got on my mike to Daedalus. “Uh, I’m in. The dome is clear of hostiles, but there’s a person here, maybe some kind of camp follower …”

She stood, and I narrowed my guess. She was wearing a catsuit: the skin tight neoprene with strategically placed flesh windows that only a certain type of camp follower wore. I’d never seen a cook wearing a catsuit.

“… confirming that. I’m gonna say she’s a sex worker,” I said. “She’s unarmed. And she’s walking towards me.”

That got the others through the air lock faster than if I’d called urgently for help. As they barreled in, Daedalus had them fan out left and right with rifles ready, but the woman was very obviously unarmed. There was nowhere she could have hidden a weapon, unless she’d been booby trapped internally. She had flowing red hair, green eyes, freckled white skin, long legs, bare feet.

She’d gotten within about four meters by the time the others appeared, and Daedalus held up his hand, yelling through his breather at her. “Stop right there young lady. No closer.”

Tiny and Ostrich didn’t see it right away, but Daedalus and I did. Probably because they weren’t looking at her face.

She wasn’t right. She should have been terrified and running into our arms crying. But she was walking slowly, and calmly.

Daedalus turned to me and lowered his voice. “Succubus?”

The woman stood still, head tilted slightly, looking bemused.

I didn’t take my eyes or my rifle off her. “Succubus.”

“Don’t see no aura,” he said.

“No, she’s been here a while,” I agreed. That was good, since it meant she was no longer under the protection of whatever field generator the aura was a sign of. It was also bad, since it meant that we were probably looking at the Lilin who had taken down the Margaritifer Terra LZ.

“The Decurio is going to want her alive,” Daedalus said.

“Do we care what the Decurio wants?” I asked.

“Not after seeing all those bodies outside, no Termite, we do not,” he whispered.

“We can’t just kill her,” Ostrich said, trying to keep her voice low too.

Tiny was more dispassionate. “Sure we can. In fact, we should.” He was still not doing a good job of looking at her face.

She spoke. Her voice was honey and cream, of course. “There's no reason to whisper, I can hear every word.”

Daedalus lifted his rifle and sighted on her body mass. Supposedly it didn’t matter where you shot them. A single plasma bolt in the core and they went down. “No shit, girly. So, are you coming with us dead, or alive?”

She frowned, like the question didn’t make sense. “I have stayed behind to parlay,” she said. “Who is commander here?”

Without even hesitating, Daedalus, Tiny and Ostrich all looked at each other, then pointed at me. “He is.”

Anker 3

‘Boldly they rode, and well’

Thanks very much, I thought. But I didn’t blame them. I was Termite, already a dead man until proven otherwise. Whatever bad was about to happen it should happen to me. But there was also something right about it because – and here’s where I tell you how I knew the ‘woman’ was a succubus – well, this was my mess to clean up.

“You can take off your masks,” she offered. “The atmosphere is Earth normal in here and I’ve done nothing to poison it.” The bodies lying around us with no sign of violence on them spoke a different story, and she must have seen us looking. “They were killed with a biological agent. It is no longer active.” None of us moved to take off our masks and she smiled. “It would be a very short parlay if I was lying, yes?”

So I peeled off my breather. And she saw my face for the first time. I’ll give her some credit; A simulacrum of emotion flickered across her features. “Scabrous!” she smiled, warmly.

“Hello, Livia,” I replied.

Don’t ask me what maelstrom of anger and grief and self-hatred was swirling in me then. I couldn’t pick out any one single feeling. Oh, alright, I’ll try. Relief, that she hadn’t been killed by the scent of an orange. Joy, that she was still alive and hadn’t died at the hands of her torturers. Humiliation, that I had fallen victim to a succubus, that everything I had felt about her had been the result of pheromones and artful play acting. Horror, at the thought of how much genetic material she must have siphoned while inside LZ Margaritifer Terra. Anger, at her, at myself, at the Gods and the universe that allowed such evil.

Fear. The next feeling that swamped me was fear.

Because she had been caged beside me for weeks on Voeykov, during which time I shared with her every secret I ever held. And not just about me, about my childhood, about my schooling, my love life, but also my training, life in the Corps, the strengths and weaknesses of our weapons, news about the progress of the war, our victories and defeats. She drained me dry with innocent inquiry and when there was nothing left to learn, she went to work. I marveled at that. What kind of enemy were the Lilin that they would let themselves be imprisoned and tortured for months in the name of learning more about their enemies?

I had hidden nothing from her, not even my love for Antonia.

And she had used everything I taught her to escape Voeykov, infiltrate Margaritifer Terra and complete the work that other Lilin had no doubt started. Livia, not human. Never had been. Lilin. And I fell for her.

Despair. I was left with despair, because how could we fight and win against an entire race of foes who used our most powerful weapon against us – our very selves?

“It is wonderful to see you, Scabrous,” she said. “You look well. The food is better at Flaugergues, it seems.”

I was still skin and bone, so the observation made me realize once again how close I had come to death in Voeykov, in the cage beside her. “And you’ve already been promoted, wonderful!”

I said nothing. She had already emptied me of everything I knew or felt or imagined. Let her believe I’d been promoted too. We didn’t wear our ranks on our combat suits in the Corps, they were tatooed on our skin to prevent our enemies from easily targeting officers. My Decurio stripes had been lasered off my shoulder when I was busted down to gregarious, and hadn’t been restored, but Livia could not see that.

“How did that orange taste?” I asked her. The others were looking at me with a mixture of confusion and suspicion, so I turned to them and waved my weapon in her direction. “This one was in a cage beside me at Voeykov,” I told them. “A spy.”

“This one?” she mocked. “So dismissive, Linus. And yet, I hope we can still be friends.”

Bile rose in my throat and I pushed it back down. “You said you wanted to parlay.”

“Yes. I picked up your biosignature in the attacking force Linus. I did my best to allow you through. It seems we know enough about your commanders now that I was right, they sent you up here!”

She sounded genuinely pleased.

“Don’t reply!” Daedalus barked at me. His weapon was still pointed unwaveringly at Livia’s center mass.

“Oh, he doesn’t need to,” she said. “And you shouldn’t worry. If I had wanted you dead, you already would be.”

She had a point. Daedalus wasn’t letting her have it easily though. “If you wanted to talk to this man, what is it you want from him?”

“Well, that is rather beyond your rank, Decanus,” she said, implying she now knew exactly who the real commander of our sorry conterburnium was. “But since your cooperation will make things move more quickly, I will tell you this. I want a few minutes alone with this man” she said. She waved a hand to encompass me and exclude the others. “Him, but not you, and none of the men and women you have below, who parked their vehicles on top of another of our minefields.”

Daedalus looked at me with red-rimmed panicked eyes.

“Yes, so, in case it needs saying,” she said. “Kill me, and you may live, but your Legate and all of your comrades will perish.”

She could have been bluffing. But I felt I knew her, a little, and it didn’t strike me that she was. “You want to talk with me?”

“Just you, sweet Linus,” she said. “So …”

I jumped as Daedalus’ weapon spat a ball of plasma that drilled right though her, throwing her two feet back into the room.

“What the hell?!” I yelled. I was going to yell some more, but like everyone else, I had turned my head, listening for the sound of mines exploding in the sand below, triggered by some kind of dead-man’s-switch Livia had rigged. But there was only silence.

And then...

Then, with a ripple of explosions that started behind us and rolled around the base of the mesa anticlockwise, the entire stone pillar shook. The horrible staccato cacophony of death continued for nearly a half minute, causing dust and rust to fill the air inside our bubble. I had to pull my breather on again, the fine sand filled the air so quickly.

When it was done, no one said anything. We went out through the airlock to one of the viewing platforms perched on the edge of the plateau and looked down. Below us were only blazing fires and pillars of smoke, already rising up toward us.

And so there you have it. The real story of how Legate Augusti and an entire equis legionis of 4 conterburnia mounted cavalry vehicles, their tank escorts and 400 hastati died in the Battle of LZ Margaritifer Terra. Yeah, not quite the story you heard in the newscasts, right? You heard the version where the Legate Augusti led a glorious charge through the minefield, his own MCV at the point of the spear, dodging mines and artillery and drones until his surviving conterburnia made it to the base of the mesa, where his rag tag company of condemned men and women rained unholy fire down on the LZ, and just as victory seemed near, the enemy unleashed some kind of mysterious alien weapon that caused the sand to rise up and swallow them, never to be seen again. Every man among them received a Medal of Valor, and their families a full lifetime pension. Earthside, Remembrance Day was renamed Legate Augusti Day and the names of the dead from the four Conterburnia of the Legion Praeda were always first among the fallen to be remembered.

That’s the version you know, right? Not the one where a condemned man saw the chance to live another day and traded 400 lives for his own.

I hadn’t known Daedalus for very long, but now I knew everything about him that I would ever need to know.

“Well, aint no one down there going to be sending us to a court martial anytime soon,” Daedalus said, lifted his breather and spat over the edge before settling it back on his face. His spit froze the minute it left his lips, dropping into the smoke from the burning vehicles and hastati.

“Gibbering gobbets of phlegm, Daedalus,” Ostrich said in a strangled voice. “What have you done?”

“Saved your life, gregarious,” Daedalus said, hefting his rifle and checking the charge level. “Saved all our lives. Legatus Augusti down there had already passed sentence on you. I just returned the favor.”

“Fatfoot was down there!” Tiny wailed. “You killed Fatfoot too!”

I could see Daedalus’ eyes over the top of his breather and the realization took him by surprise. “Aw shit,” he said. “I didn’t think about that.” He peered over the edge. “Maybe he made it.”

We all looked at the area near the personnel entrance where our own MCV had been. The smoke was thick, but every couple of seconds you could see the ground behind it. There was nothing and no one moving around down there. It had been a very, very dense minefield.

“Forget Fatfoot,” Tiny said. Which sounds cold, but you have to remember he was still under the influence of the mood killing jab Ostrich gave him. “What about the whole ‘we want to parlay’ thing?” he asked. “That Lilin might have been talking about a way to end this damn war. Maybe they were ready to talk terms, and you killed their, I don’t know … their ambassador.”

“Oh right, did I?” Daedalus asked, getting defensive now. “Because how do you know she wouldn’t have just had a nice little pow wow with Termite here and then killed us and everyone down there anyway?” he asked. “Look around you man,” Daedalus said, a little hysterical, gesturing to all the bodies lying around us. “This strike you as the actions of an enemy who wants to negotiate peace?!”

There was no arguing with that, least of all from me. I’d spent months in an electrified cage and working in press gangs alongside Livia, and seeing her just now enrobed in Lilin mendacity, I couldn’t tell you with any certainty at all what she would have done if she hadn’t gotten her parlay with the Legate, or if she hadn’t been pleased with it. Maybe all those men and women would have died anyway, and us along with them. See, that’s the version I tell myself when I’m alone in the dark with my thoughts. They would have died anyway, so at least we survived. Isn’t it a version of that story that just about every survivor tells themselves?

“Alright boys and girl,” Daedalus said. “Get your collective shit together. We have to come up with a story that explains why we are alive and no one else is,” he said. “One that doesn’t try to make us into heroes, but won’t get us court-martialed either.”

The truth is just a good story that fits the facts, right? We managed to come up with a version of the facts that fit what actually happened, in case there were any survivors left alive down below with stories of their own (there weren’t). A version that the Praeda Legion’s media machine could turn into some kind of ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ BS later – the version you grew up with.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the (four) hundred.

Something like Tennyson wrote, right? A version that made us into anonymous not-heroes that could just blend back into the dirt, filth and depravity of the Legion again with no one paying us any particular mind.

Ostrich was the most troubled about it all, and she went all the way down to the plain of death again to see if maybe Fatfoot or anyone else had made it through. It was her medic training probably, that laid a skerrick of duty on her that the rest of us had long since surrendered. Meanwhile Tiny, Daedalus and me made the call to Legion Command on the one communicator inside the bubble that Livia had left undamaged, maybe so she or I could speak with the Legate. We were ordered to stay exactly where we were, and so we did exactly that. Ostrich came back up a couple hours later. She had made it halfway around the mesa without finding any survivors, so she’d given up and dragged herself back up the stairwell.

“Fatfoot?” Tiny asked.

“Mulch,” she said with a glare at Daedalus.

“Park it sister,” he said tiredly, waving her accusation away with a tired hand. “I didn’t plant those mines.”

We were airlifted out, but not until the next morning. Which gave us plenty of time to get our story straight. A story that four dumb stim-addled hastati could stick to under the pressure of ‘enhanced-debriefing’.

They kept us in the brig for about three weeks. Every few days they dragged us out to debrief us again. Both alone, and in groups. They told me the others had broken, and told the truth, so I had one chance to do the same or I would face the death penalty, for sure this time. I just laughed at them, earning myself a little more torture. After the first week, they had decided there was nothing left to try on us individually, so they put us together in a latrine pit that we knew would be full of microphones and waited for us to break cover.

In between being showered with piss and faeces from the toilets above us, Tiny talked about growing up in a small farming town that slowly changed as food production went from fields to industrial sized labs. Ostrich told us the stories her grandparents used to tell her, of a world where you could still drink from streams and lakes in the wild. Where fish swam free in the seas, and gardens were full of birds, deer and squirrels. Daedalus told us he was a painter.

“Sorry, what?” Ostrich asked.

“You mean, like in a workshop, painting cars or something?”

“No, philistine,” he said. “Fine art forgeries. Matisse, Rembrandt, Banksy, you name it, I mastered them all. And the techniques: how to age a canvas or found object, source the paints, impregnate the work with isotopes enough to fool the carbon dating scans.”

“But you got caught,” I guessed.

“Of course I got caught,” he said. “But not for ten glorious years. Ten years of high living, real cigars, the best weed, cognac from actual grapes.” He moved aside as a stream of sewage poured down beside him. “The judge offered me enlistment or life in jail, so I joined the Corps.”

“Life in jail for forgery?” I whistled. “That’s pretty harsh.”

“The rich hate the idea they’ve been made a fool of by the poor, Termite,” he said.

Eventually they dragged us back out of the latrine pit and separated us again, but by then they’d grown bored with torturing us and so they just left us in dark cells with nothing to eat, and the threat we would never see the sky again. It was just like being back in Voeykov, more summer camp than imprisonment, really.

Since it had lost half of its strength and most of its cavalry, Legion Praeda was taken off the line and put in reserve while it was built up again. Fresh meat trickled in. We expected we would be split up, distributed among other crews, but they chose to keep the four of us together and assigned us to another MCV. Without grounds to court martial and execute us, they probably decided the best idea was to keep us all together so at least if we were killed, there was a bigger chance we would all die together and the last living stain of the Battle of Margaritifer Terra would be wiped away forever. Or maybe they'd wired our MCV and were still waiting for us to slip up and talk about what had really happened up there.

Fat chance.

It meant that we needed a replacement for Fatfoot though – a new loadmaster for the meat locker.

He arrived with a knock on our barracks door, just as I had. This time I was inside, not waiting outside. We knew he was coming, but Daedalus made him knock three times, before finally answering the door after thirty minutes, glaring at him dressed only in dirty briefs. I wondered how many times they had all been through the ritual before: before me, before Termite, before before before.

“Nonsense!” Daedalus bellowed at the poor girl who was standing there shivering with either cold or fright. “It’s too early for a replacement. We’re still mourning … uh …” he turned around to us. “What was the damned fool’s name?”

“Fatfoot,” I told him without rising from my bunk.

“Yeah, we’re still mourning Fatfoot.” He slammed the door in the girl’s face. Yes, he was a she.

But she was eventually allowed in, and took her place in the payload bay. She was a solidly built girl – had to be to be a loadmaster – but what I noticed straight away, neither Voeykov or Daedalus had managed to take the shy, cheeky smile from her face. It was the kind of smile you weren’t sure if you had really seen, it came and went so fast. But then you thought about what she’d just said, and when you rewound your memory, there it was. That little smile.

Her Redside name was Lucretia and her nickname ‘Blindside’. Neither lasted very long.

They rebuilt Praeda Legion with endless exercises, pointless drills, and a worryingly slow influx of new hastati that spoke more about how the war was going than the mind numbing newscasts we were subjected to every time we sat down in the galley to eat.

… in breaking news, the LZ at Schiaparelli Crater has been re-established after it was abandoned by the enemy four weeks ago. A strategic fire base north of LZ Flaugergues, the recapture of LZ Schiaparelli extends our control of Terra Sabea by another million hectares and …

Recapture? Is that what we called it when we reinhabited a destroyed, empty camp? We were like wasps taking over the nest a different swarm had abandoned last summer. The only reason the Lilin had abandoned a camp was it served no purpose any longer. It couldn’t be mined for human genetic material, had outlived its use as either a porcupine or offensive base. Any Lilin there had ghosted. Like Terra Margaritifer, the troops that eventually made it through the suddenly undefended perimeter found only dead, frozen bodies, destroyed habitats and weapons or ordnance rendered unusable.

No cheers greeted the victory announcements. They barely registered, except among the book makers and gamblers who began speculating on how soon it would be before the base fell again. The only news that had raised a cheer was the announcement a few days earlier that Voeykov had fallen. I told myself it wasn’t the Lilin I let in that had done it, not alone anyway. Place was probably already riddled with them when I was shunted in. Livia, for example, she’d been there before I even got there. No one was sad to hear the camp that processed the penal legionnaires was knocked out. It meant death for the poor fools in the cages there, but also for the Praetorian guards who had plagued us, and it meant a disrupted supply of meat for Praeda Legion grinder, which in turn meant it would take longer before we were up to strength again and ready to throw into battle.

Some watched the newscasts though. The dreamers. The few among us with a candlelight of hope that that Voeykov hadn’t been able to extinguish. Like Blindside.

She spooned the ‘dark bread’ (roasted reconstituted plant protein powder) mixed with ‘beer’ (fermented reconstituted plant protein powder) that they were calling chow that day, and pointed with her spoon at the screen. “That’s good, right?” she said, looking around the table for agreement. “We’ve got control of more territory now than we had six months ago.”

“Uh huh,” Daedalus said. “And how much do the Lilin control?”

She thought about that. “Well, they’ve just turned Voeykov, and they took Camp Huygens last month. So that gives them those two, plus another what, four LZ’s they currently hold, against our fifteen. So we’re winning.”

Ostrich gave a bitter laugh.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

“You. But don’t take it the wrong way, replacement…”

“With respect, my nickname is Blindside, Decanus,” she said, allowing the needle to get through her armor.

“Not for long,” Daedalus told her. “Here’s the thing they didn’t tell you in all those reducation classes in Voeykov,” Daedalus said. “The Lilin aren’t trying to control anything.”

“Sure they are,” she said. “Why do they keep taking our LZ’s then?”

“Lilin have never had control of more than five LZ’s at any time,” Tiny told her. “Sometimes it’s two, right now it’s four. Never more than five.”

“They turn a camp, they use it, they destroy it and then they ghost,” Daedalus continued. “Is that the strategy of an enemy that wants to hold ground? Or is it the strategy of an enemy that just wants to deny it to us? To make the cost of defending it so high, we eventually just give up and go away, like the Vikings in North America?”

“There were Vikings in North America?” she asked, blinking, trying to keep up.

“Not for long,” Daedalus said. “Which is my whole point.”

“But if we keep expanding the number of LZs…”

“We just stretch our defenses thinner and give the Lilin more targets to choose from,” Tiny sighed. “Blah blah blah. This conversation is boring. Can we do what we agreed earlier?”

Daedalus had been on a roll and was annoyed Tiny had broken his flow, but he relented. “Alright.” He motioned with his hand. “Stand, gregarious Lucretia.”

She frowned, put her spoon into her bowl, and stood.

“We have a tradition in this Conterburnium,” Daedalus said in his best most portentous voice. “Whenever we get a new replacement, they must take on the name of our dearly beloved and first departed comrade, uh…”

“Termite,” Tiny prompted.

“Yes, dearly beloved Termite, curse his soul.”

“Sodding Termite,” Ostrich nodded. “Fuck him.”

“Yes, fuck him. And in his honor, Lucretia Blindside, you will henceforth be named…”

She pointed at me. “I thought his name was Termite.”

“Not any longer,” Daedalus said, annoyed again at being interrupted. “That there is Ballsack.”

“Scabrous,” I said. It was worth a try.

“Shut up, Ballsack.” Daedalus said, collecting himself. “He was Termite, when he was our latest replacement. But since the death of Fatfoot, he has been replaced by the new replacement, who is you, so therefore, henceforth etc etc, your name is Termite. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, Decanus,” she said, saluting. And there it was. Or wasn’t. That little smile.

It was a carefree few weeks, that rebuild. Outside the perimeter of LZ Flaugergues, the war raged. We watched the cohorts from other Legions mount up, ride out, sometimes to return victorious, more often to return as smoking, leaking, limping ruins. Meanwhile, we played games of chance – the size of the pot inexorably linked to the level of lethality – ate our reconstituted protein, drank our wine ration and basked in the reflected light of the twin moons knowing it could not last.

Because although Daedalus was right, he was also wrong. There were 10 billion people Earthside. The exact number was a secret, but by our best estimates, upward of 300,000 troops had now been shunted Redside and the number in the various garrisons was increasing, despite attrition. So even though we were bleeding a lot of meat, as long as the number of LZs we were building and had control of was still increasing, we were winning, right?

Doesn’t sound like victory to you? Me either. In the Praeda Legion, we didn’t count LZs. We counted bodies. And by our reckoning if you allowed for say four or five Lilin per turned LZ, and counted the total number of LZ’s that had been lost – 69, since several had been lost and recaptured over and over – then we figured the Lilin had lost 276 individuals to our 69,000.

That sounds like defeat to me. But I’ll allow that at the rate we were losing bodies Redside, none of the politicians Earthside was particularly worried because, after all, what are 69,000 casualties against a population of 10 billion? The military analysts on the newscasts would laugh at the Lilin’s ‘asymmetrical warfare’ strategy and point to its inevitable failure. “They’re trying to break our will to fight,” the pundits would say, chuckling among themselves in panels and on talk shows. “They don’t understand humanity. They don’t understand they are just making us more determined to win.”

Funny, I didn’t feel especially determined to win. I was determined to stay alive, yet absolutely resigned to the fact I was about to die. Not quite broken, but also not quite determined to win, right?

And now you’re probably thinking about what happened there atop the mesa at Terra Margaritifer and thinking, but hey, didn’t the Lilin want to open negotiations? Even if Linus Vespasius aka Scabrous aka Termite aka Ballsack was a strange ambassador to choose. Isn’t that maybe a sign that they realized their strategy wasn’t working and they might be fighting a losing battle?

Yeah, nah.

Which leads us to the Battle of Isidis Planetia. But not the one you know. Another piece of the puzzle, another clue to who the Lilin are, what they want, and what comes next.

Anker 4

Anker 5

Isidis Planetia

What you heard about Isidis Planetia, if you heard about it at all, was probably this. I’m quoting from an official government newscast:

The Battle of Isidis Planetia was a minor action in the Red War, notable more for the regrettably high number of casualties than for its strategic importance.

That’s it, right? A single sentence, if it gets mentioned at all.

Well, let me tell you this. Isidis Planetia was where my journey to enlightenment really began. Sure, you could say it began Earthside, with Antonia. Or Redside, with Livia, first in Voeykov, and then seeing her as her true self on the mesa at Margaritifer Terra. Before, and after Daedalus drilled a 10,000 degree hole in her.

I thought about that a lot in the days afterward, in the shit pit. Like, why he did it. He said he did it for us, that he deliberately and with forethought traded the lives of the men and women at the foot of the mesa in the minefield below, for our own. His crew. He’d been warned by the Legate that we were going to be placed before a court martial, for our incompetence out on the plains of the Margaritifer Chaos. So it was us or them. Or, us minus Fatfoot, versus them. Fatfoot? He was collateral damage. But would he not have traded his life in order to save the four of us if we’d asked him? Of course he would have.

I seriously bloody doubted that.

So I was giving a lot of side-eye to Daedalus after they hauled us out of the shit pit and assigned us to a new cohort. The Legion Praeda was a total cluster at that point, with the current crop of Primus Pilae all jockeying to be promoted to the suddenly vacant position of Legate. Even though none of them stood a chance because everyone knew – at least every one of us knew – they would never appoint another criminal to command a Legion of criminals. Lunatics and asylums, right? Of course the new Legate had to come from outside, and she did.

Her name was Gaius Avidius Hersilia and she was awesome. You didn’t expect me to say that, did you? You expected me to say she was a sadistic bitch. Well, yes, she was that. But that didn’t make her less than awesome. Have you read the stories of Boudica, Queen of the British Icini during the Roman Empire? That girl who had wild red hair, always appeared at the front of her troops in battle, and kicked Nero’s ass so badly he was close to surrendering all of Britain to her? That was our Hersilia: Boudica reborn. She didn’t just order us into battle at Isidis Planetia, she led the charge. I personally heard her say (or Daedalus did, which is close enough) “I don’t care how deep the fucking hole goes, wake me when we hit bottom.” We were all on death row anyway, but if I was ever going to lay down my life for someone, it would have been that crazy red-haired sadistic bitch.

Why do I say sadist? Well, let’s just say a Legate comes into a penal Legion with a set of expectations. Preconceptions if you like. First, that we are terminally demotivated and think of nothing except how to get out of performing our duties. Harsh, though true, I will give her that. Another? That we are not competent soldiers and therefore need to be trained, drilled and ‘disciplined’ to within a millimeter of our lives.

That one is not true. I was a hell-good Decurio. The fact I fell in love and went AWOL and was caught and sentenced to a penal legion has nothing to do with my soldiering abilities. I would say the same of Ostrich, Tiny and Daedalus, having seen them in battle now. I have no idea what kind of brain fart got them here, and I would never ask, but it wasn’t a lack of soldierly competence or discipline.

OK, maybe a lack of discipline. None of us actually believed that the ability to scrub a latrine clean with a toothbrush made you a better legionnaire. And no, we weren’t so fussed about turning up for roll call if a few of us could sleep longer because a couple guys shouted ‘here!’ when we weren’t. The whole ‘consequences’ thing was admittedly kind of lost on men and women who had been sentenced to death and sent to the legion with the lowest survival rate on The Red.

But sadism was apparently something that came with the Legate job description, so we rolled with it. Hersilia’s thing? Every Legate had their own special foible, a thing they came up with which was peculiar to them. Earthside it might have been tying a hastati to an ant nest and smearing them with honey. Or pushing them underwater with only a straw to breathe through, which was too narrow to give you enough air to live, but just wide enough to think if you sucked harder, you might just make it.

The Red had no ants, and no water. What it had though, was freezing cold wind. So a hastati caught in bed after reveille, who didn’t snap a salute at a passing officer, who took the name of the Legate in vain, they got ‘cairned’. Cairning was Hersilia’s invention, and I even heard her brag about it once.

“So what we do in the Praeda Legion in place of the usual disciplinary actions, which do not suffice…” she told an Earthside Senator once, “… is we send the offender outside wearing only a thermal skin, not a suit …”

“Not even a breather?” the Senator asked, shocked.

“Well, yes, a breather, or they’d die immediately,” Hersilia said as though it was a stupid question. “No, we send them out with skins, and a breather, to the Plain of Cairns.”

“I’m not familiar…” the Senator admitted.

“Oh, you won’t find it on a map,” Hersilia said, flicking he hair over her shoulder. “I named it myself. It’s a small flat plain just outside the eastern perimeter at Flaugergues, strewn with small stones from a meteorite impact. The idea is, that the offender has to go out there, wearing only thermals, and build a cairn of stones.”

“That doesn’t sound too onerous,” the Senator said. “I mean, yes, they would be freezing, but a cairn of stones…”

“Oh, but there’s one more condition,” Hersilia said. “They have to find the highest cairn, and the one they build has to be higher.” She gave a throaty laugh, and I remember that laugh, because I was there, and it made my groin warm. “Of course, the first offender had it easiest. But the next, and the next?”

“Delicious,” the Senator said. “How tall is the tallest cairn now?”

Hersilia had no idea, and needed to call a Tessarius to her to get an update. “A meter ninety. Taller than most men,” she said proudly.

“How many die trying to complete this challenge?” the Senator asked.

She waved a hand like she was swatting a fly. “Fewer than you might think. More than I would like.” She picked a biscuit crumb off her robe. “I will have to think of a new punishment soon, if the attrition rate continues to climb.”

I never got cairned myself. But I know four guys who did and only three made it back. I don’t know if you can extrapolate that, but a death rate of one in four for gross disciplinary offenses seemed pretty okay to us. In fact, it left quite a lot of room to maneuver. And Hersilia wasn’t a stupid sadist. She was having trouble filling the ranks of hastati as it was, so she didn’t want to waste too much meat out on the Cairn of Stones.

I’m rambling, aren’t I? That happens to a man dealing with the trauma I’ve been through. With the burden of truth I bear. Ah, where was I? Oh hell, yeah.

Isidis Planetia.

Let’s start with what you know, which is, excuse the language, fark all.

Isidis Planitia is a plain located within a giant impact basin on Mars, situated partly in the Syrtis Major quadrangle and partly in the Amenthes quadrangle. At approximately 1,500 km (930 mi) in diameter, it is the third-largest obvious impact structure on the planet, after the Hellas and Argyre basins. Isidis was likely the last major basin to be formed on Mars, having formed approximately 3.9 billion years ago during the Noachian period. Due to dust coverage, it typically appears bright in telescopic views, and was mapped as a classical albedo feature, Isidis Regio, visible by telescope in the pre-spacecraft era.

Bored now? Sorry, I am too, but there are actually people that care about these kind of things, thank God, or none of us would be alive. But I’m not one of those and, as you are still reading, I’m guessing, neither are you. So let me get to the important part, which is … Isidis Planitia wasn’t what it seemed. To you it’s a big crater 1,000 miles wide, to me, it’s a gateway to the whole cowardly, depraved, depressing civilization (generous word) of the Lilin. Sorry, I’m still there. Can’t leave it, it annoys me so much, given what came after, which, yes, I will also tell you. Perhaps, if I live long enough.

Which is highly unlikely. Damn, I’m being negative again.

Why? Because at this point in the story, Daedalus, me and the crew of our MCV were about to crawl into the anus of the planet and give it a colonoscopy.

Sorry, that was rude. It’s just... I think of the battle of Isidis Planetia and I get all worked up because there were so many damn lies. First lie, our mission briefing. Yes, we got a mission briefing, even us lowly MCV crews. More than the hastati in the meat locker got, less than a Decurio.

Our mission briefing for the action at Isidis Planetia was delivered by the Centurion leading our cohort and went like this.

“Alright you idiots, listen up. The LZ at Isidis Planetia has gone dark. It was turned about a month ago by the Lilin and has been a pain in the ass since then, Lilin using it to send out raids while they still had meat, and lately just racking up a body count with automated defenses for as long as they had ordnance.” The centurion was a guy in his thirties, which was pretty impressive, given the average lifespan in the Praeda. Of course, he might have just joined from Voeykov. “Attacks died down, a scout unit was sent in a week ago and they reported they got inside the perimeter but we haven’t heard anything since. But satellites show no activity at the base, at all.”

He pointed at Daedalus, then a few other MCV commanders. “Cot 1 is going in to find out what the hell happened to our scouts. You’ll each have a belly full of meat. Get inside that perimeter, find out what is happening inside Isidis Planetia LZ and get a message out again if you can. Die well.”

Sir, yes sir! We all replied.

Daedalus had another take on the brief. “Alright, so they flew a bunch of scouts in by drone, and they got wasted. But they managed to get inside the perimeter, so it looks like the perimeter defenses are down. Now we’re swarming the LZ with meat and hoping a few hastati survive long enough to tell them what the hell is going on in there. We’re delivering a hundred fresh bodies for the Lilin grinder. So this crew’s sole purpose is to get in, throw the meat at the grinder and get the hell out again, with at least myself and as many of you who don’t screw up, alive. Questions?”

I was already in love with Lucretia – Termite I’ll call her – since she had a way of taking everything Daedalus said and turning it on its head with a few dumb questions. Thing is, I knew she knew they weren’t dumb, but she knew I knew that and she would give me a little smile to say, ‘just roll with this, alright?’, so I did.

“Question, Decanus?” she raised her hand.

“No questions, Termite,” he said. “Yours is not to question why, yours is but to die.”

She wasn’t put off. “There are four MCVs in the Cot. Are we going in first or last?”

Daedalus grimaced. “You’ll learn about this crew. First lesson. Command is of the opinion we are the root cause of everything that is wrong with this Legion, so we’re going in first. SITFU.”

She frowned. “SITFU?”

“Suck it the freak up,” I told her.

She raised her hand again. “Consider it sucked, Decanus. What is the strategy for getting us out of this alive?”

Daedalus looked at her like she was insane. Which, to be honest, we all were, but he gave her an extra heavy dose of doubt. “Assume that we won’t,” he told her. “And you’ll do fine.”

She looked at me, gave me the smile that was not there, and I wanted to marry her.

I know. When you are in life or death situations, which we always were, you add more meaning to things than are really there. A curse is a portent. A glance is a promise. A smile that isn’t a smile is …

She wanted to marry me. I could feel that. That not-smile smile was saying to me “I see you Ballsack who calls himself Scabrous whose real name is not Linus. I know we haven’t known each other very long, and we probably won’t live long enough to consummate this new love affair, but I want you. If there is ever a moment when we are not being punished, tortured, starved or shot at, I will make crazy wild love with you and after you are dead, I promise you, I will survive and I will raise our child (or children, since twins run in your family) and I will call them Linus and Linea, and I will tell them stories of what a hero you were, and how you sacrificed your life for me, for them, and for the entire human race, never thinking of yourself. And their children will know your name, and their children’s children and…”

No, I am not pathetic. I am human. And that train of thought kept me going all the way to the LZ. Where we found yet another scene of death and carnage but that isn’t the interesting part. We also found the Lilin's butthole.

That’s what Ostrich called it.

“It looks like a goddam puckered up butthole,” Ostrich said. I had to give her that one. Our MCV was one of the first sent in to the LZ and after we finished crunching across frozen bodies we came to the groundworks at the periphery of the camp that the Lilin had apparently been trying to hide, and then defend.

A hole in the surface of the planet that had been covered up by a ten meter thick crust of sand and debris, but which the residents of the LZ had uncovered, probably by accident since it lay under the site of a planned latrine. Which made you wonder how many of the great discoveries of mankind were made by a person wandering into the wilderness looking for a place to shit, really. Like coffee. Who the hell had thought to themselves okay, here is a berry, I shall pick it, eat the flesh, ferment the bitter, inedible core and roast it, then crush and pour boiling water over it and it shall become the most popular beverage in human history.

Someone sitting next to a coffee bean bush taking a shit, I promise you.

The excavators working on the latrine for LZ Isidis Planetia struck an unknown metal. They couldn’t dig through it, so they dug around it. The unknown metal was a disc about ten miles in diameter. So they dug around that. It fell into the hole below, along with six of the crews doing the digging.

They died well, since they uncovered the Isidis Planetia anomaly, which you never heard about because if the planetary government told you, you and everyone Earthside would lose your tiny minds. What’s so mind blowing about it?

Unlike a butthole, it has no bottom.

Sorry, that joke was pathetic. I’m doing my best to stay sane here and one way I do it, is inappropriate humor. I know I might come across as patronizing. Don’t mean to. It’s just I know that not a single person in the human universe has been through what I’ve been through – you included – so I don’t want to assume anything, including whether or not you know what was so amazing about the bottomless hole at the edge of the Isidis Planetia LZ.

Because it wasn’t the bottom-less-ness.

It was the fact that Legate Hersilia sent three scout MCVs into the black vastness of that hole, and none came back. Until she sent us. Because we went in, and we came out again.

But not all of us, and we were not the same.

The second lie we were told at Isidis Planetia was this.

“They are probably still alive.”

Our Decurio said that, when Daedalus asked him what happened to the crews who went into the butthole before us.

“Then, with respect, why the hell have they not reported back?” Daedalus asked, quite reasonably.

The Decurio lost it at that point and I don’t blame him. He had his orders. His orders were to send us to certain death by repeating the error which had already been committed twice previously, just blindly sending another scout team into the Red’s anus and expecting a different result. He was a convict like the rest of us, just a lower degree of stupid which had allowed him to retain some kind of rank, like Daedalus. And in his world view, sending us to an apparently quick death was a mercy, so why were we even asking questions?

But Daedalus, I was learning, really believed he was going to make it off the Red and Earthside again. The rest of us, we went through the motions of trying to survive, but he really believed he was going to. Was he a narcissist, sociopath, delusional, or all three. Thinking of how casually he had sacrificed Fatfoot and half the Legion, I vote the latter.

“They have not reported back, Decanus…” the man said, placing a lot of emphasis on that last syllable. “…because they are now in paradise, receiving blow jobs and, or, cunnilingus from a heavenly host whose entire purpose is ensure their eternal happiness.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound too bad,” Tiny said, nudging me.

The Decurio continued. “So mount up, get your machine moving down the ramp into that black hole and keep transmitting until you either reach said paradise, or can transmit no more.”

We mounted up. There was still a certain inverse privilege attached to being the only unit that had survived the Massacre at the Margaritifer Mesa, and it guaranteed us a place at the front of any queue involving imminent death. So, I could only imagine what the MCV crews ahead of us had done.

“Glorious, good-looking and reasonably competent Crew,” Daedalus proclaimed graciously as he crunched our MCV turbines into gear and the fans lifted our skirts. “We are about to boldly go where few other crews have gone before. But they were idiots, all. Whatever fate befell them, unless it was, you know, desirable, was their own fault. I however, have complete faith in this crew – except for Termite, who has yet to prove himself…”

“Uh, I identify as a woman,” Termite said from down in the payload bay. Whatever was about to happen, it was going to require the minimum of effort from her, since we had no payload in the payload bay.

“And I care, dear Termite,” Daedalus said to her with continued graciousness. “As I was saying, I have faith in most of you, and whatever happens to us in the next few weeks, days, or minutes, I want you to know that.”

Tiny was booting up his sensors and stopped what he was doing, giving me a thumbs up. It was a lovely gesture and made me entirely miserable.

Ostrich was running through the litany of things that were wrong with our vehicle, and barely paused for Daedalus’ declaration of love. “… joints overheating, rear laser defenses defunct and we can only put up three of ten anti-projectile drones,” Ostrich finished saying.

Daedalus, sitting in his perch in the command cupola above and behind us had been listening to his own voice, and not to Ostrich. “Engineer, commander, summarize please.”

“Anything attacks us, we’re dead,” Ostrich told him.

“All systems nominal then,” Daedalus declared with deceptive cheer. “Moving out.”

We lifted off the red sand and slid towards the dark maw of the anomaly.

There was a ramp marked with pathetically innocuous traffic cones, and Daedalus steered us toward it.

Termite did her thing, asking the obvious. Down in the payload bay, she had a wonderful head high, five person wide screen showing her a near-3D image of our impending doom. “Uh, Decanus? Seeing as every other unit entered the anomaly though this ramp, maybe we shouldn’t?”

Surprisingly, Daedalus didn’t mock her, he dragged the MCV to a halt. “Good point, Termite. Why did none of you others say the same?”

I kept quiet. My reasons were personal, since they involved fantasies of self harm.

“I was going to,” Tiny said. “But you never listen.”

“That changes today,” Daedalus announced. “Suggestions? Options?”

Termite had already been thinking about it, that became clear. “The ramp is obviously a death trap. The most logical approach is therefore to take the least logical approach,” she said.

“Which is?” Daedalus asked.

“The opposite. The other two MCVs no doubt made cautious approaches at low velocity, via the ramp. I propose we dive off other edge, going immediately vertical, at high velocity.” She said. The way she said it, it made so much sense. But you have to remember I had already decided I was in love with her.

Perhaps Daedalus had begun falling in love with her too. The thought of that makes me inappropriately jealous as I write this, but there you are. We are full of fallibility, we humans. In any case, he shoved his throttles forward and steered us around the edge of the anomaly to the opposite rim, ignoring the high pitched queries from our Decurio.

When we reached the far side of the anomaly, he balanced us on the edge. “Tiny? Last words?”

“I want to go home,” Tiny said, staring into the abyss.

“Ostrich?”

“I used to fantasize about my aunt.”

“Not what I expected, but uh … I look forward to meeting her one day,” Daedalus said. “Ballsack? Something more pithy? ”This is insane,” I said. “This entire war is…”

“Well said!” Daedalus yelled. “Alright crew, ‘die well’…”

“I want to say something!” Termite said, from the payload bay.

“You have not yet earned the right to last words, nameless one,” Daedalus declared, shoving his throttles forward. “Now, strap in everyone, and clench!”

Our drop into bottomless oblivion was a disappointment. We hung. Or it seemed like it. I think we fell, like maybe a hundred meters. But then we hung there, nose down, harness straps biting into our chest.

“Anticlimax,” Tiny said. “What now?”

Daedalus spun the turbines up, and racked them down again. “I’m getting no traction, it’s like…”

“… like we’re in some kind of spiderweb,” Ostrich said. “Do you suppose…”

“What?” I asked, terrified. “Suppose what?!”

“Suppose we’re hanging here like flies in a web, and the other MCVs are on the other side of the pit, and they’re just hanging there too, and we’re all just waiting for this insanely huge Lilin spider thing to come up out of the hole and spin us into cocoons and then then drag us down into its lair to become food for its hatchlings… or something?"

“Tiny,” Daedalus said from above and behind us. “You may shoot the engineer called Ostrich if you can unstrap and reach a weapon.”

“Yes, Decanus,” Tiny said, and started unstrapping.

“Tiny! It was a joke!” Ostrich yelled. “Dammit am I the only one thinks this is kind of funny?”

“Yes,” I told her. I was hanging from my harness, face planted against a screen that showed nothing but endless miles of oblivion beneath me. I wasn’t seeing the funny side.

“We’re moving, idiots,” came the voice from the payload bay. “Don’t look at your screens, look at your watches.”

As we were hanging in nothingness, looking at our watches, a different reality was unfolding at LZ Isidis Planetia. We should have known, really. Isidis Planetia, right?

No? The Plains of Isis! It was like the name was buried in our genetic code, waiting for someone at the other end of telescope to map the surface of the Red, see the huge crater there and think to themselves, Isis! Of course, the goddess of Resurrection, I must name this place after her.

Except, to be resurrected, you first had to die. Which everyone on the lip of the anomaly was busy doing. It was another trap of course, the Lilin being grand masters of the ambush. The dead bodies around the LZ were not dead at all. A more competent Legate than Hersilia would have sent in scouts to check the bodies before we rolled over them, but she was a builder of cairns, not a checker of corpses.

As the crew of the doomed ship Daedalus tipped into the abyss, the dead who were not dead rose to attack the cohort poised around the edge of the anomaly. They were wearing breathers, and carrying anti armor weapons.

The slaughter lasted only minutes. A hastati who survived it by crawling into the escape pod of a burning MCV and blasting into low orbit said that after the attack, they saw the attackers gather on the edge of the anomaly and throw themselves in behind us.

We never saw them.

Termite was right, we were stationary in the blackness, but the digits on our time pieces were flying. Backwards! Don’t ask me about the physics of that. It's something about relative velocities, doppler effects, Minkowski equations and the speed of light. Forget everything you’ve been told about time dilation. What I know is for every minute we were in the anomaly we got younger.

Not like, years younger. Actual minutes younger. Measurable, visible minutes. We decided we fell for nearly an hour, so by the time we stopped falling, judged by the fact that our watch displays stopped spinning and the blackness around us went gray, we were an hour younger than we had been, falling into the anomaly.

Which, unfortunately, only made us more likely to die younger.

The MCV dropped onto a ramp just like the one we had avoided on the lip of the anomaly above. Daedalus already had the throttles at idle, and killed the turbines.

“Not my fault!” Termite yelled, before any of us could yell at her.

“Hey, we are still alive,” Daedalus said, carefully. “If this suspended-in-grey-nothingness shit is life.”

“It beats the shit pit,” Tiny observed.

“That it does, Sensor Operator,” Daedalus acknowledged. “What are your sensors sensing?”

Tiny bent to his instruments. “Well, Decanus, I can report that according to our sensors we have three hundred sixty degrees of nothing around us. And that includes ground. So I can’t tell you what is holding us up, only that it isn’t, you know, there.”

“Thankyou Tiny. Engineer Ostrich, your report please.”

“Decanus, Engineer Ostrich is pleased to report that all systems are one hundred percent nominal, except for those which were defunct before our descent, and these are still defunct, so there’s that,” Ostrich reported.

We hadn’t dropped into the anomaly in the company of any tanks so I didn’t expect Daedalus to ask for a report from me. He didn’t. “Loadmaster Termite,” Daedalus said imperiously. “Put on a breather and drop the payload bay door if you please.”

Opening the payload bay door would expose our lower deck to whatever atmosphere or vacuum or neurobiological hellscape was outside, but we were protected in the cockpit, so the risk belonged entirely to Termite. She was equal to the command. “I respectfully refuse, Decanus,” she said.

“Repeat please,” Daedalus said, confounded.

“Decanus, we could be floating in a spatial vacuum, meaning the temperature outside is zero Kelvin. What are the sensors showing?” Termite asked. Very reasonably, I thought.

“Tiny?”

Tiny bent to his display. “Twenty three Celsius.”

“Very pleasant,” Daedalus decided. “Put on your breather and crack the damned door.”

We sat in our nice environmentally contained capsule and waited for Termite to die. We could all watch on the internal cameras. She donned her breather, and a thermal suit which I knew from personal experience would protect her from a hostile environment for about ten minutes. Then she cracked the payload bay door.

I mean, afterward, it occurred to me that we could have invited her into the cockpit and opened the bay door remotely, and I would have, if I had thought of it. But I didn’t.

“OH MY GOD!” she screamed as the door dropped open, falling to the floor, clawing at her breather. “HELP! PLEASE HELP ME!”

Tiny jumped from his seat, then sat down again. What the hell could he do? Ostrich just stared at her monitor, mouth open.

I … I sympathized with her.

Termite stood up. “Just shitting you,” she said. “Like you even care.”

“Not funny, gregarious,” Daedalus told her. “Do a circuit around the MCV and report.”

Anker 6

The quick ones among you have noticed I referred to the Battle of Isidis Planetia. But that was no battle. Not really. It was a massacre.

Three hundred and thirty souls died that day though the only one they ever mention is that red haired cairn building cow Hersilia.

It could have been three hundred and thirty one, so now you’re wondering which of our scrofulous crew came close to death.

Well, obviously it wasn’t me. Yet. These diaries will be published after I’m gone, so you won’t know until suddenly this story stops, right? But no, I didn’t die at Isidis Planetia or I couldn’t have known about the battle of Terra Sabea right? Now you’re thinking, wait, what happens after Terra Sabea?!

You tell me, reader. Because I sure as shit don’t know.

What? Where were we?

The anomaly. Our watches were still going backwards.

Termite did a tour around the MCV. It’s funny how I only thought of her as Termite already. What was her Legion name? Lucia? No, Lucretia. That was it. And her real name? Her Redside nickname before she joined our crew was … Blindside. Yeah I had that much. Her real name, I had never asked. I had no idea. I was going to marry her and I didn’t even know what people called her Earthside. Did she have people Earthside? A mother, a father? Brothers, sisters? She looked liked she be the kind of girl would have a big family. Lots of sisters watching out for her, brothers you’d be afraid of. She had big lips and stubble that spoke of black curly hair, and wide hips. She reminded me of my beautiful, faithless, treacherous Antonia. Which only made me love her more.

I wanted those lips to speak my name in gasps and I wanted to bury my nose in that hair and I wanted those hips to straddle mine. I wanted to give her children. Only if she wanted them of course. A life of togetherness without children would also be fine. Preferably before I died, since the likelihood of it happening after was kind of minimal. And before you ask, no. I didn’t get those feelings looking at Daedalus, Tiny or Ostrich.

OK, maybe Ostrich. But Ostrich was … no that’s private. Not my place to tell you. There's a reason sometimes I call Ostrich him, and sometimes her.

Termite appeared back on the viewscreen from the payload bay, broken smile breaking my heart. “Loadmaster Termite reporting,” she said, looking outside and back again. “I walked all around. There’s eff-all out there.” She took off her breather. “And another thing. Atmosphere and gravity Earth normal. Which should blow your minds.”

We getting younger by the minute, so definitely not wiser.

Then the universe inverted.

I say inverted, and I know that’s not actually intuitive. So stay with me here. The way I understood the universe, my universe, was this.

I was human.

The Lilin were … not.

Humans had evolved Earthside and we had colonized The Red. For thirty years it was going pretty well, until it wasn’t. The Lilin appeared Redside and started killing us.

That sucked. So we tried killing them back. That kind of worked, kind of didn’t, but we were expanding across The Red and convinced ourselves that meant we were winning.

You know now that’s bullshit, but back then, we didn’t. We didn’t.

So turn that upside down. Or if that’s too hard, let me do it for you.

I wasn’t human. We weren’t.

The Lilin were … are.

Humans didn’t evolve Earthside and we didn’t colonize The Red. For thirty years it wasn’t going well at all - we were hurtling towards our own doom.

The Lilin weren’t fighting us. They were fighting their own war. We were collateral.

Okay, I confused you totally now. I’m sorry. The battle of Isidis Planetia. The real one, didn’t involve guns.

“Heat signatures!” Tiny shouted. He hadn’t stopped scanning his sensor screens and thank the Gods for that.

“Where away?” Daedalus yelled. “Ostrich, weapons up!”

The MCV was armed with pulse cannons. They were only intended for close in defense, but ‘close’ was a flexible concept to an engineer like Ostrich. He had modified the weapons to engage targets out to five clicks, nearly five times the range their designers had intended.

“Bearing two twenty, plane zero, range two clicks, I have two contacts,” Tiny said. The contacts were on our left rear side, on the same level or ‘plane’ as us. “Approaching at walking speed.”

“Mechanical or organic?” Daedalus asked.

“Neither,” Tiny said.

“Shit. Lilin,” Ostrich said. “Two of them. What do we do?”

Daedalus knew exactly what to do. “Termite, grab your sidearm, get out there.”

Termite spun toward the comms camera. “Get out there? And then what?”

“Hell woman, I have to teach you how to breathe while walking? Get out there, kill those mothers.”

She slammed a hand on the bulkhead beside the camera. “It occur to you Decanus, we’re down the bottom of a bottomless pit an hour into the past and going backwards, with no way to the surface? And you want me to kill the only beings could maybe tell us how to get home?”

Daedalus actually thought about that. I know he wanted to say ‘yeah, that’s what I want you to do’ but even Daedalus knew that street instinct was not the same as street smart.

“Alright, approach them and … make peace, or something,” Daedalus said. “But keep your damn gun pointed at them and shut the bay door on your way out.”

Tiny leaned over to me. “They got our whole MCV in their spiderweb, but he’s worried whether our back door is open.” Even so, he checked that the airtight hatch down to the payload bay was locked.

I watched as Termite picked up a pulse weapon, but holstered it on her hip. I had to agree with her on that. I was thinking about the scene atop the mesa at Magartifer Terra and thinking a little pulse sidearm wouldn’t have changed that outcome. Sure, Daedalus drilled a hole in Livia, but she’d already turned the whole damn LZ by that point, and we never found out what the hell she wanted to say, so it was a pyrrhic victory.

Termite had her chest cam on, and she headed out the back of the MCV, walked about twenty meters out, and waited.

“Coming right at you,” Tiny told you. “You should see them soon.”

“See them now,” Termite said. “Man and a woman.”

“No. Incubus, and Succubus,” Daedalus said. “Remember that. Every damn minute. They get close, you feel like you want to copulate with any of them, start shooting, gregarious.”

“Good copy, Decanus,” Termite said. “Wet thighs, shoot the aliens.”

She said that, and it didn’t matter my life and probably the entire planet Earth was about to end. All I heard was ‘wet thighs’.

But I forgot straight away, because the Lilin came into view on our holo screens and my universe exploded. Or, since time was still going backwards, imploded, to be accurate.

On the left, was the simulacrum of a man I didn’t recognize. Let’s call him Adam, since he was as naked as. On his right was a woman that I did recognize. She was also naked, which might be why I recognized her. She had a birthmark on her left breast, just above her nipple, right over her heart. It was dark brown against her ivory white skin and you’d call it an imperfection, unless you were in love with her.

I’d called it her ‘heart stain’; the visible mark her heart left on the skin that covered it. I’d lay my head against it, and listen to her heart beat slow after our love making, slowing from a bird like thrumming to a slow post-ecstasy drum beat.

Antonia. Which it couldn’t be. Which it was.

They stopped a good non-threatening distance from Termite, who gave them her inscrutable smile. “Hello, what do you want?” Termite asked.

Antonia lifted her arm, pointing past Termite to our MCV. “Not what, dear girl. Who.”

Dear girl. Dear boy. Antonia used to say that. It was, is - will be – her. I knew it.

Termite turned around. “Uh, Decanus, not sure what is going on here, they appear to …”

“It’s me,” I said, standing. “They want me.”

“Sit, gregarious,” Daedalus ordered. “That makes no sense.” He was leaning down from his seat, glaring at me.

I tapped the screen, and the woman that Termite’s chest camera showed in her full and natural glory. “That’s the woman who I deserted for. She’s the reason I am here,” I said. “That’s Antonia.”

It starts and ends with Antonia. I told you that. This isn’t the end yet, if that’s what you’re thinking. Time is strange like that. There was Antonia before, in the middle and after. This was ‘in the middle’.

“I don’t know what you think you are seeing, gregarious,” Daedalus said gruffly. “But I’m seeing a damned succubus. You go out there, she’ll milk you dry and turn you. I’ll shoot you before I let that happen.”

“She already did,” I told him. “Or she will. I’m a little confused on timelines right now,” I admitted.

Daedalus pulled his sidearm from the seat beside him. “I’m serious Ballsack. I have yet to develop any sort of attachment to you, so you better believe I will not hesitate to shoot you.”

Tiny gave me a worried glance. “He really won’t,” he said. “He means it.”

Termite had brought her pistol up and had it pointed at the woman, which was kind of interesting. Not sure what that said about her. “Aright, we know what you want, so let’s get to the part where you offer us something.”

Antonia looked at Termite like she was seeing her for the first time. Perhaps she’d just been an obstacle to pass until that point, and the question suddenly made her worth noticing. She tilted her head, as though looking at a work of art on a wall. “Interesting. He lusts after you only because you remind him of me,” Antonia said.

I reached quickly for my throat mike. “No. I don’t. I mean, I do, but not because … I’m not. Don’t listen to her!” I said.

“Message received and not understood Ballsack,” Termite replied. “Daedalus you still want me to shoot these two?”

“Yes,” Daedalus said.

“No!” I yelled. “No. Seriously? What about the other one. The guy. Ask what he wants!” I didn’t recognize him. He had a hairless, softly muscled body, lithe and kind of sexless. Yes, he had a wiener, but it was rather … discreet. Had I seen him before? I thought not. It was almost like he’d been designed to be forgotten.

Termite trained her weapon on the man. Simulacrum of a man, if we’re being accurate, since our sensors were showing no trace of organic material. “You, do you have anything to say?”

He didn’t appear frightened. “No. We are here to take the one you call Linus.”

“Linus?” Ostrich asked, turning to Daedalus.

“Ballsack,” he said.

“Oh, right,” Ostrich said. “I forgot.”

But Termite was talking now, and not using words I particularly liked. “Alright. We give you Ball … Linus … what do we get?”

They looked at each other, like it had not occurred to them that this was a bargaining type situation. Antonia spoke. Antonia’s voice spoke. Antonia in the court, crying my name. Antonia here, speaking my name again. “Give us Linus, and we will return you to your time and place.”

“Our time and place?” Termite asked. “That would be The Red, late 21st Century, yes? Exactly where and when we left. Just so there are no misunderstandings?”

Antonia frowned at her. “Yes, of course. You have not left there yet. You are there still.”

“Well excuse me for not realizing that,” Termite said, getting huffy. “It’s a deal.”

“No it isn’t!” I said. “I am not going to…”

Daedalus waved his pistol at me. “Yeah, you are. Sorry Ballsack. I’m pretty sure I might have developed some kind of attachment to you if you’d lived a little longer, but Termite is right. It’s you, or this crew, so that means it’s you.” He shrugged. “Hasta la juego, jeffe.”

“Lived longer? I’m still right here, right now!” I protested. “I’m still alive.”

“Technically not,” Ostrich said. “If time is going backwards, you’re already dead somehwere in the unreachable future and we’re arguing about nothing because you know, fate.”

“That makes no sense!” I yelled at them, but Daedalus waved his pistol at me and what was I supposed to do? I lifted the cockpit hatch, climbed down into the payload bay, and then walked out into the nothingness of the anomaly.

Was I really about to walk away with my naked lover? To where? And why did it feel so damn wrong? I felt like yelling some more at Daedalus, but as I stepped outside the MCV, I lost comms.

I stopped beside Termite. “I just lost comms to the MCV.”

“Me too,” she said. “They’ve cut us off. Let’s get this done.”

“This is goodbye, I guess,” I told her.

“I guess,” she shrugged. No doubt she was torn inside from the gut wrenching pain of being forced to betray the future father of her twins, but she did a brave job of not showing it.

But I wasn’t going to go quietly. I snatched the gun from her hand and pointed it at Antonia-not-Antonia.

“Why me!?” I asked her. It was meant to sound like a command, as in ‘Tell me why me or I will shoot you’, but it actually came out a little whiny.

Neither of them looked particularly worried by my erratically waving pistol. “You already know why, Linus,” Antonia said. “Or rather, you did. We are here to help you reach that previous understanding.”

“If you wanted me, why did you not take me when we were together?” I asked.

She frowned, as though that was obvious. “There were those who did not think you were possible, or ever will be. I had to be sure.”

I thought of our days of love making. “You were very thorough about it. Or will be.”

“It will not be unpleasant,” she smiled. “But then, just as I am sure, your government takes you from me. That will be … unexpected. So we need to contrive opportunities to get you back. Like this.”

Termite had taken a step behind me, putting me between the Lilin and herself, but also putting her where she could whisper in my ear. “Can we hurry this up, I can feel my breasts and buttocks getting firmer and I’d like to be done here before I regress to a teen.”

I tuned her out. "What about Livia? In the cage. And on Margaritifer Terra. Was she sounding me out too?"

They looked at each other. It wasn't just a glance. They locked eyes. It was like they were exchanging data with each other. Or maybe I'm just reengineering that memory, given what I know now.

Antonia waved a hand in the air and a floating image of Livia's face appeared. "This individual?" she asked.

"Yes! Her. Who was she?"

"She is a reactionary."

"Was," I said. "We killed her."

"Is," Antonia insisted. "And will be. Forget her. You are safe now, come with us."

I still had one question. “Why me? Who am I to you?”

Adam spoke this time, frowning. “But you know this. You are The Code Bearer. Wielder of the Power of Future Ancestors. Leader of The Way. The Transitioned. Child of the Dawn…”

Antonia put a hand on his arm to stop him, or he would probably have kept going. "You see, it's as I told you. He does not know." She turned back to me, and her eyes softened. “You will come to understand, as once you did. It is time to come home, Linus Vespasius.”

“Yeah, no. We need to talk about this,” Termite said, grabbing me by the collar of my thermal skins and pulling me backwards, careful to keep me and the pistol between her and the two Lilin.

When we got far enough back they probably couldn’t couldn’t hear us, she put her mouth to my ear. Her breath was a sweet kind of foul, which was normal in the Praeda Legion, given our diet and lack of dental care.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I have no idea what they’re raving about! I swear.”

“Forget that,” she said. “Tell me about what you said when you were back in the MCV.”

“What I said?”

“That speech before you came out here, the whole ‘I do, don’t, do’ care for her, thing,” she said.

“Well, kind of irrelevant now that you are trading me for your freedom,” I pointed out.

“No. I was just playing for time. Daedalus gave you up, not me. Tell me what you meant.”

She was standing behind me, chest to my back. Since I was a little taller, I could feel the warm curve of her stomach against my buttocks. “I meant… you know… oh come on, this is stupid,” I said. The two Lilin were looking at us like we were acquarium animals. Antonia. The Antonia I once, would, couldn’t possibly know, was standing there again - radiating love. “Forget it.”

She pulled me even tighter, speaking fast and low. “No, it isn’t stupid Linus. You don’t realize it yet, but you need a friend if you are going to survive this murderous crew. And so do I. Are you that friend, Linus?”

Well, that was unexpected. There I was worried about the two murderous aliens in front of us, and she was thinking about the three murderous humans behind us. Maybe she was right to. “Yes,” I told her, fervently. “Yes, definitely. I am.”

She held me there for what felt like an eternity as she made up her mind about something, but the way time was moving around, it was probably just a second or two. “Alright then,” she said. “Follow my lead.” She grabbed the pistol from me and put it to my head.

“You send us back to our time or place, or I kill him,” she yelled at the Lilin.

“Termite! For effsake!” I protested.

The man I thought of as Adam looked at Antonia, then back at us. “That makes no sense. If you kill him, none of us get what we want.”

“Maybe, but I don’t trust you, and he is my only way out of here,” Termite said. “You want him. I want to get back to The Red. So here’s how it works. I take him with me, you send us back to the Red, same time, same place, and after that, you can come and get him at your leisure.”

Antonia blinked slowly. Damn it, I could smell the musk of her body from meters away. Stay! My body screamed. My mind asked whether I was goddamn crazy. “If that is how it must be,” Antonia said.

“It is. It must,” Termite said. She pulled at the back of my thermals. “OK you, back up. Into the meat locker with me.”

“Stop,” Antonia said.

She took a step forward, and Termite pressed the barrel of the gun harder against my head. “Not another step, bitch,” she said.

“Do you love him?” Antonia asked her. “Because I do. You are taking him from me.” She fixed her gaze on me. “Linus? I’m sorry. Ask her to let you stay. I will explain everything.” Her voice was like a bow, and I was the violin.

Every sex cell in my body was telling me to stay. I had a lot of those apparently, and they were winning. I had neurons too, but they were being drowned in hormones at that point and not helping the situation.

Termite put a strong arm around my neck and started dragging me backwards, pistol digging into my temple. “Into the MCV, Ballsack.”

Would she really have shot me right there, right then? I believe so. She didn’t trust for a minute the Lilin were going to honor their promise anyway.

Antonia didn’t give up. “Linus, please!” she called out. “This wastes time we won’t have.” Whatever that meant.

Termite bundled me into the meat locker and stood on the ramp, looking outward into the gray mist. “You send us back now, or I shoot him. That’s the deal, got it?!”

When we got back into the MCV, our comms were restored, and Daedaelus’ gruff voice was loud in our earpieces. “What the hell are you two playing at?!”

“I just did a deal with the devil,” Termite told him. “They’re going to send us back. Strap in.” She cut the comms link.

Termite holstered her weapon and pointed me to a grunt rack. “Sit down and buckle up,” she said. “Look at your watch.”

I did as I was told, then frowned. “Why?”

“If they live up to their word, time should start moving forward again, right?”

Oh right, I thought. I stared at my watch, but nothing happened. Then it did. The digits started spinning forward. The grayness turned to black and then to reddish light. Maybe we passed out. I definitely did, at least.

When I woke, lifting my chin from my chest, Termite was at the outside camera screen, looking out the back of the MCV. “Welcome back. We’re on the surface,” she said.

“Where?” I asked, though the red light from the view screen bathing the inside of the payload bay told me the answer to that.

“Wrong question,” Termite said. She stepped aside, showing me the view on screen. “Question is when. And the answer is, too late to do anything.”

I unbuckled and went to stand beside her. The ground behind our MCV was littered with destroyed MCVs and frozen bodies. We had only been gone for what … five minutes? Ten? Subjective time. I could tell from the frozen state of the bodies of the screen they had been exposed for hours. An entire battle had been fought and lost in the time we had been inside the anomaly.

That’s the battle you read about. But not the battle I was referring to. The Battle of Isidis Planetia? That was the one waged inside me, the one where I fought to stay with Antonia and surrendered to Termite.

I backed up and slumped into my seat, feeling defeated, not victorious. Yes, we were alive, all of us. Maybe if I’d gone with Antonia, the others would have been killed. But maybe, if I’d stayed, I’d have found answers right there and then. Answers to what, you ask?

Who was Antonia? That was an obvious one.

Was that creature her? A more complex one.

What did she want with me? Another obvious one.

Livia, still alive? How, where? And who?

Finally, who the hell was I? Not such an easy one. I thought I knew. In all my misery I had at least a pretty good idea of who I was, despite the many names I had been visited with since arriving on The Red. Adam called me Code Bearer, Wielder of the Power of the Ancestors, Leader of The Way, Hidden One, Child of the Dawn. Suddenly, I had no idea who I was.

Is that enough questions for you? It was enough for me, and I no answers to any of them. I guess I’d zoned out thinking about all that stuff. I looked up and Termite was standing in front of me, shaking my shoulders.

“What?” I asked, annoyed.

“You with me, Ballsack?”

“My name is Linus,” I told her. For now, at least. On The Red, I am Linus. Not Scabrous. Not Ballsack.

“Alright, Linus,” Termite said. “My name is Lucretia. And you and me have a pact now, you remember that?” she said, and I could see she meant it.

“Yes.”

“I have your back. You better bloody have mine,” she pointed at the deck above. “Because - Chosen One or not - those bastards up there would mulch us both and sell the juice for a flask of whisky, and if you don’t realize that yet, you need to catch the hell up.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t?” she lifted me by the collar and dragged me to one of the payload bay bulkheads, sweeping aside some thermal skins hanging there. “What do you see?”

I saw a single line scratched into the wall, on what looked like a shield.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Unit emblem,” she said. “In case you didn’t notice yet, Ostrich, Tiny and Daedalus, they’ve all got the same emblem carved into their forearms.”

I looked at it again. “What emblem?”

She laid a finger on it. “That’s a one. This is the symbol of the ‘Bloody First’, the United States First Infantry Division. I’ll bet my virginity these guys all served together Earthside, probably in the same squad.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh,” Termite said. “That means there is no ‘us’ in this crew, only ‘them’. They’ll protect each other to the death, but you, me, anyone else in this Legion, we’re expendable, you got that?”

“Fatfoot,” I said.

“Who?”

“Our last loadmaster. He didn’t have that tattoo.”

“And he’s dead, along with a few hundred others. Daedalus sacrificed him without blinking. You see where this is going?” she said. She grabbed my skull, pulled me forehead to forehead, eyes boring into mine. “Either we kill them, or they will kill us.”

I pulled away. It was a lot to process. I mean, there was the drop to nowhere, time running in several directions, Antonia appearing out of the fog, Livia not dead, the whole Child of the Dawn speech and now I was sharing a cockpit with fratricidal psychos?

“Wait,” I said. “You’re a virgin?”

She glared at me. “That’s your takeaway from this conversation?”

“Well, that, and … the Lilin think I am their Leader” I said.

She smirked. “Leader of the Way, egomaniac. Probably Leader of the Way To Be Sacrificed, I bet. Peel your skin off with laser tweezers, dismember you with a molecular saw and drink your blood while you scream for eternity. That kind of Leader.”

I hadn’t thought of that angle.

TO BE CONTINUED