“Right, after we handled the hard part. That’s our job. Handling the hard parts.”
“But you just said that this isn’t a long-term solution,” Salcido said, waving out to the funnels. “In which case the hard part is still here, which means we’ll be back. Or someone like us.”
“Yeah, funny, I remember talking about not addressing root causes a couple of weeks ago, and got shouted down with ‘who cares’ and a song about pizza.”
“It was a great song.”
“If you say so.”
“All I’m saying is that what we’re doing now is increasingly full of bullshit,” Powell said, bringing the discussion around. “If this is what we’re doing now, fine. So be it. But I’d rather be shooting aliens. I think everyone else would too.”
“She’s not wrong,” Salcido said, to me.
“No, she’s not,” Lambert agreed.
“I know,” I said.
PART FOUR
Friday.
“Root causes,” Lambert was saying. “You all kept mocking me for talking about them and now look where we are. Another colony planet. Another uprising. Except this time the planet’s already declared independence.”
The shuttle rocked on the way through Khartoum’s atmosphere. This time it was not only the four of us but my entire platoon, as it was on Rus. We weren’t doing protest suppression this time. This time we were making a surgical strike on Khartoum’s prime minister, who had declared the planet independent, encouraged mobs to occupy Colonial Union buildings, and then hidden himself, with a circle of advisors, in an undisclosed location, presumably because he knew that the Colonial Union wasn’t going to be particularly happy with him.
Indeed it wasn’t. It wasn’t happy with him, or in fact any of his party’s leadership, all of which had endorsed the independence—without, it should be noted, actually presenting it to the entire parliament for ratification.
“They learned from Franklin,” Lambert continued. “This time they knew not to give us a chance to respond first.”
“Which makes their independence illegal,” Salcido noted. He was sitting next to Lambert.
“It was always going to be illegal,” Lambert said. “By which I mean there was no possible way the Colonial Union would accept the legality of their independence. So there was no reason for them to put it up to a vote.”
“But now it’s also illegal by their own system of government.”
“No, because the prime minister had his cabinet approve a declaration of emergency powers and dissolved the current government,” Lambert said. “All legal as can be.”
“For what little good it’s going to do him,” Powell said. She was down a bit from Lambert and Salcido, on the other side of the shuttle, as was I.
“Oh, now, Ilse, he’ll be fine,” Salcido said. “He’s in an undisclosed location.”
“Which we’re on our way to right now. Another high-altitude drop and destroy.”
“We need to get Prime Minister Okada alive,” I reminded Powell.
“High-altitude drop, snatch, and then destroy,” Powell corrected.
“Which begs the question of how we know where this undisclosed location is,” Lambert said, to me.
“Okada’s had nanotransmitters in his blood since he became prime minister,” I said.
“I assume he doesn’t know that.”
“Probably not.”
“How did they get there, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“No idea,” I said. “If I had to guess, I imagine at some point or another he had a meal at the Colonial Union compound, and they were slipped to him then.”
“And we wonder why the Colonial Union isn’t looked on with great enthusiasm,” Lambert said.
Powell rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”
“You can snark at me all you want, Ilse,” Lambert said, and then disappeared as a hole in the shuttle appeared behind him and he was sucked out into Khartoum’s upper atmosphere, along with Salcido and the soldiers on either side of them. My combat suit, sensing pressure drop and shuttle damage, immediately snuck its mask over my head and started drawing oxygen out of what remained of the air in the shuttle cabin. Simultaneously as platoon leader I was patched into the shuttle’s systems, which told me what I already knew: The shuttle had been hit and was no longer in full control of its descent.
I fought down the urge to panic and focused on damage assessment. The pilot was trying to keep the shuttle from tumbling, fighting with the now damaged controls. Four soldiers out the growing hole in the side of the shuttle. Five others dead or mortally injured, another five seriously injured but alive. Fifteen uninjured and me.
The shuttle was declaring it was being tracked; whoever hit us wasn’t done.
I connected to the shuttle and authorized the shuttle doors to open. Everybody out now, I said, through the platoon BrainPal feed. My simulated voice made me sound more calm than I was.
We were all already suited up to jump out of the shuttle. We were just doing it earlier now.