Humanity's Fight

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Cherry lifted a whistle to her lips and blew it so hard her ears rang.

“Exercise over. Get in line!”

The troops shuffled slowly to their positions in the training yard. Some didn’t even seem sure of where the line was.

“MOVE IT!”

Cherry’s missing arm was itching, which was doing nothing to improve her mood. She didn’t think she’d ever seen such a bunch of useless recruits. If they weren’t dropping their weapons they were bumping into each other, and if they weren’t bumping into each other they were screwing around when they thought she wasn’t watching.

Dammit! Where was Aubriot?

His subordinate officer’s face had been a picture when Cherry had turned up unannounced that morning. Then the woman had tried to make up excuses for her CO, stuttering out some lame excuses for Aubriot’s absence during the training exercise. That had only made Cherry madder. Loyalty was a virtue but not when it extended to covering up irresponsibility.

From the corner of her eye, Cherry saw a tall figure striding toward her. The sight of Aubriot finally arriving only made her more irritated. She glared at him as he approached.

“I’ll take over, General,” he said as soon as he was within hearing distance.

Cherry waited until he was close enough for her to speak to him without the recruits overhearing her. “Where the hell have you been?” she hissed. “You should have been here two hours ago. What kind of an example do you think you’re setting?”

“Hey! I—”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Cherry pulled the whistle over her head and thrust it into Aubriot’s chest. “These men and women are a disgrace, but now I see the attitude of the person responsible for training them I’m not surprised. You’ve got one week to whip them into shape. I’ll be back to run them through a training exercise of my choosing, and if they don’t behave like something resembling soldiers, you’re discharged.”

Aubriot’s handsome features darkened. “You don’t mean that. You wouldn’t dare.”

“I wouldn’t dare?” Cherry struggled to keep control of herself. “Try me, Aubriot. Just try me. The Scythians could return any day, and when they do, we’ll be relying on these idiots for our defense. Stars help us! If this is an example of the best you can do, our military is better off without you.”

Cherry walked away before she had to take any more of Aubriot’s attitude. The man was beyond exasperating. She knew why he’d been late. Antisocial as she was, even she had heard the rumors. Aubriot was late because he’d been with some young woman, one of the latest in a long line to fall victim to his charms. He was disgusting—working his way through the female half of the colony like a bad algae sandwich.

Cherry had heard he’d been fraternizing with recruits too, though she had no evidence to prove it. His behavior in that regard was bizarre. Aubriot was the one who had written all the rules for Concordia’s defense forces, basing them on his memory of armed service regulations back on Earth. Now he was the one flouting them.

She should have given him a dishonorable discharge a year ago, when his attitude started to slip. And she would have, except for the fact that when he concentrated on his job, he really knew what he was doing. Aubriot knew stuff about military training and tactics that wasn’t in any of the colony’s data banks. He also knew how to manipulate people into doing what he wanted. In the early days, he’d been too authoritarian and overbearing, pissing off the more independently minded Gens in the defense force. But Cherry had persuaded him to tone it down, and the nature of the people he was working with had altered too. These colonists were a later generation who had not revolted against Woken and Guardian control. They were softer, more malleable, and more tolerant of being bossed around.

When he put his mind to what he was doing in Concordia’s military force, Aubriot produced excellent results. When he put his mind to it, and he wasn’t giving priority to that other part of his anatomy.

Cherry swung herself into her autocar, started the engine, and told the car her next destination. The vehicle locked its doors and pulled out of the lot. The Concordian countryside rolled past Cherry’s window as the car headed east in the direction of the site that was formerly Sidhe, the colony’s underground settlement.

Was Aubriot’s deteriorating attitude only due to the fact he was getting older, she wondered. She wasn’t sure exactly how old he was. He didn’t seem to show any signs of aging, but she guessed he had to be in his late forties or early fifties. He’d expanded his family’s already huge business empire until it was vast before sinking all his assets into funding the Nova Fortuna Project. Then the project had taken many years to complete. Kes would probably know Aubriot’s age when he left Earth. The xenobiologist was the only other living Woken who had embarked on the Nova. But since that moment, how much time had passed for the man?

Aubriot had spent a hundred and eighty-six years frozen aboard the colony ship—did people age while in cryo? Cherry had no idea. A little more than a year after Arrival, Aubriot embarked on the mission with her to the Galactic Assembly. Six more Concordian years or roughly three Earth years had gone by since their return.

But while they’d been away, time on Concordia had moved on another one hundred and six Concordian and fifty-three Earth years. How old did that make Aubriot now, or her for that matter? It was confusing.

Still, however old he was, aging didn’t justify Aubriot’s bad behavior. Whatever the reason was, it was up to him to fix it. He was a grown man. If he continued to be more of a liability than an asset to the colony, he had to go. Cherry wasn’t going to place the safety of tens of thousands of men, women, and children in his hands.

Her car arrived at the destination and parked itself. She climbed out and walked to the stairs at the side of the parking lot, stepping over the crack that ran around the lot’s outer edge. The line in the pavement was the only sign of the vast man-made cavern that lay under her feet.

She went down the long flights of stairs that led to the cavern’s entrance and passed through the security at the door.

Cherry regularly inspected Concordia’s armament depots. Everything always seemed in order when she carried out a visual inspections of each depot, but she liked to meet face-to-face with the officers in charge. People tended to be more open and honest when communicating verbally, often saying things they would not commit to writing. She perched on a camp stool and balanced an interface on her knees as she double-checked that month’s report from the officer responsible for Cerberus.

Putting aside the interface, Cherry rose and walked to the nearest missile launcher. The points of four missiles protruded from the ground and rose to the ceiling. The frames that held them upright had been sunk into the ground far below.

“General,” said a voice. “Welcome to Cerberus.”

A fresh-faced young man in uniform was approaching. Cherry squinted, peering through the dim lighting and shadows. The man was a colonel and therefore the person in charge of the depot. She didn’t recognize him. Aubriot must have reassigned the previous officer but hadn’t informed her.

“Colonel,” Cherry replied. “Please don’t call me General. Ma’am is fine, or even sir if it’s easier to remember. What’s your name?”

The officer’s stiff posture eased somewhat. “Fletcher, ma’am. I hope you’ll find everything as it should be.”

“I’m sure I will but it doesn’t hurt to check, and also to meet new staff. You didn’t write this month’s report so you must have taken up your new post recently.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve only been here two days. I received my promotion last week.”

“Right. Well, how about you take me on a tour and show me what you know about the place?”

“It’ll be a pleasure.”

Fletcher took Cherry to the pulse emitter first and explained what it was and how it operated. An entirely different construction than the ground-to-space missiles, the emitter had been built according to plans Faina, captain of the Guardians’ ship, Mistral, had dumped into the colony’s data banks before crashing her vessel into the Scythian flagship.

The silo also contained a ground-to-air missile launcher to be deployed if the Scythians made it into Concordia’s atmosphere. Stacks of missiles sat beside it.

As Fletcher led Cherry around the other armaments in the depot, her mind turned to her long day ahead on her bi-monthly visit to all the four military sites, code-named Cerberus, Minotaur, Medusa, and Hydra. Cerberus was the oldest, built in the earliest days of the colonization. Work had begun on the silo not long after Cherry had left to go to the Galactic Assembly.

Minotaur sat deep within the cliff face several kilometers from Oceanside, the second major settlement to be built. Medusa lurked beneath the mountain range that bisected the main continent, an offshoot of the extensive mines that riddled the mountains. Hydra held the title of the newest of the four. Built with the permission and help of the Fila, it lay in wait beneath the shallow waters of the continental shelf off the shores of the largest continent and original site of colonization, Lyonesse.

Hydra would eventually lose her status of most recently constructed depot. Work was underway on Chimera. The fifth silo was being constructed on Suddene, the second largest and recently colonized continent on Concordia.

At the end of his tour, Fletcher returned to the four ground-to-space missiles. Dust lay thick on their metal surfaces. Despite the dust, the silvery hue of the metal shone through. The missiles had been constructed from the search-and-destroy spiders the Scythians had sent down to kill the humans in their second attack. First to be built, they had sat there more than eighty Concordian years, awaiting the return of the Scythians.

Eighty years was a long time, and no missiles had ever been launch tested. When the moment for their deployment came, would they work?