Steve swallowed, understanding — finally — the guilt he’d dismissed as a liberal delusion. He had so much and the locals had so little. He lived in peace; the locals lived in permanent war. His wife and daughter were safe; the women and children here might be married off against their will or simply raped, if the town fell to the wrong occupation party. And the American government, despite its flaws, was far better than anything the locals had produced or had designed for them. It was hard not to feel guilty.
“I believe some of them might be suitable,” he said. It was hard to know when everyone in the town had almost no practical schooling at all. “But others… others are unlikely to fit in.”
He sent a command to the interface. The teleporter activated and the world faded away in silver light.
Gunter Dawlish had had enough run-ins with the military bureaucracy to know when he was being fed a line of bullshit. As one of the veterans of freelance journalism — it was a point of pride that he didn’t take any regular pay from any newspaper or TV broadcaster — he’d heard enough spin to have a nose for it. And where someone was trying to sugar-coat a shit sandwich, it generally meant that someone had something to hide.
But what?
Gunter had gone to a great deal of trouble to be embedded with the 1st Marine Division. It did have a certain element of risk — reporters had been killed in Afghanistan — but it also allowed him to earn respect from the soldiers, who were the true heart and soul of the war in Afghanistan. But without respect, they wouldn’t talk to him and most soldiers regarded reporters as the enemy. It was very hard to win their respect. Not being linked to any established part of the Mainstream Media did help, he knew, but so did bravery.
He jumped out of the AFV and looked around. It should have taken weeks, at best, to reduce the town’s defenders to the point where the Coalition could just walk in. Instead, it had taken barely an hour to take the entire town. There hadn’t even been a major battle, his sources had whispered, and the only causality had been a soldier who’d triggered an undiscovered IED… it just didn’t make sense.
The town’s remaining inhabitants were gathered at one end of a field, being tended by a group of medics and Civil Affairs specialists. For once, there seemed to be no attempt to hide the women, something perhaps encouraged by the shortage of males in the group. Indeed, the more Gunter looked, the stranger it seemed. The defenders seemed to have been wiped out… or had they fled? Had the military, having laid its plans for a great battle, discovered that its enemy had retreated and then claimed victory anyway? Or…?
He followed the soldiers out towards the mass grave and swore, sucking in his breath as he saw the bodies. The defenders had died, he realised, and clearly no one in the local community had felt like burying them, a clear rejection of their ideology. But what had killed them? Most of the bodies seemed strangely unmarked. Indeed, there seemed to be very few insurgents who’d died conventionally. It just didn’t make sense.
His imagination went to work. Gas? Something new and untried? But how could it have left one group untouched while others died?
Shaking his head, he removed his small camera and started to take pictures, then uploaded them to his storage site through the dongle his assistant in New York had procured for him. Sending messages through the military internet was always risky, particularly if they were trying to spin something into a victory. But the dongle seemed to allow him to bypass all of their precautions. And maybe a few people he knew might have an idea what happened to the bodies.
By the time they were escorted back to the base, he had half of his story already written in his head.
Chapter Fourteen
Shadow Warrior, Earth Orbit
“Welcome to your first dose of guilt,” Mariko teased. “It’s what being human is all about.”
Steve snorted, but he couldn’t escape the image of the girl staring at him. She had haunted his dreams for the past week, ever since he’d laid eyes on her for the first time. It wasn’t romantic, he hastened to tell himself, it was a grim awareness that she was human, that she was real, that she had thoughts and feelings of her own. She wasn’t just a statistic any longer.
He sat up in bed and looked over at his partner. Mariko had spent most of the last few days in Afghanistan, working in the refugee camps. From what she’d said, conditions had been hellish, particularly when some of the villagers who’d fled ahead of the Taliban started to return and assert their authority. Eventually, Steve had provisionally authorised a number of children — and teenage girls — to be moved to a camp and placed in line to go to the moon. It was a drop in the bucket, but his conscience would allow no less. Besides, he knew — all too well — what fate awaited them if they remained in Afghanistan.
“I thought I was human,” he said, bleakly. “I didn’t know I wasn’t.”
Shaking his head, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, making his way towards the shower. Whatever else could be said about the decor the Subhorde Commander had considered appropriate — the interface said it was alien porn, but it looked like nothing more than splashes of paint — the showers were wonderful. He stepped inside, allowed the warm water to wash the sweat of nightmares away from his skin, then waited for the hot air to dry his body. Outside, Mariko was already pulling herself out of bed.
She looked gorgeous, Steve realised, once again. Part of him wanted her right away, to take her back to bed and prove to both of them that life went on, but he knew there was no time to waste. The meeting was scheduled to take place in thirty minutes. Instead, he walked over to the food processor, picking up pieces of clothing along the way, and ordered them both breakfast. There was a ding from the machine as it produced its latest version of something edible for humankind.
“They won’t starve, down there,” Mariko said. “And they won’t die of thirst either.”
Steve nodded. He’d sent two biomass processors down to the surface, along with a portable water cleanser. It was probably best not to think about where some of the biomass was actually coming from, but the locals wouldn’t starve. So far, they were so grateful to be fed that no one had started to complain about the tasteless food. The cynic in Steve suspected that it wouldn’t be long before that changed.
He passed her one of the plates and tucked into something that looked like scrambled eggs, although the eggs were gray and the bread a faint pinkish colour. It tasted fine, despite its appearance. Kevin and Mongo kept experimenting with the food processors, trying to produce something that both looked and tasted good, but there were just too many variables in a system designed to feed individuals from over a thousand different races, each one with their own requirements. The sections on interstellar diplomacy he’d accessed through the interface had warned of problems in serving dinners when two or more races met to talk. One race’s food might be literally sickening to the other race…
Once they were finished, Steve returned the plates to the processor and walked out of the cabin, heading down towards the conference room. It was astonishing just how much like home the giant starship had become, now they’d cleaned the decks and removed most of the more disturbing alien artworks. The interface seemed to believe that some of them were worth considerable amounts of galactic currency in the right places, but Steve found it hard to believe that it was right. But then, if someone could stick a piece of wood in a glass of urine and claim it was modern art, perhaps the Horde had their own sense of aesthetics. Or, for all he knew, there were races that collected their art.