Betrayal
As was his custom, Commander Stoiber Llaneza didn’t wait for the landing platform to lower completely before he started walking down his ship. He would have done it nonetheless, as warranted by the piece of evidence he carried in his case, and the information contained therein.
A small security retail of two hurried in. They barely had time to snap to attention and salute. He saluted back as he walked by, silently wondering how it was that the war against the Zool hadn’t been lost long ago, what with this kind of personnel filling the Terran ranks nowadays. Llaneza was a veteran and had been an instructor; his keen eye detected all the failures on those two guards and despised them.
He dismissed them. They looked at each other, not really knowing what to do, but in the end training took over and they slowly retreated. Llaneza didn’t need an escort, and all the corners of the base were constantly monitored. Or he certainly hoped so.
Llaneza walked on, his boots clacking on the polished floor. It reminded him of the floors on the war starships, so neat when they were first launched. They didn’t last long like that. Not when a Zool boarding party had a picnic around. The stains never truly left.
He shook his head. All of this, a war that had raged for decades, costing lives in the millions. What had it been for? Oh, dissidents and philosophers had been asking that for a long time, but now he, a soldier, had the answer. He had the training and the patriotism that fighting for the Terran cause was a source of pride for him. But not like this.
It had all been a mistake. A stupid, terrible mistake. And he had the evidence to prove it.
***
The mission had gone horribly wrong from the start.
Llaneza’s squad, nicknamed the Shadows, was a small specialist force. An elite commando. They were used by the Terran High Command for very specific purposes. Pinpoint operations behind enemy lines, surgical attacks, information retrieval missions, single target eliminations. The High Command named it, they undertook it. As fast and professional as possible, Llaneza’s Shadows would go in, perform, and be back with minimum fuss and loss of own forces.
Not the last time.
As the Shadow ship was about to drop out of netherspace, Llaneza felt the hairs on his nape tickle.
“Raise shields!” Llaneza ordered.
But the ship’s skipper, Captain Bellini, had doubted for a second before complying. It was only her third mission with Llaneza: Captain Elliot would have raised shields and sounded red alert at once, no questions asked. But Elliot was dead, and Bellini was just a tad younger, a tad slower to trust Llaneza’s instincts. One second slower.
In one second, Llaneza cursed. In one second, the Shadow ship appeared in realspace, her shields still down.
Right in the middle of a naval battle.
A skirmish would be a more appropriate term given the few ships involved, Llaneza thought as missiles ruptured his ship’s hull. It was fortunate that the Shadows travelled in their combat suits, since these automatically sealed themselves, giving them time. Something Bellini and her crew no longer had. Not that the former skipper needed any more time; that’s a commodity one no longer requires when one has no head. The sudden decompression took most of the rest, including at least two of Llaneza’s crew.
Llaneza opened a channel.
“Llaneza here. Report in. Full combat situation. Clamp suits down. Use maglinks. Move to the hangar. Forget about the ship’s crew, they’re beyond help. Llaneza out.” Voice after voice came in. Too few of them, he thought.
It’s amazing what adrenaline does for one’s perception of time when it’s pumped into one’s system. The fact that the artificial adrenalyne was, too, meant Llaneza and his crew had augmented reflexes and reaction times. And they enjoyed the best training the Terran empire could offer.
Fifteen men and women reached the hangar, as the Shadow ship dropped from orbit towards the surface of the planetoid that had been their original target. Space battles was much harsher than people imagined: as soon as one ship lost her shields and its hull was pierced, it usually ceased to be a target. Her atmosphere would vent, and no ship had space suits for the full crew. Once someone thought of that trick, Llaneza had often mused, that side would easily win the war.
“Board the shuttle!” Llaneza ordered.
Vegas, Llaneza’s best pilot, was already handling the controls and effecting an accelerated launch procedure.
“Hi boss,” Vegas said. Somehow she always managed to stay calm. Llaneza noticed the gunman, Cho, hadn’t reported in so far. He then sat behind her and strapped himself in. He put a helmet on, and then brought the guns online at a sign from Vegas. He saw a reticule appear on his HUD, but he didn’t need it to hit his target. He shot astern of the Shadow ship, blowing the hangar space doors outwards and opening yet another large gap in her hull.
Vegas launched them.
The landing craft lurched forward, hit a bulkhead in its way out with a loud bang and a shower of sparks that used up the little remaining oxygen and extinguished themselves at once, and roared out into space. Llaneza had always found odd that there was no sound in space, yet there was, and a lot, inside the ships themselves. He knew the physics, of course, but still it unnerved him.
Vegas rode the stray missiles and the feeble atmospheric turbulence in order to bring them safely down. They still had a mission to carry out, even if their parameters had changed drastically.
***
Llaneza stood to attention and snapped a sharp salute as he entered the office of Field Marshal Farah Lakita. Tall and lean, the woman in command of all the Terran forces saluted back and waved him towards a chair.
“Sit down, Commander Llaneza,” she said. “I believe you have something for me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Llaneza said. He opened his suitcase and produced a box made of, of all things, wood. Lakita took it and stared silently at the sigil on the lid. She recognized the family crest of Admiral Stone. Anybody could, since it had become a war symbol for all Terran armed forces.
She opened the box. She extracted one single item: an old-style journal book.
“Admiral Stone’s diary, ma’am,” Llaneza said. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t dare to act like this, but I believe these are not normal circumstances.”
“Explain yourself, commander Llaneza,” Lakita said. She laid back and interlaced her fingers as she listened to him.
“Admiral Stone tells the story of his first contact with the Zool… and it didn’t go exactly as we believed it did. When Stone met the first Zool ship. he hailed them, which for their culture was impolite. The Zool countered, as was their custom, by arming their weapons. Stone answered by running weapons hot as well. Which, of course, was the wrong action to take.”
“And so?” Lakita said.
“It was all a mistake, ma’am. It looks like the plot from a bad sci-fi story, but it’s true. There was no preemptive attack or retaliatory one, as we thought. Believe me, I hate it to be me who points this out, but I am convinced we should open a diplomatic channel to the Zool. With that journal we could end this war.”
It was a testament to Llaneza’s training that, even here, in the safest place of the Terran army, he sensed something was wrong. Perhaps the hairs on the back of his neck tingled again. As it was, he wasn’t carrying his usual equipment, so he reached for his regulation gun, but it wasn’t enough. His eyes registered surprise before they went blank.
Lakita put her own gun on her table. She picked up the journal and placed it in her dustbin. Loving the irony of it, she put it on fire with a vintage lighter she had owned for decades.
“Ah, Llaneza,” she said to the cadaver, as the flames danced in her eyes, “it will be hard to replace you. You were really good. But reading the journal was not within your mission parameters. You know, without the war effort the Terran Empire would just collapse. As would the Zool’s, by the way.”
A beep sounded. She produced a handheld device and unlocked it by pressing two fingers on two specific spots. After a second, a Zool draconian head appeared on its screen.
“Chancellor S’hhhrk,” Lakita said. “Pleased to see you again. The… obstacle I talked to you about has been cleared.”
“Good,” the Zool said. “Will there be no more complications?”
“Who can be sure of that, Chancellor? I can assure you, however, that all adjacent details are being taken care of as we speak.”
“Good,” the Zool repeated. “Shall we review next week’s operations, then?”
“Certainly. The current Orion’s arm campaign has boosted our warship production by 10%. I hope yours goes as expected.”
~~~~
This is my entry for this week’s Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Five Random Story Seeds.
This week we had five seeds to choose from:
1.) A child is born under mysterious circumstances.
2.) A dead body goes missing.
3.) A mysterious journal is found.
4.) An accident occurs that may be no accident.
5.) An impossible animal appears.
I chose number 3, and ended up with this little space-opera-like story.
