Rick Partlow - Honor Bound

“For now,” Kage snorted. “Presidents change, McKay. You’re this President’s golden boy, but I wouldn’t get too comfortable in the position.”

Before McKay could respond to that, Kage turned on his heel and strode purposefully down the corridor and through the exit.

“Whaddya suppose he meant by that?” Jock wondered. “Next election ain’t for another seven years.”

“He’s just talking out his ass,” Vinnie shrugged. “As usual.”

“Either way,” McKay said, “we’ve got more important things to worry about.” As he spoke, Shannon Stark emerged from the woman’s locker room in her Intell blacks, her dirty utilities in a bag slung over her shoulder. “Shannon, tell them about the reports from the Scouts.”

“We had an observation post in a system near the inner frontier,” Shannon told them quietly. “They were checking out a habitable there, fourth out from the primary. They’d been checking in every two months with a regular military patrol, then, about four months ago, the patrol cruiser found this.” She pulled a tablet out of a thigh pocket and touched the screen, bringing up a video feed, then turned it around so Vinnie and Jock could see it.

The picture was a recut and remixed video that started in orbit around the green and blue planet, then descended with the lander through a thick, stormy atmosphere to circle above a tall, old-growth forest. The trees were subtly different from terrestrial flora, yet similar in a way that convergent evolution had, they found, made almost inevitable. Here and there, as the shuttle passed lower above the treetops, the two former Marines could see a local flyer, aloft on four wings. Finally the picture dissolved in a cloud of dust and fire as the lander came down on VTOL jets, and then the view switched to the helmet camera of a Marine, walking point in a wedge formation of other grey-and-black camo’ed, body-armored ground troops.

Their rifles swung back and forth in a constant scan as the trees slid by on either side; tall, broad-leaved plants tugged at their weapons and harness and once in a while an out-of-focus flitting dot spoke of swarms of flying insect-like life. Then the trees gave way to a wide clearing, the darkened ground speaking of the recent clear-burn that had established the base. As they moved into the clearing, video cut together from different helmet cams showed several domes sprayed from buildfoam, linked together with walkways lined with flat, local paving stones.

Even from more than a hundred meters away, Vinnie and Jock could see the scorch marks on the outer walls and the jagged edges where the doorways had been blown in with some sort of explosives… but no smoke. Whatever had happened was long over. As the images grew closer, the pockmarks of bullet impacts became clear, and on the paving stones leading to the door of one of them was an all-too-familiar dark red stain.

When the image moved to the interiors of the buildings, it was more of the same: bullet holes and blood, but no bodies and no equipment other than some cheap, plastic furniture. Vinnie was about to ask if that was the end of the video when the view swung downward, to a glint of brass wedged behind a broken table. A gloved hand reached down into view and pulled the object free, revealing a spent brass cartridge casing. Vinnie’s blood froze in his veins. No one had used brass-cased ammo in over a century. No one except…

“There were no bodies found,” Shannon told them quietly, switching off the picture and stuffing the tablet back in her pocket. “ Every piece of electronic or mechanical equipment, every weapon, every vehicle, everything useful was stripped away and missing. There were a couple dozen of those cases found, mostly buried in the dirt.”

“It’s Antonov,” Vinnie murmured. “The son of a bitch is back.”

Staring at the rat-faced, slicked-back lobbyist across the desk from him, Daniel O’Keefe wondered idly why he had ever wanted to be President. It was all he had dreamed of since the time he was nine years old and had watched a documentary in school about Calvin Elliott, the first President of the Republic, the man who had brought the whole planet away from the edge of the abyss of the Sino-Russian War. He had worked his way up from a volunteer for a Provincial Commissioner to running for that office himself after graduating college, to the Republic Senate… and now for the last three years, he had been the leader of all humanity

Usually it felt like a sacred responsibility combined with the most thrilling experiences ever—a sort of cross between the Pope and a fighter pilot. But at times like these, it felt like a neutronium anvil hung around his neck and he understood why every president he could remember looked so much older when they left office than when they were elected. He looked at his grey-haired, open-faced reflection in the display on his desktop and wondered if the new lines he saw around his eyes were just his imagination…

“I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Fourcade,” O’Keefe said slowly, trying to keep the perturbed sigh out of his voice, “but I can’t change Republic immigration policy based on the needs of the mining consortium. The colonists on Inferno do not exist to make your multicorp more profitable.”

“The issue isn’t our profitability, Mr. President,” Fourcade insisted, frowning through his neatly trimmed mustache—he was less adept than O’Keefe at hiding his frustration. “The issue is the future of the Republic’s economy, and the hundreds of millions of jobs dependant on supplies of raw materials from the colony worlds. If we can’t make a profit from resources in the colonies, it will not be worth our effort and investment to keep extracting them.” He spread his well-manicured hands. “You’re going to have inflation, shortages of products we all use… it will hurt the less-affluent more than anyone else. Tax revenues will dry up and you will not be able to fund your… generous incentive packages for emigrants to the colonies, which will make the labor situation even worse.”

“Many of those resources could be produced in space-based facilities right here in the Solar system, Mr. Fourcade,” suggested Svetlana Zakharova, his Finance Minister, from the chair to the lobbyist’s right. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with blond hair and pleasant, matronly face, her business suit subdued but expertly tailored. “In fact,” she went on, “if it weren’t for government infrastructure on some of the colony worlds—laser launch systems, for example—paid for by the taxpayers, you couldn’t profitably produce in the colonies at all.”

“The situation has hardly been one-sided,” Fourcade shrugged. “The government couldn’t have built the fleet that helped save our planet a few years ago without aid from the multicorps. As for space-based resources… yes, there are asteroids in the Belt that hold minerals that we can and do exploit, but the Belt facilities are, as you well know, highly unionized. That greatly increases production costs. And the safety requirements for a space-based facility often offset the transportation costs for a planet-based mine.” He sat back, crossing his arms. “But that only applies to resources available from asteroids and the various moons… iridium, nickel-iron, fissionables, water ice, for example. But there are resources that just can’t be had except on a planet—petroleum for one. Drilling is obviously illegal here on Earth and without the oil from Inferno, our chemical industry won’t last a year and you,” he directed that at Minister Zakharova, “damn well know it.”

“It’s clear that we do have a problem, Mr. Fourcade,” O’Keefe acknowledged. “But that problem will not be solved by forcing the underclass to move off-planet so that you can use them as cheap labor. Those days are gone. We will work with the multicorps to come up with an alternate solution; that one is off the table.”