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  “Maybe, sir,” I replied. “But you weren’t here six months ago.”

  “I read about that. Did you see a lot of fighting, son?”

  Son? Hell, I was almost thirty.

  “I saw my share,” I said evenly. “My rifle company trained en route. Our Conglomerate transports already had mock-ups of s’ndar urban terrain on-board. We thought we’d be ready.”

  “But you thought wrong,” the senator said.

  “Yah,” I replied, grimacing at the memory.

  Petersen waited, as if expecting me to say something more. When I didn’t, he ran a hand over his scalp and then folded his arms across his chest.

  “So, you’ve seen some rough fighting. OK. Do you at least feel like it was worth it?”

  “Worth what, sir?”

  “Earth’s involvement in S’ndar-khk’s civil war. America’s involvement in the CEMEF – the Combined Earth Military Expeditionary Force.”

  “I don’t make policy, sir,” I told him non-committally. “I just follow orders.”

  “Fair enough. But the UN’s bargain with the Conglomerate is costing American lives. Do you think it’s worth it?”

  I frowned, remembering my sister Karen. She’d been an officer in the Air Force, and had wanted to be an astronaut too, before the Conglomerate established their first contact with Earth. The interstellar robotic transports the Conglomerate sent to us made Earth’s space stations look like toys. We’d not even put a man on Mars yet, and the Conglomerate was picking us up and hauling us off in whole battalions – over 300 light years to this obscure little planet, where my sister had been thrilled as hell to see actual aliens.

  Now she was buried back home, her skull split by a s’ndar bullet. It had been a closed-casket affair, given the damage. Mom and Dad still weren’t over it.

  “I’ve lost some friends here,” I said. “And family too. Things were a mess on this planet when we showed up. Lots of killing all over the place. Now there’s not so much. But only because we’re still alert every hour of every day. You ask me if it’s worth it … I sure as hell hope so.”

  Petersen’s brow furrowed. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, his face turning empathetic.

  “I’m sorry for your friends, and whoever else you lost in your family, too. Part of the reason I’m here is to assure you and the other troops that you’re doing truly important work. You’re saving lives. Human lives. We help the s’ndar establish and keep the peace, and the Conglomerate helps Earth. We need the Conglomerate’s clean fusion technology to reverse the economic and political damage from the Oil Crash. You’re standing guard on this intersection so that you – or someone like you – doesn’t have to stand guard over a few barrels of crude in the Person Gulf or Venezuela.”

  “Militia coming!” yelled one of my privates.

  Senator Petersen and I turned our heads to see a small patrol of s’ndaran-made armoured personnel carriers manoeuvring towards us through the hubbub. The large-wheeled, tank-like vehicles took a few minutes to reach our position, and when they did, several armed s’ndar climbed from the hatch on an aerial-spiked APC, and approached my squad.

  The s’ndar in the lead looked older than the rest. It was a female. Hell, all the authority figures in the insectoid race from sergeant on up were females, just like the ants and bees back on Earth. Her chitin was greyed at the edges and had several wounds that had been puttied over with artificial quick-cure ceramic, now weathered. Her thorax bore the militia equivalent of a non-commissioned officer, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out she’d seen her share of combat.

  Sergeant to sergeant, we saluted, the s’ndar in its form, me in mine.

  As I lowered my rifle from the vertical, my Conglomerate-manufactured Translation Application Device – TAD – began speaking into my helmet’s earphones. Emotionless metallic English filled my ears as the s’ndar’s mandibles clicked and scratched consonants in between flute-like vowels.

  “Good morning, Staff Sergeant,” she said.

  “Good morning, Primary Sergeant,” I replied, my TAD turning my English into s’ndar words.

  “My soldiers and I arrive in coordination with the senator’s visit,” said the primary sergeant.

  I studied her. You could never really be sure about the militia. They worked for the provisional government, who worked with the Expeditionary Force. But that didn’t mean much on the street. I’d learned that first-hand. A few of the militia were quality. Many of them were either incompetently hazardous or deceitfully dangerous. It was best to be cautious.

  Petersen turned back to me. “Do you mind if I go talk with your people?”

  “Feel free, sir,” I said.

  I watched Petersen navigate away from my fighting position, chatting briefly with privates, specialists and my corporal.

  Finally the s’ndar sergeant spoke. “I apologize for this nuisance,” she said.

  “Not a problem,” I answered, grateful my TAD didn’t translate my distaste. We’d come to S’ndar-khk to help, and the various s’ndar hives had fought us tooth and nail – in the middle of their own stupid hive-on-hive war. They might have gone nuclear on each other if the Conglomerate hadn’t established first contact, and intervened for humanitarian reasons.

  I heard some loud, rumbling engines, and turned to see a series of large trucks manoeuvring into the intersection. They were flatbeds of s’ndar construction, weighed down with large, square containers. I frowned. Any kind of large-scale commercial traffic like this should have been cleared with the Tactical Operations Centre well beforehand. The native traffic cop out in the intersection knew it too, and began waving his paddles furiously, signalling for the trucks to stop.

  Their drivers obeyed …

  … and the traffic cop exploded in a spray of barking rifle fire.

  After that everything became a blur.

  I remember the sides of the shipping containers splitting open and a small swarm of s’ndar pouring out. Civilians on foot began to scatter while vehicles attempted to either halt, or speed off. The air buzzed with countless s’ndar voices which overwhelmed my TAD. I switched over to the squad channel as I brought my weapon from off my back and pulled the charging handle.

  The turrets on the s’ndar APCs – armoured personnel carriers – rotated and began hammering heavy rounds towards the flatbeds, only to be hit by rocket-propelled grenades.

  The APCs burned.

  I couldn’t determine which of the attacking s’ndar had fired. In the panicked crowd, it was impossible to tell the attackers apart from the civilians. I saw the primary sergeant hunched and firing her rifle, so I got down on one knee and began firing likewise. Whoever she shot at, I could shoot at, at least according to the rules of engagement – s’ndar being better able to tell one another apart.

  Corporal Kent was taking care of the squad. Her bellowing voice was comforting through the speakers in my headset.

  Using the laser sight on my weapon, I drew a bead on a s’ndar moving hurriedly towards me, while the crowd scrambled in the opposite direction. My finger gave a near-motionless trigger pull and my target’s carapace cracked hideously as the jacketed round tore through its thorax.

  I fired at another one, also moving against the crowd. And another. And another.

  There were so many trying to converge on us at once!

  The senator! I thought. They’re after the senator!

  His armoured car was in flames along with the militia’s APCs, and I heard the popping of the Secret Service’s pistols, punctuated by the occasional rip of their sub-machine guns.

  From somewhere in the chaos of the crowd, numerous small objects catapulted. For an instant they looked like opaque mason jars, then one was smashing onto the pavement two metres from me.

  Grenades?

  I stopped firing and turned to see other such objects cascading across our sandbagged position.

  I crouched down and began to move towards my people when I caught a deep whiff of a sickly s
weet chemical. The contents of the mason jars had spilled wetly on the ground, vapours pluming, and I suddenly found myself rolling helplessly onto my side, arms and legs twitching sporadically.

  The s’ndar had never used chemical weapons against us before. Neural agents which were effective against s’ndar didn’t work against humans, and vice versa.

  Until now, anyway.

  My instinct was to reach for the unused protective mask in my thigh pouch, but the pouch was pinned under my bodyweight and I didn’t have the strength to roll over. It was as if all the signals travelling from my brain to my body had been roadblocked.

  Darkness began closing in on me from all sides, and I thought about how stupid it was to be snuffed like this.

  The screams of my squad fell quickly silent, and the last thing I remembered was the murky shape of a s’ndar leaning over me.

  It was not a member of the militia.

  * * *

  “Staff Sergeant?”

  I didn’t move.

  “Staff Sergeant!”

  I still didn’t move. The neutered voice did not compute.

  Something like a tree branch raked my face.

  That computed.

  I reflexively opened my eyes and tried to bring my arms forwards in self-defence, only to find them shackled over my head. Short, rusted iron chains kept me pinned against a cold wall. A single hole in the high ceiling allowed a broad-based shaft of sunlight to penetrate, forming a too bright circle on the cracked cement floor, and leaving the perimeter of the room in near darkness.

  A sudden wave of nausea hit, and I coughed violently, my nose and eyes running – doubtless a final reaction to the residue of the chemical attack.

  For a second I thought I was going to pass out again, but the nausea slowly subsided and I began blinking the tears from my eyes.

  “He is alert,” said the mechanical voice. “Go inform the others.”

  I kept blinking until a s’ndar silhouette took shape before me. The rotund, beetle-like being was resting on its lower motile legs with one utensil arm poised, ready to strike. The stiff hairs along that arm had stung mightily when it swiped me the first time. I’d have been happy to swing back, if only I wasn’t chained.

  “Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

  My TAD scratched out a translation. I was thankful that both the device and its requisite headset were still on my person. That meant my captors wanted to talk, not just kill me.

  “I am not authorized to tell you,” answered the s’ndar, its own TAD turning clickety-clackety mandible movements into human speech.

  “The timing of your ambush couldn’t have been accidental.”

  “You are correct.”

  “What has happened to Senator Petersen and my squad?”

  “No one has been harmed,” the creature said. “You must realize that if we’d wanted to we could have killed you where you stood.”

  “OK, you could have killed us and you didn’t,” I said. “What now?”

  The s’ndar turned and left my cell for a moment, the crude iron door hanging wide open, then returned with several others, including a larger, older female who wore the colourful cloth raiment of a priestess.

  Great, I thought. Someone who knows God is on her side.

  Among the usual squabbling of the various hives, there was a particularly absolutist sect of s’ndar fanatics who considered the human presence on their world to be a literal desecration. They were the ones still fighting guerrilla-style even when most of the other resistors had been bought off at the bargaining table, or beaten down into submission by the Expeditionary Force.

  “We are holding your senator,” said the priestess. “Do you understand what this means?”

  “Yes,” I said. Capture or assassination of the leader of a rival hive was a time-honoured tradition among the s’ndar. Kill or incapacitate the queen bee, and the hive falls apart. A simple yet effective strategy – if you grew up in a hive. “But I don’t think you understand what it means.”

  The s’ndar remained silent, watching me with alien incomprehension.

  “When word gets back to Earth that the senator has been taken hostage or, worse yet, killed, there will be a demand for justice.”

  “Justice,” the priestess repeated. “By whose definition? How many thousands of innocent s’ndar are dead because of humans?”

  “The Conglomerate seems to think that if we hadn’t been sent in to stop your civil war for you, there’d be millions dead.”

  “The human presence on S’ndar-khk is immoral,” she replied. “By intervening in our affairs, you deny us our divine right to order our own lives and our world according to s’ndaran destiny.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me,” I said. “I couldn’t care less about you or your fucking planet. But seizing the senator won’t get the Expeditionary Force to budge. They’ll come after you with everything they’ve got.”

  My own words surprised me. I didn’t owe the senator anything. But he’d seemed an earnest man, and I’d already seen too many friends die. Somebody had to pay.

  As if sensing my rising anger, the two s’ndar flanking the priestess suddenly exposed and charged their weapons.

  “Are you threatening me, Staff Sergeant?” said the priestess.

  “I’m in no position to threaten you,” I told her. “I’m just stating a fact.”

  The priestess stared at me for several seconds then turned and left the cell, guards in tow.

  They locked the cell door behind them, and I was left alone.

  My left arm ached. It wasn’t from the chains. There was a scabbed set of fresh stitches directly over where my Conglomerate-made ID chip had been implanted before leaving Earth. Every member of the military had one, to prevent us from going Missing-in-Action. But these s’ndar had been smart enough to cut the device out of me, lest it give my position away to the Conglomerate satellites in orbit.

  I sighed. No hope of a quick rescue now.

  Minutes crept by in silence. I shouted, hoping to get a response from any other human that might hear me.

  No response.

  It’s amazing how long an hour becomes when you are deprived of typical sensory input. The cell became deathly quiet. There was no noise from beyond the iron door, no music, no human or alien speech, nothing to look at except the circle of light that slowly inched across the cement floor as the day dragged on and turned into night.

  I grew thirsty. Only a prolonged and significant amount of clanging with my chains attracted the attention of the guards, who brought me a portable light and two buckets: one to fill up, and one to empty.

  Guards removed the manacles from my wrists and ankles, and then brought an even longer chain, which they connected to a collar they placed around my neck. The other end of the long chain was attached to a cleat in the floor, and I was able to walk and move for the first time in almost twenty-four hours.

  They left me in the dark again. When the sun came up the priestess reappeared, only this time without her escorts. She kept well away from me, but her posture expressed curiosity.

  “What now?” I said.

  “If seizing or killing your senator yields an effect opposite of what we desire, consideration must be taken as to how to proceed next. We do not ordinarily keep prisoners.”

  “What’s this for then?” I demanded, yanking the chain on my collar.

  “Human prisoners,” she replied.

  “You have the senator,” I said, “so what happens to the rest of us?”

  “We used forbearance during the ambush, at the cost of many s’ndaran lives. Your squad still lives because I wish it, in spite of the feelings of many others who would just as soon see you all dead. After all, you are aliens. Everything about you is alien. You have no business being here. We want you off our planet, but before that can happen there are a few of us who believe we must understand you first. The better we understand you, the better we will be able to determine by what leverage you are moved.�
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  I stared at her. “Seizing hostages won’t do it, that’s for damned sure. We’ll have every available troop scouring this planet for Senator Petersen. Once they find him, it won’t be very pleasant for his captors.”

  “We will make your masters understand us,” the priestess said, advancing close to me. She stabbed a foreleg into my chest. “You do not belong here.”

  “Tell that to the Conglomerate,” I said.

  “You are the Conglomerate!”

  “No, we’re just humans from Earth.”

  She stared intently at me. “Explain.”

  “It’s simple enough,” I said. “Earth’s government cut a deal with the Conglomerate.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I explained the essentials of the situation. Earth needed what the Conglomerate had to offer, and as long as that remained true, the United Nations would keep the Expeditionary Force on S’ndar-khk.

  “We never knew any of this,” the priestess said.

  “You never asked,” I said.

  The next day of incarceration passed with numbing sameness. As did the next. And the one after that.

  Then the priestess reappeared, only this time she had several other s’ndar with her. None of them were armed, though they hardly needed their weapons against a chained and defenceless prisoner. They all stood near the door, well out of the radius of the chain that kept me anchored to the cell floor.

  “You were right,” the priestess informed me. “News of the senator’s abduction has caused human activity on S’ndar-khk to increase precipitously.”

  “That’s hardly a surprise,” I said. “They’ll be looking for Petersen, me, and my whole squad. The Army doesn’t leave its men and women behind.”

  “You are that valuable?”

  “Every soldier is valuable,” I said.

  “Even those who are inferior?”

  “Subordinate, not inferior,” I said. “There’s a big difference.”

  “We wish to know more of this deal humans have with the Conglomerate,” said one of the priestess’s companions. “At what point will it be satisfied?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Until someone in the Conglomerate decides the job is done, I suppose.”