The First Man

"There are people who kill you; there are people who get you killed; and there are people who help you stay alive."

I am a different person now. Transom changed me. In less than three days, everything I believed to be important evaporated. Now I’m left with a hollow understanding of what it means to be a human being. Three days. All the forbidden thoughts have come flooding out of me, the questions I never would have dared to ask.

My name is Mattia Broyle. I am from Etterus. I was born into war, forged for that single purpose, just as every child of my generation was. Perhaps some in my parents’ generation remember a time before it, but war is our only reality now. Our culture has been saturated in it, subsumed by it. I suppose I hope to speak to posterity from my little outpost, to those lucky souls who are blessed enough to be born into the opposite condition, knowing only peace. You need to understand how fast it can happen, how quickly the mind can be conditioned to accept such horrors as you’d only read about or seen in stories. Things you wouldn’t have thought possible. The things you would do, you need to think them possible and reasonable first.

Our education was martial. We were raised in military academies from early on. Graduation left us all with only two options—enlistment or commissioning—either way, we donned the colors of Etterus and knew our destiny was to fight Trasp. Less than half of our childhood friends and compatriots would see our thirtieth birthdays. That was simple statistics, but we all thought it would be us—we would be the ones to make it.

They did not need to teach us to hate Trasp. It came naturally. We would see the notices—the older brothers and sisters of our friends, sometimes our own—dead at Burning Rock or Richfield. We would see the reports—two million dead in a sneak attack on the Exos cylinders. We didn’t need to be conditioned to hate the people responsible for those atrocities. Nor did we need to be convinced of the stakes of the fight. To hate the Trasp was obvious. The prospect of peace was the foreign concept. Even asking about this status quo was a forbidden idea.

As a young man, before I was commissioned, my compatriots would talk of our future assignments, and inevitably, bloated with bravado and ignorance, we’d speak of our desires to cut our teeth on the great fronts of the war. We looked up to the lucky few who came back, their glory, honor, and heroism pinned on their chests for all to see. The respect that was paid when each passed in the streets on every corner of our world. We all said that was what we desired. That, or to give our lives to our home world’s cause, to our future. That was the only proper way to live. I was as ambitious and zealous as any in my cohort.

It may be difficult for one foreign to war to imagine how crushing a blow it was to be assigned to an outpost like Priam. It wasn’t just that the odds of seeing battle were scant, the true source of the disappointment was that so far out here, it was difficult to see any way of contributing. To train my whole life for a purpose only to be sent as far away from the central fight as possible? Even logistics specialists, freight haulers, munitions developers, miners—the list was long—nearly everyone was making a greater difference than us.

Priam was an ice planet over a hundred light years beyond the lettered systems, where only sporadic fighting had ever been registered. Old intelligence reports had once indicated that Trasp planned to use obscure marginally-habitable worlds like Priam to stage incursions into our shipyards in the Gamma and Delta systems, neutral moons like Reveen and Martha, even the Kappas. So the unlikeliest of assignments—Priam and Kordis—were still possible, where we lonely few were sent to keep watch over uninhabited space to make sure the Trasp left it that way. As our CO Kaffie put it, “We watched the battery’s naked ass from a trillion miles away.”

Kaffie was a Second Lieutenant when I arrived two years before Transom did. Shortly after I arrived, Kaffie was promoted to full Lieutenant by correspondence. I was one of his two junior officers. Myself, Second Lieutenant Mattia Broyle, who everyone on Priam called Matty, and Second Lieutenant Rain Park were the other officers there. The sergeant among the ranked was Terra Blanken. She had eight specialists under her—a combat specialist, two communications and surveillance personnel, a logistics technician, a medic, a pilot, and two non-designee enlisted whose specialty seemed to be complaining and causing Kaffie all manner of grief. In truth, none of them were bad kids. They were just bored, as we were.

Kaffie had been there four years before I arrived, and in the two years I was there before Transom’s appearance, the most exciting thing any of us had seen was when Terra’s scope team had caught a glimpse of an unlicensed freighter storing illegal munitions on one of the system’s moons. Kaffie was itching to interdict, but we were instructed to stand down rather than reveal our presence.

We were all so programmed for the fight that none of us appreciated the blessing that an assignment to Priam was, most of all Kaffie. He resented never getting reassigned. Logistically it made little sense, with the time it took to get out here, but what was unspoken was that as prepared as Kaffie may have been to command on the day he arrived, leadership recognized that they couldn’t put any of us back into combat positions and expect us to perform. We all expected to be sidelined indefinitely, for none of us had ever been sent back to any real post. Kaffie himself had grown fat by military standards. And a year after I arrived, he and Rain started a relationship that was so open, he didn’t voice any objection when Terra and I did the same.

I was tasked with general training, and I ran it to the letter—fitness and basic combat maneuvers, anything that teams of two-to-twelve fighters could perform. Mostly, operations went smoothly, or at least we were so ignorant of real combat that we didn’t know the difference. We were so far out, though, that we had minimal drone coverage, no robotic field units, and little hope of surviving if an actual Trasp combat force appeared, discovered us, and engaged us, which is why command sent Transom.

Our site was in an ice cavern along the edge of a glacial plain. The post was well hidden, and it was the only place the unit’s ship was safe from the shifting ice. We hadn’t had a proper site meeting in weeks. All twelve of us gathered around the ship, seated on crates while Kaffie announced that an operative would be arriving from Etterus to take command of the unit. We were to give him our total attention and follow every order. No further information was given beyond an ETA.

In the week before Transom arrived, everyone did their best to tighten things up around the post. The specialists tuned and inventoried gear. Coms and surveillance teams reviewed all recent data for their report. I ran daily calisthenics and exposure runs along the ice sheet, conditioning everyone for longer exposures than we ever willingly subjected ourselves to. Kaffie cut back to one meal a day. He knew what his appearance would convey to a serious operator.

Then, completely unannounced, a week following the communique, Transom walked directly into the outpost. He wasn’t wearing any colors or identifying marks, just heavy gear, an exo, a facemask, and goggles. He wasn’t even on twos—which is to say second-level planetary gear common on planets with double- and triple-digit negative temperatures like Priam. Even a breathable atmosphere by composition becomes unbreathable at temperatures that freeze the saliva, the windpipe, and the alveolae of the lungs on contact. Priam was rarely that cold but rarely far from it. Transom had walked in from God-knows how far, and he wasn’t even wearing a space helmet.

I was out on a training run with the unit, and Transom filed in behind the final two stragglers and simply strolled in with them. It didn’t make for a good impression.

“You,” he said. “Junior Lieutenant. What’s your name?”

“Broyle, sir,” I said, saluting.

“Don’t call me sir. And if you salute me again, I’ll take your hand off.”

I almost said yes sir but managed to catch myself. “What should we call you?”

“Call me Transom, Broyle,” he said, pulling back his hood. “Get me a cup of coffee and your CO, STAT.”

I didn’t even take the time to get my exo off, just burst into the mess fully geared up and got Transom his coffee. When I got back to the cavern, Transom was standing there, silent, observing everyone as they filed in. Kaffie came in roughly as I did, and Transom ignored him, waving me over with the coffee.

“This better be the best damn cup of coffee I’ve had in a year, Broyle.”

I shrugged. “Only coffee we have.”

He shook his head. “You assholes have coffee out here.”

He looked at Kaffie. “My God, are you soft. Not just you, CO. The whole damn lot of you. Just waltzed right in here like it’s a spaceport on Athos. Broyle here even served me coffee. Didn’t even wait for me to be seated.”

Nobody knew whether to laugh or not, but the way he said it, it was funny to us.

“You’ve probably judged from the accent that I’m not Trasp. Good thing for you all too. The unit that’s on its way,” he paused and shook his head for effect, “you wouldn’t even know they’d killed you. You’d just be dead. Or maybe I am a Trasp with a well-practiced Nu City accent and I just wanted Broyle to make me a cup of coffee before I killed you all so I wouldn’t have to do it myself.”

Rain snorted and couldn’t help but laugh.

“There it is,” Transom said. “I was wondering what the hell was wrong with you people. What are you, scared of me? Is everyone scared of me, Broyle?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure we know what to think.”

“I was briefed. No fight out here. Well, that’s about to change.”

He took a couple sips from the coffee

“Is everyone here?”

Kaffie looked around. “All present and accounted for.”

“Terra’s still taking off her exo,” I said. “She’s in the gear hall.”

“Great. Terra’s not here,” Transom said, looking over at me. “Go and get your girlfriend and bring her back in here, Broyle.”

I’m not sure whether he was guessing or just saying it to take a gauge of the reaction, but everyone suddenly looked at Transom as though he was clairvoyant. I didn’t wait to observe his reaction to being right, I just double-timed it to the gear hall to get Terra. I told her not to salute him as we double-timed it back.

“Okay,” he said when we returned to the cavern. “Now that Broyle’s girlfriend has seen fit to join us, I’ll commence with the briefing.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me. In fact, I am the one thing you should not fear. I am the only thing that will keep a single one of you alive through Sunday. If we do our jobs properly and are lucky, some of you, maybe even all of you, can go back to your soft lives, your calisthenics, and your morning coffee. It’s halfway decent, by the way, Broyle. Thank you.”

Transom paused to allow the nervous laughter to settle.

“We have human intelligence that Ketch is extremely confident in—as high as ninety-seven percent—that a Trasp black ops team intends to survey this system for an appropriate base from which to run interdictions in the outer lettered systems. They’ll arrive within the week.

“This forward unit of special operators is among the hardest forged units of human fighters ever conceived in the history of man. Naked and barefoot, these ten hard bastards would eat three hundred Spartan warriors for breakfast and use their spears and shields to break Alexander’s army for lunch and still have enough of an appetite to eat half of Genghis Khan’s cavalry for dinner. And in honor of you lucky bastards they aren’t coming naked or barefoot. They’re bringing weapons.

“They are a scalpel unit, composed of genetically enhanced athletic specimens. Their blood is coursing with nanotech that heightens their already superhuman physical capabilities. They’re all neurally implanted with aural and ocular adjuncts. And they have been training for combat against other super-soldiers and strike model combat robotics from the time they were old enough to hold their own spoons. There is nothing about warfare they don’t know except what it feels like to be ignorant of it.

“This Trasp scalpel unit is who you need to be afraid of. I, Transom, am your friend. I will tell you how to live. Your job is to do exactly as I say before they arrive or you will die.

“Ketch has identified sixteen probable landing sites on Priam for their incursion. Objective A will be to hide countermeasures in proximity to these sites and neutralize this fighting force before it has a chance to touch down. Needless to say, that is the ideal scenario.

“Objective B, should they land, is to engage them using deceptive tactical maneuvers for long enough that a group can disable their ship. Ketch and human intelligence believe that if this unit is neutralized without returning any intelligence to Trasp, they will deduce that this outpost, maybe even this sector, isn’t worth the trouble, considering the way things have been going for them at Burning Rock lately.

“Once we disable their ship and their coms. We kill them all until they are dead. If I have a specialty, it’s that. I’ve been a party to the destruction of seven of these units, and I’ve never once lost a fight.

“So, are you sorry-looking bastards ready to begin?”

Nobody answered.

“Great sign, but hell, it’s hard to be enthusiastic when you’ve just soiled yourselves and it’s thirteen below. Isn’t that balmy for this place, though?”

“A heat wave,” Kaffie said, doing his best to joke with Transom.

“Okay, Broyle, get me another cup of coffee and we’ll start breaking this operation down properly.”

Transom had detailed plans laid out from the intelligence bureau and Ketch, the Etteran standard warfighting AI strategist. We had a five-day window to deploy countermeasures to the prospective landing sites, conceal our presence, and drill our ambush maneuvers in case our initial plan failed.

Transom made it clear that once the Trasp were on the planet, only passive communications would be allowed. Signaling would give away the presence of other groups, and our one advantage over the scalpels, as he called them, would be their ignorance of our numbers and location. The passive coms we could use would come directly from the four stealth-hypersonic satellites that skipped through Priam’s high atmosphere.

Transom separated us into four teams. Kaffie and Rain each led a team of four, while Terra and the two munitions specialists were deployed to set the countermeasures that the forward teams dug. Transom, meanwhile, drafted me to provide cover for him when he attacked their ship. It was the most rigorous part of the operation. Because we couldn’t be certain where they would land, we would have to cover considerable ground on foot after they landed to avoid being detected.

Their MO when scouting a planet, according to Ketch, was to air survey, followed by a focused ground recon of the surveyed area, before setting up a base to run ops from once the area was cleared. Our ground units would attack in a coordinated pattern at the scalpel unit’s greatest distance from her ship. While they were engaged, Transom and I would move in and destroy their ship, leaving their soldiers vulnerable to air support from our harrier. The harrier would then extract Terra and the munitions team who would drop “hell on their heads” as Transom put it.

“Once you see their ship on fire,” he instructed, “groups one and two will fall back under air cover while the harrier rains down fire on them from the stratosphere. Then we pick Trasps off one by one. As soon as they’re stranded, it’s coms up, coordinated through me, then Kaffie, then the next in command if we go down. We have the element of surprise and the opportunity to plan and coordinate. Battles are won before they begin. That’s a piece of war college truth that actually turns out to be battlefield truth too. An eternal law.”

At that point, it became a matter of cutting through the work and getting our heads right for the first real fight of our lives. I won’t lie in hindsight. The prospect was exhilarating, intoxicating even. To finally get a chance to fight? Real combat against the toughest of opponents, and as we saw it, to have a real chance to win? Even Kaffie, after all that time resigned to the quiet life on the edge of the war, was amped up almost to the point our familiar CO was a totally different person. I’d never seen Rain so focused, and Terra, even with the pressure of overseeing the munitions team, was positively giddy. She mentioned to me one night that week in the gear hall that she’d never seen a Trasp in real life.

“Neither have any of us,” I said. “Except Transom.”

“Do you think they even know we’re here, Matty?” she asked me.

“I hope not,” I said. “I hope they never find out. I hope our countermeasures fry the lot of them before they even touch down.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I want to fight them.”

She’d lost two older brothers, one at Burning Rock and another at Richfield.

“They need to pay for what they’ve done to us.”

“Agreed. I just hope it comes in the form of a big Trasp fireball falling from the sky. Then none of them gets any of us. I don’t think Transom is lying about this scalpel squadron. I think they might cut us up if they get on the ground.”

On the final day of preparation, we used industrial carriers and exos to clear out the ice constricting the cavern entrance so we could fly the harrier out to deploy. Then all that was left to do was wait, and we didn’t have to wait long.

Passive sensors caught a ship entering the system the following afternoon, tracking right for Priam. As predicted, the vessel was a fast-attack Trasp tactical interdictor, designed for close air combat and troop deployment. Tough to take down, Transom told us.

“But if they enter any of our countermeasure windows, they don’t stand a chance.”

We stood at the ready, watching as they approached, trying to predict their course from their bearing.

As they neared the atmosphere, “Coms silence,” Transom declared. “Gear up and prepare to board the harrier.”

All we could do was watch and hope they tracked to one of Ketch’s sixteen landing spots. I didn’t have the faintest idea how the AI selected such things. Surely every time one of our ships or their ships landed, we both understood that the other could be tracking them. They knew what we knew, and the AI would be taking this into account. How then, in the entirety of a world could we expect they would hit one of our ten-kilometer circles?

Sure enough, though, the Trasp interdictor flew in low over two of our sites, even circling just out of range of our countermeasures, surveying. Transom looked on stone-faced as the stealth-hypersonics relayed data on their position. For a moment it appeared they would land at the second site. Then they pulled off, taking what seemed a random tangent.

As both Ketch and Transom had predicted, the scalpel unit deployed and scattered the moment the interdictor touched down. When the stealth-hypersonics relayed visuals of the scalpels, it was the first time the situation seemed real to me. These soldiers moved with shocking precision and speed across the ice. It seemed their exos, instead of being their driving force, as they were for us, were their limiting factor. The thought of all twelve of us engaging even one of these fighters seemed a daunting prospect. And with Transom and I set to pursue the interdictor, the numbers would be near even. All we had going for us was the element of surprise.

“Obviously the ideal didn’t play out,” Transom said. “Seldom does in combat. We have a plan to execute.”

Our pilot kept us dangerously low to the horizon, never breaking the detection ceiling. Their interdictor’s system circled in a random flight pattern, partly monitoring the Trasp team’s progress, partly monitoring for possible enemy presence. Our job was to creep as close to their horizon as possible and deploy our ambush teams. They would then systematically engage and fall back to the cover of the other two groups for as long as it took for Transom and I to disable the Trasp interdictor.

All three of our teams leapt out of the harrier and headed for positions in the area the Trasp were fanning out into. Then the pilot dropped Transom and me behind the enemy by nearly forty kilometers. We needed to cut through that ice plain at a serious clip to even get within striking distance of the interdictor.

Transom didn’t say anything to me for nearly an hour after we touched the ice. We just ran and ran. It became clear that this scalpel unit was not following the pattern Transom had briefed us about. The interdictor was not landing as predicted. According to his briefing and Ketch’s intelligence, their interdictor would clear the area, circle a few times, and then land at their six. Only it showed no signs of landing.

“Transom,” I asked him between breaths. “Why would the Trasp send these scalpels to scout a planet like Priam? I didn’t think of it before, but it seems odd now.”

“Stealth incursion,” he said. “A small but deadly team can go unseen, but if they’re discovered, their job is to leave no witnesses to report their presence.

“Now shut up and run, Broyle, and stop asking questions. It’s doing time, not asking questions time.”

I had more questions, like how he knew which way to run if the Trasp ship wasn’t going to land, for one. Even more pressing, what our ambush groups were supposed to do if the scalpel units got close to them with their air support hovering overhead.

We ran and ran. I’d trained my body, and I’d trained my mind to understand that when my body said no more, my mind could override it. Transom gave no sign he was even remotely bothered by the exertion. Even with the exoskeleton doing the real work, my legs were exhausted, and it felt as though my body was actually bearing the hundred kilos the exo was carrying.

The light dimmed as the sun set behind the hills along the horizon. Transom and I kept running toward the Trasp rear. Periodically, we would stop to scan for the interdictor. It was still airborne, circling behind the area we could only presume the scalpel squadron to be. They had to be on top of our people by then. Transom shrugged his shoulders, but he couldn’t deny it.

“Why isn’t it landing, Transom?”

“Probably because they’ve detected some anomaly, and they’re treating it as a threat.”

“Our people?”

“Probably, Broyle. There’s nothing else out here.”

“We have to get them out of there. Let them know.”

“Broyle, stop. I’m only going to say this once, and the only reason I’m saying it at all and not acting on my instincts is that I need you to set countermeasures when that interdictor finally lands, but you need to get a clue and fast. You’re in a war here, and there are no friends in war. Not me. Not anybody else. There are people who kill you; there are people who get you killed; and there are people who help you stay alive. If, for one second, you cease to be a person who helps us stay alive, then I’ll drop you where you stand. You will not compromise us in any way by attempting to communicate to your unit. Do you understand me?”

I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t say anything.

“Acknowledge me, damn it, Broyle!”

“I understand you.”

“Good.

“If we attempt to contact our people, it will confirm our existence. Whatever element of surprise we had has disappeared, except for location, timing, and our numbers. That interdictor will rip our harrier to shreds the second it moves in to extract our people, so whatever happens, they’re on their own.”

We kept running, the darkness setting in around us. It wasn’t long before we started getting imagery from the stealth-hypersonics showing the first of the fighting. Within seconds of the first sign of fire, Kaffie’s team disappeared from the readouts. It was impossible to tell who fired first, but they were gone.

“Not a word, Broyle,” Transom told me. “Keep moving.”

We kept running for another twenty minutes before the second party, Rain’s group, was wiped out by the Trasp. I stopped to observe the encounter on my glasses. Transom took a few steps before stopping as well. His reaction gave me the sense that he wasn’t the least bit surprised by the outcome.

“We need to find cover,” he said, pointing to a ridge of rocky outcroppings. “They’ll scan the area again after they engage the last group.”

“They’re going to kill them.”

“Your girlfriend, I know. Sorry about that, kid. Heroes of Etterus all.”

He was so cynical he couldn’t even get the words out without a detectable note of sarcasm in his voice, even under the mask. I wanted to kill him. I don’t know how he could have known, but it was at that very moment that he took off his goggles and stared directly at me.

“Go ahead, Broyle. See what happens. You all wanted to find out about war. That was lesson one. Pawns die. You’re about to get lesson two: self-preservation is a powerful motivator. I’m your only lifeline, kid.”

“I’m a pawn too.”

“Occasionally, pawns are needed. And sure, I might be lying to you. What other choice do you have but to let it play out, though? Every other option means you die.”

“I’m not just going to let them kill her.”

“I’m not going to say it again, Broyle, you blow our cover here and I won’t even wait for the scalpels to get to you. If you kill us because you can’t control your emotions, you’ll kill every other person I’m going to save by taking these bastards out. Focus on that. They’re the ones killing your friends, not me.”

I shook my head.

“Cover,” Transom said. “We need to get to that ridge before they get the harrier.”

Transom knew Terra would call to get picked up. She didn’t know any better. She’d seen those scalpels clear out the first two groups as well as we did. We followed it on our viewscreens as the Trasp interdictor gradually widened its pass around the area, giving the appearance that they were opening a wider search radius. Transom and I were at the base of the rocky ridge by then. He took off his goggles again and tucked under a large iced-over outcropping between the rocks.

“This’ll do,” he said. “Their ship will land when they’re certain they’ve neutralized their targets.”

“Neutralized their targets?”

“Shut up and get in here, Broyle,” Transom said.

I didn’t want to lose the signal from the stealth-hypersonics under the rocks. I needed to see. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from that dark horizon.

“Broyle!”

I stared him down.

He glared at me. “What?”

“You’re not even going to watch?” I said.

“Seen that story before, son. Ends the same way every time.”

He began to clear out a trench in the ice at the back of the shallow cavern he’d identified as cover.

“Suit yourself, kid. Watch. Then get your ass in here and take cover before they scan their perimeter.”

I don’t know what I could compare it to. A snake and a mouse? A child playing chess with a callous adult? Both the tactics and the outcome were obvious from the outside. Terra made the call, the harrier moved in, and even though they could have hit Terra’s group as hard as the others, the scalpels only hit them with enough fire to make them think they were escaping. The second our people boarded the harrier, the interdictor shot into the theatre and turned our ship into a plummeting fireball so big I could see it with my naked eyes from kilometers away.

They were all dead. And as they fell from the sky, I realized that Transom had known it from the second the Trasp had touched down. He knew what we were even if we didn’t.

I slumped into the cover of the cavern.

“They’ll do low-cover, high-res imaging of the perimeter.”

“How do you know?” I asked him.

“Because we know how they operate,” Transom said. “I’m sorry it went down like that, kid. I wanted them to hit our countermeasures, but they’re smart. The Trasp have intelligence too. Now we get one last chance at them, if they get lazy.”

We sat in his trench waiting as they surveyed. I had a rush of thoughts I’d have considered traitorous and insane hours before. The Trasp out there, the people who’d just killed my friends, they were like Transom, doing the job of war making. I’d fixated my hatred so firmly on Transom that I was able to see them for what they were—operators taking orders. Trasp, doing the same thing we were. What Transom had done by deceiving us all was exactly what we told ourselves the Trasp do, the things that made them uniquely evil. As I was sitting there in those minutes without a word between us, I couldn’t help but see him just as he’d said: he wasn’t going to kill me or get me killed; he was just a person who could keep me alive. I couldn’t blame him any more than I could blame those Trasp for acting out the roles they’d been forged for.

“Here’s the deal, Broyle. They came to clear you out. Why? Who knows what the Trasp are planning out here? They think further ahead than we know. They’ll assess whether they got the whole unit, and they’ll find a fat CO, a junior Lieutenant, and the small contingent that was in their intelligence reports. Then, when they’re satisfied your group was neutralized in that firefight, they’ll board their interdictor and scan the planet until they find your base, light it up from the air, do a planetary overview, and head back to Trasp territory. Mission accomplished. There’s only one way to kill perfect fighters.”

He paused and waited for my response.

“We hit them when they’re together and they’re vulnerable.”

“You were paying attention at war college, Broyle,” Transom said. “It’ll probably take them an hour or so to collect the bodies and survey the wreck. They won’t be hustling if they think they got everyone.

“Stay low, head for these coordinates and bury the countermeasures. Then pray like hell when they take off that we hit that interdictor square, because if they don’t go down, they’ll fly back over us and blow us to hell.”

“Understood,” I said.

We waited until Transom was reasonably certain they’d completed their scan. Then it was a dead sprint. Transom and I had about an hour to put enough distance between us that a long firing vector would challenge the interdictor’s defensive systems when they took off. If they didn’t spot us before taking off, I knew it would at least be interesting. As much as I hated myself for thinking it as I ran, I knew Transom’s tactics were clever. Cold.

My lungs burned. I thought about Terra, what she would have thought about what we’d done, what I was doing now. The harder I ran, I convinced myself, the likelier it was that I’d get to watch them burn and fall out of the sky like I’d watched her. I didn’t hate these Trasp anymore. If anything, I hated myself, hated that I was doing what I was doing. Still, I was doing it. A dead run into the darkness, my feet crushing the upper crust of the ice. Every few minutes, my foot would break through and send me tumbling forward onto the ice hard enough to crush the surface beneath me on impact, sending me sliding up and forward. I was so maddeningly focused I didn’t even bounce before floating up to my feet again and kicking onward. When I felt the pain of the fall seconds later through the cold, I was already running again. I imagined I was running away from that pain. It fueled me.

In forty minutes, I was there.

I quickly surveyed the area at the coordinates Transom had given me and saw a depression about the right size. I cracked the top crust of the ice, breaking through to the pocket of snow underneath, buried my payload, armed it, and then covered the top with shards of ice and displaced snow.

I searched the area, looking for cover. I knew the Trasp would scan for anomalies along the ice sheet as they took off. I didn’t see cover initially, so I ran back the way I’d come. A few hundred meters back, a small crevasse in the ice field cut into the pure ice sheet I’d been running along. I hopped in and waited. And I hoped.

I had little doubt Transom would do his part as I’d done mine. Next, it just fell to luck and the vagaries of their tech versus ours. I watched the display as it was fed down to us.

Finally, the scalpel team began to coalesce around the interdictor. The display was clear enough I could even see them as they boarded—so confident they didn’t even look back. For a moment, I confess, I felt a kind of sick joy possessing knowledge about their future I knew they were lacking.

The interdictor took off almost square into the kill zone. The ice around me shook and vibrated as the bolts went up. Even through my mask I could taste water vapor in the air, as though for a split second the entire ice sheet around the perimeter had melted and flash-frozen. I couldn’t see it at first, but I heard it. Impact.

I lifted my head out of the crevasse to see the interdictor speeding away and up, a small ball of fire streaking out its back end. It was still climbing.

It was impossible to see the rest of their ship in the darkness, and even if I could have, I hadn’t nearly the expertise to tell how badly they were damaged. There was nothing in the universe I wanted more than to see their utter destruction. The interdictor didn’t fall, though. It continued to climb.

“Winged it,” Transom’s voice came over coms. “Must have done some damage, because they’re making a run for it. What altitude do you run those hypersonics on, Broyle?”

I hadn’t thought of it, but as soon as Transom mentioned it, I knew exactly what he was suggesting. The stealth-hypersonics weren’t much of a weapon, because they were about the size and mass of a tea cookie and hardly maneuverable, but travelling at a thousand kilometers per second, a tea cookie could make an impact on a hobbled craft.

I lit up my coms channel and routed our local Ketch stream into my helmet to make the calculations. With Kaffie dead, I was cleared to make the order, unconventional as it was. There were four disks, one passing every several minutes. The only question left was whether the Trasp would home in on Transom’s transmission and decide to engage us instead of trying for space. The unknown in that moment was their greatest enemy. They could have descended, touched down fifty kilometers away, and doubtless, hunted us down and killed us with little trouble. But they didn’t know the only remaining contingent was just Transom and I. They made the wrong call. They ascended.

As soon as they hit six thousand meters, Ketch inverted the collision avoidance measures in the disk. The passing stealth-hypersonic met the interdictor at nearly seven thousand meters altitude igniting an enormous fireball followed by a streak of flame that came down in a straight line from the night sky.

“Well done, Broyle,” Transom said.

He ordered me to follow him on a direct run to the crash site.

I caught up to him when our courses intersected about halfway there.

“Do you think any of them could have survived?” I asked him.

“If anyone could, it’s one of those gene freaks.”

We ran in silence for the better part of six hours. My exo charge was down to a third. It was going to be close to get to the wreck and then back to the base. Transom didn’t seem to care at all. Even after the sun came up, the temperature was minus sixty. The cold bit through my gear every time the wind blew at our backs. I was indifferent now. Combat had made me so in less than a day.

We got to the crash site mid-morning. Scans were negative for movement or large anomalies along the ice, which, Transom informed me, indicated that the fuselage had come down more or less intact. There was no movement inside the craft, but he thought there could be survivors inside.

“What do we do?” I asked him.

“We go in and if there’s anyone left breathing, we kill them, Broyle. Follow my lead.”

Transom approached the wreck cautiously, instructing me to follow him at a flanking angle. There was no movement. Even through my filter, the smell of smoke was in the air, though there didn’t seem to be anything burning in the ship any longer. It was a twisted, mangled wreck, difficult to imagine anyone surviving.

When we approached the gaping opening in the fuselage, the interior was littered with bodies and wreckage, a bloody mess all the way up to the flight deck. Transom headed in first, his bolt rifle pointed at every line of sight he took. There didn’t appear to be anyone alive. Transom cleared all the way to the front then doubled back.

“Whoa there, Broyle,” Transom said. “We got a breather.”

When he said it, I couldn’t believe it. The soldier he’d passed by looked dead at my feet, completely unconscious, his torso blown halfway off. But as Transom approached and knelt to examine the man, I could see him breathing in shallow, short bursts. Tiny puffs of moisture evaporated around the seam of his mask each time his chest moved.

“Would you look at that,” Transom said. “First time I’ve seen that.”

“What?”

“Look at his wounds, Broyle. Frozen solid. Only thing that kept him from bleeding out. Lucky him.”

Transom pulled off his outer gloves and reached for his belt.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to wake him up, Broyle, and you’re not going to say a damn word no matter what he says to you, understood?”

I nodded.

Transom dug into his personal med kit, pulling out a plug of epi and smelling salts. He detached the power cell from the man’s exo and locked the extremities into place, as if he could have moved anyway. Transom crept closer to the Trasp’s head, still on his knees, staring down at the man’s face.

“Can’t be too careful with these bastards,” he said, before hitting the Trasp soldier with the smelling salts.

It took several slaps and a few repeated belts with the salts before the man coughed, wide-eyed, and then gasped back to life.

He looked at Transom as though he recognized him.

“It’s you,” he said, his voice raspy and weak.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Transom said, laughing. “I didn’t know you were expecting me.”

“Obviously not,” the Trasp said, coughing as he laughed back. “Probably should have been … in hindsight.”

The Trasp soldier looked around the wreck and down at his mangled body, then grimaced.

“You know who I am?” Transom said.

“No, but yes. There are stories about the Etteran Reaper. I thought you’d be like us or maybe a team of strikers.”

“Just me,” Transom said. “Just a guy.”

“I am Adam,” the Trasp said.

“Oh, great,” Transom said, “the first man.”

“Who are you, after all?” he asked Transom.

“Me? I’m Transom.”

“This is some Etteran name?”

“It’s a codename. Some architectural thing, apparently. Who knows how they come up with them?”

“I meant your real name.”

“See that kid over there, Trasp. His entire unit that you slaughtered, they followed every order I issued to the letter for over a week and they’re dead because of it, and none of them knew my name. Kid still doesn’t. And you think I’m going to tell you?”

“As a sign of respect. Soldier to soldier.”

“Respect?” Transom said, snorting out a cynical laugh. “Hear that kid, he wants respect? You can consider it a sign of respect that I haven’t spat in what’s left of your torso.”

The Trasp grimaced again and then coughed.

“What’s your name,” Adam asked me.

“That boy’s what’s left of the local regulars manning this post, and he’s not going to say a goddamn word to you without my say-so, and he doesn’t have it, Trasp.”

“You’ve earned your reputation, Reaper. I invoke my Article VI rights as a captured soldier.”

Transom laughed. “You’re joking, right? Your Article VI rights? You realize that manufactured infantry like you are a living, breathing war crime? For as long as you’re still breathing, anyway.”

“I won’t tell you anything, Reaper, no matter what you do.”

“I ain’t asking questions, Trasp.”

“Why did you revive me then?”

Transom pulled a knife from a sheath in his belt and then turned back toward the soldier.

“I had to make sure the fall didn’t, you know, scramble your brains, leave you cognitively impaired. Asking the questions isn’t my job. That’s for our data analysts back on Etterus. Turns out it’s a lot easier to extract information from an intelligence source after the source isn’t … well, breathing anymore, shall we say.”

“Young man?” Adam said, looking over at me.

Transom turned his head back toward me.

“We’re in the killing business, son. Modes and methodologies don’t make a damn bit of difference in the grand scheme of things.”

I shook my head.

“Go get my pack, fill up the back compartment with loose snow and ice. I’m not going to make you watch, but this is happening.”

“Son, please.” Adam said.

“Might be a strange start to your great hereafter,” Transom said to him. “I’ve heard you can feel it when they extract your memories. I on the other hand, won’t hardly feel a thing.”

“Please,” Adam said begging me with his eyes.

“He’s not going to do anything for you. You just killed the kid’s whole unit, his girlfriend included.”

Adam’s eyes locked on mine. I couldn’t move. He shook his head.

“The bag,” Transom said, turning and glaring at me. “Remember what I told you. We’re not out here to make friends.”

In the month that followed, after Transom left, I had only the isolation of the droning winds and the monochrome palette of the shifting snows. It felt like I had all the time in the world to think: about who I’d been made to be; about how I’d chosen it willingly because I knew no better; about who our real enemies were; and about what the sector might look like if soldiers like Transom and Adam were brought to bear on all the people who had benefitted from setting our peoples against each other.

Transom and I didn’t talk much in the three days he was with me on post before his transport back to Etterus arrived. He got his own coffee.

When the strip came in to pick up Transom, she carried orders for me to hold the post until command decided what they were going to do with the place.

“Any idea how long that’ll be,” I asked her.

“A few weeks, most likely,” she said. “Try not to go crazy on your own out here.”

“If I were going to go crazy, I’d be there already.”

“What’s this guy like?” she asked me. “I heard stories about him before coming out. The 303 talked him up like he was some kind of legend.”

“Transom? He’s a legend all right. That’s a word for it.”

He showed up in the cavern wearing all his gear just then, hauling a metal box.

The strip saluted, “Sir.”

“Don’t salute me,” he said.

She stepped toward him offering to haul his gear.

“And, no,” Transom said. “I got it.”

He paused for a moment and looked at me. He smiled.

“If this war ever ends, Broyle, and you’re still standing. Look me up. Maybe we could be friends.”

Three weeks later, a whole new crew arrived. All four years younger than me. They complained about the cold constantly. They would sit at the table at night, asking me to join them.

“There’ll be time for that when the war is over,” I would tell them.

“Whenever that day comes, LT,” one of them would always say back to me.

They don’t know yet. I pray they’ll never have to learn, certainly not the way I did.

About a month after the new troops arrived on Priam, I received a communique. I was to be given Kaffie’s post and his rank. Included in the message was a commendation undersigned by a Major Sebastian Pollack, a man I never met, for he was only ever Transom through the course of the war.