Duty, Honor, Planet

here and monitored things.”

“What message?” Shannon wanted to know. “We stopped listening three hours ago, when everything went off the air.”

“So did we,” Corporal Lee said. “But this shit”—he jerked a thumb at the commo gear behind him—“picks up any wide-band communication automatically. And ma’am,” he went on, grinning despite himself, “this sucker was wide, wide band.” He leaned over and punched a series of controls and the main screen —an old-fashioned, LCD flatscreen—flickered to life. “I taped the first one,” Lee explained, sliding off the desk to give them all a clear view.

An image formed slowly on the meter-wide screen, coalescing from a hazy darkness into the figure of a man. Everything about him spoke of strength. He was powerfully-built, his broad shoulders and thick neck straining the seams of his old-fashioned grey suit, his clenching hands large and thick-fingered. Grey was sprinkled liberally through his bushy mustache and the hair at his temple, but it seemed more to signify the wisdom of experience than the weakness of old age. Behind him hung a flag: red and white vertical bars, centered by a circle of stars.

Even before he spoke, Shannon knew who he was. There was no mistaking the jut of that cleft jaw or the set of his beady brown eyes; they had jumped out at her from a thousand old videos in history classes and political science lectures. But though she knew it for a certainty, every fiber of her being screamed, No, it can’t be.

“I am,” the man spoke, his voice a boulder crashing on a field of gravel, “General Sergei Pavlovich Antonov.” The corners of his mouth turned up slightly. “You may have heard of me.”

“Holy God,” Klesko muttered from the couch. Beside him, Valerie’s eyes were the size of pie-plates. Her father’s mouth had dropped open, and he backed up, falling awkwardly to a seat on an arm of the couch. Glen was watching silently, expression neutral.

“Feel free to doubt whether I am truly the man I claim to be,” Antonov continued, a hint of a Slavic accent evident in his voice. “I shall not go into how I have survived over a century without appearing to have aged, since your belief or disbelief in no way affects my actions. What you must believe, however, is that the fist of the Protectorate has returned to reclaim what is ours. Once before, we offered to lead the oppressed masses of this world to liberation, but the forces of the reactionaries resorted to the ultimate in aggression to thwart us, and we were left with no choice but to withdraw and regroup.

“Regroup we have.” A vibrant light burned in Antonov’s eyes. “Our strength is renewed and we have come to unseat the pretenders who have stolen our revolution and used it to enrich the upper class exploiters. They have claimed to defend your freedom, yet they have enslaved you and imprisoned you in their gulag cities and kept you docile with their bread and circuses. No more. Our soldiers have crushed the defenses of the corporate masters, and you will soon be free.

“To those remnants of the oppressor military which may hold out hope of opposing us, this warning is for you,” the big man said harshly, the affectionate tone melting into fiery rancor. “You may think your spacecraft and weaponry superior to ours, but you may wish to reconsider.”

The image of Antonov disappeared, replaced by a shot of Gregory Jameson. The Republic president seemed disheveled but unharmed, sitting on an office chair with a biomech’s weapon pointed at his head.

“This is the corporate puppet who arrogates himself as your leader,” said the Russian’s voice-over. “He is being held in the ground control center for your network of defense satellites. We have destroyed your military space station and have assumed total control of these orbital weapons.” Shannon flinched, stomach twisting as she realized that Colonel Mellanby was likely dead—along with a thousand other Fleet personnel. “Any attack on our space vessels will be met by the fire of your own ground-based laser weapons and will provoke us to use the fusion missiles in your military satellites on your population centers. Any attack on the satellite control center will result in the immediate execution of the pretender Jameson and a terrible retribution by our ships in orbit on one of your cities.”

The image on the screen switched back to Antonov, his eyes afire with the same glare they’d possessed when he’d declared war on China.

“Our demands are simple: complete and unconditional surrender by all military forces. Your ships will immediately assume a high-earth orbit, deactivate all drives and weapons systems and prepare for boarding. Your ground forces will lay down their arms and report to Capital City within the next forty-eight hours. Anyone caught wearing a military uniform after that deadline will be shot on sight. Anyone attempting to interfere with Protectorate troops will be shot on sight. Be assured that any action against us is futile, and will not only result in the deaths of the aggressors but in the deaths of civilians. I am not a monster, and I do not wish this to happen, so do not force my hand.”

Antonov’s expression transformed once more, from the ruthless warrior to the revolutionary ideologue. “When last I left this world, I was consumed, obsessed only with winning back the glory of my Slavic brethren and, one day, making whole the Motherland. Since then, my travels and experiences have helped me to grow—and my dreams have grown as well. Now, I seek not just the liberation of my own people, but all people. All those among you who love liberty, rejoice! Your time has come at long last.”

Lee hit a button and the screen faded to black.

“There was some other shit about penalties and curfews,” the corporal said, “but you get the gist of it.”

“It must be some kind of trick,” Senator O’Keefe said, hands visibly trembling. “Antonov—even if he survived the war, he’d be dead long ago. It’s got to be a trick.”

“I don’t know,” Shannon admitted, still staring at the screen. “The reason I’m—I was back here was to report our findings on the investigation at Aphrodite.” She turned and looked the Senator in the eye. “Those ‘alien’ Invaders, Senator, were actually biomechanical constructs, assembled from cloned tissue—cloned human tissue.” She saw Daniel O’Keefe’s eyes narrow and nodded. “We managed to piece together a theory, and it looks like we were right.”

“What kind of theory?” Glen asked. He seemed, incredibly, unfazed by the series of revelations. Maybe, she thought, he’d finally reached the point where he couldn’t be shocked anymore.

“According to rumors among the Russian scientific community,” she told them, “the first Protectorate ships that were sent to the asteroid belt discovered some kind of gateway—a hole in space that led to another solar system, somewhere. They reported their discovery, but before Antonov could do anything about it, the war with China broke out. Sometime during or after the nuclear exchange, the stories say, Antonov and his staff and personal guard took a shuttle to the ships that were waiting in orbit for their planned Mars mission.

“Our theory was that Antonov took the ships through the gateway and that somewhere on the other side, someone or something found them and used them for their genetic material to create the army of biomechs that invaded Aphrodite.”

“You said that was your theory,” Senator O’Keefe interrupted.

“Yes, sir,” she explained. “If that is Antonov, then the Russians that escaped through that gateway weren’t just the victims—they are and have been collaborators.”

“But what can we do about it?”

“That’s your decision, sir,” she told him. She couldn’t help but want to laugh. Jason would love this. “With the President in enemy hands and his staff and the other members of the Senate dead, you are the acting head of the Republic.”

Chapter Eighteen

“The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.”

—The Duke of Wellington

Jason woke from a fever-dream of shark-eyed blue monsters to a rush of frigid air and the bitter aftertaste of biotic fluid. He choked out a hacking cough and forced his eyes open. For a long moment, he was convinced the face looming over him was a creature come to life from his nightmares, but then it coalesced into the severe bangs and