All is Fair Ch. 02

"Okay, sounds reasonable, but how does that explain the comms going down and the tanks losing power?"

"It doesn't... The power in a tank can only be shut off remotely with a shutdown frequency."

"That's right," the angry corporal nodded, "It's a security thing to make sure they can't be used against the Imperium. But that is, like, a two-hundred-digit code."

"Yeah, it is." Cameron nodded, leaving the implication hanging over the group. "There is no way they could have stumbled onto that. They had to have been given it. But the rebels being given tactical information like that would also explain the comms. The power surge wouldn't have touched those either. They would have to have been actively jammed, meaning they needed to know the exact frequencies we were using."

"You're forgetting about the Ping," Stevo added, already knowing the answer to this particular question.

"What do you mean?" Cameron squinted. "What about it?"

"Did it strike anyone else as odd how that artillery strike was so accurate? I've been around the block a few times in my career, but I have never seen artillery hit with anything like the precision the rebels managed. They were given the frequency to our ping, too. They knew where we were down to the inch."

"They could have pre-sighted the trenches, though," one of the other captives offered.

"And still manage to land shots on the heads of almost every marine? Not to mention hitting every tank with a working comm?" Stevo countered. "Let me take a stab at this. You," he pointed at the angry corporal, "didn't have a comm unit in your tank. It was already faulty, so you never received the order to activate your ping." The man nodded, "You," he pointed to Jennings, "said you were knocked out after the second hit. I bet your comms unit in your helmet was damaged then, just like mine was. They lost the signal and couldn't target you. Mac didn't activate his, because he was right next to me when I activated mine... How many of the rest of you didn't follow the order to ping?"

"I didn't," Walker answered, "Me and Malone were on the firing line, we were too busy beating back the rebels. I just assumed someone else on the line would do it, and their contact would be close enough to me to keep us safe when the destroyers opened up."

"I didn't activate mine. I was too busy patching the data stream back to fire control," Cameron murmured, looking deep in thought.

"Anyone else?" Most of the people in the room raised their hands. "And if that is not enough proof," Stevo went on, "Angel, my corporal, the one whose condition I asked about, took off her helmet and tossed it toward the rebels when we figured it out. No prizes for guessing where the next plasma bomb hit."

"My god," Cameron had her hand over her mouth.

"Now, Lance Corporal," Stevo turned to her. "You are our resident communications expert; tell me how hard it is to hack that system."

"It's not just hard, it's impossible." Cameron shook her head. "It's not just crazily encrypted; it's a closed system. You would have to already be inside it to be able to even add data - like a location - to it. But you would need to have, Jesus, ultra-classified level access to be able to receive the data. That can't be the work of a hacker or a spy, it... fuck..."

"What?" the angry Corporal was back on his feet again. "It what?"

"It can only be a traitor. Someone sold us out. Someone high up."

Stevo looked over his shoulder at Mac. He knew the same things Stevo did. "Which brings us to the next big question," he looked around. Did anyone see any medevacs coming in?"

A few of the Marines opened their mouths to speak, but invariably, they would pause, frown, close their mouths, and shake their heads. "I d... don't understand what you mean. What are you saying?" Walker asked.

Stevo sighed. "Before we were captured, we pulled a pilot out of a downed Broadsword, carried her to cover, and stuck with her til we were captured. She was still conscious. She told us that one of her wingmen was hit and bugged out back to the carrier."

"Yeah, that's pretty standard for fighters," Cameron nodded

"She radioed in when she got there... She told Almark, the pilot we rescued, that there were people... on the carrier.... Killing the pilots who returned. And then someone shot her while she was still on the comms."

Silence fell around the room as the full implication of that information started to slowly set in.

"No... No, It can't be, they wouldn't," the angry corporal stammered, dropping back onto his cot. "She's lying! She has to be."

"Why?" Stevo shrugged. "What possible reason would she have to lie about that? She had been hit. She was going down. Why would she take her chances on the beach when she could have evacuated back to the carrier?"

The angry corporal, like a few other silent members of the group, were hugging themselves, trying to ward off or comfort themselves against the reality of their situation. Stevo doubted it was working, but none of them raised any more arguments against the idea. Deep down, each of them knew - as Stevo did - that the entire Three-Eight-One being sold out by the Imperium itself was the only way to explain what had happened to them.

"Why?" Jennings finally said. "Why would they do that?"

"I don't know," Stevo shook his head, "And the only way we are going to find out is if the rebels tell us. Which is one of the reasons..." he turned to look at the angry corporal, "...I'm playing nice with them."

The man looked up, held his eye, and then nodded in understanding. "I'm sorry for my outburst. I just..."

"It's alright, Corporal. We're all feeling the pressure. Can I get your name now?"

"It's Sam. Sam Wooly, no prizes for guessing what my nickname was."

"Sheep?"

"Cardigan?"

"Blanket?"

"Bah, Bah?"

The silly ideas seemed to lighten the mood, and "Sheep" was confirmed as the correct answer among the quiet peals of laughter.

********

Michaels. 5

Reality seemed to fade into being as his eyes slowly opened. His eyelids felt heavy and sluggish, his mouth and his lips were parched, and swallowing the paltry amount of saliva in his mouth seemed to take an extraordinary amount of effort, but slowly, his awareness seemed to return to him. He remembered where he was; he wished he didn't, but he remembered everything. He braced himself for the pain, the same pain that had blanketed his last bout of consciousness, and for a few merciful seconds, the agony seemed to leave him alone.

And then it didn't.

A deep, rasping groan seemed to pull itself from his lips, a sound that took his ears completely by surprise, so much so that he wasn't sure it had come from him for a few seconds. It sounded alien, distant, and - for lack of a better word - broken. For a man who had spent his entire adult life needing to be very sure of the power of his own voice, it was an oddly disconcerting experience.

"Easy there, Colonel," a disembodied voice echoed into his ears. "Have some water, slowly now."

Michaels groaned again as the rim of some description of plastic cup was pressed to his lips, and the cool water flowed over his tongue. Of course, his bone-dry throat didn't respond the way it was supposed to, and a violent and painful cough ripped through his chest as his lungs tried to expel the new liquid intruder.

Coughing up the few drops of water that seemed to be intent on drowning was a herculean task. It felt like gallons of water were being pulled out of his lungs with every agonizing clench of his diaphragm. Each cough could be measured on the same scale of pain as a sledgehammer to the ribs would be; he could feel the veins over his temples bulging, and his body seemed to demand to be sat up straight to avoid any more risks of drowning, despite it apparently being in no condition to be able to do so. Every part of his nervous system fought against every other part, and every one of his bodily instincts seemed totally at odds with the seemingly catastrophic levels of damage done to his body.

It came as something of a surprise, then, when a strong hand pushed itself between his back and the bed and pulled him into a sitting position, not only with relative ease but with a markedly less amount of pain than he was already expecting.

"That's it, get it up," the voice said again. There was something at the back of the Colonel's mind that was starting to think the voice sounded strangely familiar. "Breathe. Take your time; you've been through quite an ordeal."

Yeah, no shit. He felt like he had been dropped onto the planet from orbit without the use of a dropship and then been run over by a tank instead of being inside one. Everything felt like it had been broken. No, not broken... smashed. He felt how he imagined a plate to feel after a Greek wedding.

"How much do you remember, Andre?"

Michaels kept his eyes closed. He didn't trust them not to try to leap out of his skull if he opened them. "How many?"

"I'm sorry?"

"How many of my men were killed?"

There was a pause before the voice sighed. "Too many. Survivors are numbered in the very low hundreds, and most of them are wounded."

Yup, he was wrong. His injuries didn't feel like a sledgehammer caving in his chest; that did. The world seemed to collapse in on him, the sheer weight of it all. There had been twenty thousand men in formation before him on the carrier... Twenty Thousand... and now there were only a few hundred left? It was too much, it was too big, it was...

A thought ripped him out of the way of that fall into the yawning pit of despair. He frowned at it "How do you know my name?" He asked slowly; Michaels could count on two hands the number of people who knew his first name and even fewer who he tolerated using it to his face. All of them were either dead or lighyears away.

The voice paused, seeming unsure how to answer that. Michaels, in no mood to play those sorts of games, decided to cut through the theatrics and force his eyes to open. The sunlight seemed to assault every single one of his ocular nerve endings, searing the brightness of the morning into his retina, the shock of which sent another blistering wave of nausea-inducing pain through his skull. The room spun, but he forced himself to swallow down on his stomach's desire to give his last meal an encore appearance, and he forced his eyelids to stay open.

In a feat of strength and self-discipline that would astound most people, Michaels pulled his gaze to the figure standing beside him. It was like his eyeballs were being dragged through gravel and broken glass, but he did it anyway. The man standing beside his bed was shadowed against the brilliant, torturous light of the window he was standing before, his outline hazy, his features indistinct, even as the blurriness and the shadow started to clear.

Slowly, one feature at a time, the haze started to clear. A hospital room, surprisingly clean and modern looking - at least as much as his last memory on the beach suggested it would be - but standing between him and the window, his hand on Michaels' back and that plastic cup in the other one, was a ghost.

"Valdek?"

"In the flesh." Serge Valdek nodded his head.

"But... you're dead. The rebels ambushed your fleet. They killed you."

"Did they?" The Admiral smiled. "I hope I don't need to quote Mark Twain at you."

"Who?"

Valdek rolled his eyes. "Ancient Earth author. He's the one who said, 'reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.'"

"Oh," Michaels frowned. "I thought that was Daniel Radcliffe,"

Valdek snorted. "Still need to get you started on a monthly suppository of culture, my friend. No, Daniel Radcliffe was the guy who shit himself at the Superbowl about 500 years ago."

Michaels' eye twitched. They seemed to be getting off track. "What are you doing here?"

The smile faded from Valdek's face. "I'm sorry I couldn't tell you. I... defected, Andre,"

The colonel felt his jaw fall into his lap. Valdek was the golden child of the Imperial Navy; he had won more victories than almost every other admiral combined. He was personally responsible for a string of stunning victories, including the one that had kept Michaels alive in the space about Sigmus IV while the colonel was on the ground fighting. That had been more than thirty years ago, and they had been friends ever since... or at least Michaels had thought so. But this... this was a level of betrayal - both of the Imperium and of himself personally - that beggared belief. "But... why?" It was the only question he could come up with.

There was a pause. "You know why."

"No!" Michaels almost growled, shoving both of Valdek's hands off his as if they were burning him. The plastic cup crashed to the floor, splashing the remains of its water over the former Admiral's pants. "I don't know why. You're a fucking traitor! I went to WAR for you! Thousands of my men are dead... for YOU! And here you are, alive and well and working for the fucking rebellion!"

"They know I'm here." Valdek said calmly, never breaking eye contact. "The Imperium, the emperor, they know I'm alive..." he clarified for Michaels' shocked expression. "... and they know I'm here. There was no fleet action; I was never attacked. I told them exactly what I was doing and why."

"They told us you were dead. Attacked while..."

"Running a convoy," Valdek scoffed. "To Orpheus-fucking-IV, because that made sense. Why wouldn't the Imperium's golden boy Admiral be in command of an unarmed civilian flotilla that somehow got turned around and wandered into the badlands, where a rebel fleet just happened to be waiting for him? C'mon, Andre, I know you better than that. You questioned the official story, even if only to yourself."

Michales clenched his jaw, snarling at the Judas before him. But the Judas had a point, the story hadn't made even a remote amount of sense when he heard it. He was loyal to the Imperium and to the Emperor, but he was perfectly capable of seeing the faults in the system, and the endless shitpile of propaganda and bullshit was the tip of a very large iceberg. No, he hadn't bought the story that Valdek had been ambushed while running a relief convoy, but he hadn't questioned for a moment that he was dead, nor had he doubted for one second that the rebels had killed him. It had never occured to him that one of his oldest friends had betrayed everything Michaels held dear and true.

He frowned.

If Valdek had turned coat and defected, he knew the man well enough to know that he wouldn't have snuck out in the night like some criminal. He would have gone with his head held high, as loudly and publicly as possible. Admittedly, the "publically" part of that would have probably ended up being "not very," Michaels doubted more than a handful of members of the upper command structure would have known the truth. It certainly wouldn't have reached as far down the chain as Michaels. But it didn't take much deep thinking for the extrapolations to start falling into place.

"We weren't sent here to kill the rebels, were we?"

Valdek shook his head. "No," he answered softly, letting his friend come to the truth himself.

"And you didn't want to be captured and sent back to the Imperium for trial and execution..." Michaels continued, the accusation still thick in his voice. "The shields, our comms, all of it. You gave them everything they needed to stop yourself from being taken by us,"

Valdek arched an eyebrow. "How? I wouldn't have had access to that information for one of my own fleets, let alone someone else's."

Michaels' frown deepened. That was a good point.

"If you're going to understand this, you're never going to be able to do it thinking like a Marine Colonel," Valdek offered after a long silence.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"They've trained you to think the way they want you to think. See the way they want you to see. Someone is a friend or an enemy. An enemy who used to be a friend is a traitor because there is no legitimate reason anybody could have for willingly turning their backs on an Emperor who is as close to a living god as any of us will ever know." Valdek said, taking a step back and lowering himself onto a metal-framed chair behind him. "But you see it, don't you? You see the lies, you see the endless, fanatical mission to hide the truth and bury it beneath what the Imperium wants you to see. You may not be able to see it, but you know that what you can see, isn't it."

"You sound like a fortune cookie."

Valdek snorted out a laugh. "I guess I do. So you tell me. How did the last mission of the Three-Eight-One go so terribly wrong? In fact, let's start earlier than that. How do I know the name of your division at all?"

"One of the survivors told you."

"A battle-hardened Marine would give classified details to a treasonous former Imperial Admiral... or to anyone, for that matter.... Come on, Andre. Tell me all the things that went wrong, all the things that didn't add up. How would I know, for example, that your battle interface didn't work in your tank? That the commanding officer on the ground went into that battle completely blind. Could survivors have told me that?"

"What? How did you..."

"Do you think that it's because someone up the chain of command wanted you blind?"

Michaels blinked.

"Would you like to see the map of the battle you commanded? A real one?" The Admiral didn't wait for an answer. He reached into the inner breast pocket of his trenchcoat and pulled out a rolled up, portable holo projector and rolled it out onto the end of Michaels' bed. Without saying a word, he sat back down and waited for the projector to activate. In only a few seconds, a shimmering topographical map - the one he should have had access to in his command tank - started to rotate lazily in the air.

Michaels' eyes slowly started to widen as the details that couldn't quite be appreciated on a two-dimensional, incomplete map started to become painfully obvious. The beach, with its towering cliffs on either side, was quite possibly the worst conceivable place to launch an assault. More than just the terrain, the enormous network of trenches and reinforced bunkers spread out like a shattered pane of glass along the top of the beach told a story of its own.

One that said that on an Island of more than 25,000 square miles, the entire rebel army seemed to have miraculously guessed and then prepared the exact landing point of the Three-Eight-One attack.

Valdek leaned over and tapped an icon on the display, and the map came to life, an accelerated account of the battle playing out in painstaking detail over the display. The air wings coming in, the first MAC rounds hitting the flak guns at the top of the beach, the wreckage of destroyed dropships crashing into the ocean and the surrounding hills. The first waves landing, then the second's, then the third's. Then his.

Then things started to go wrong.

The energy pulse. The rebel strike craft swarming over the map, and then the artillery barrage. Michaels watched in horrified fascination as thousands of blue dots, each representing a single Marine, were blasted out of existence with extraordinary efficiency. Then, the red swarm washed over the beach. As the hours played out over the space of minutes, he was able to see the last holdouts of Imperium forces by the gaps in the red tide. But one by one, they started to fall.

"Tell me what you see," Valdek said as the battle drew to a close.

Michaels could only stare at the map in stunned silence.

"You had access to our sensor readings. The ping..." he said slowly, "the whole system was compromised. We..."