Guaranteed Analysis

by Brad Andrews

conclusion

After three hours the remaining population of Horatio-17 had been given a continent as a reservation. They accepted it with a well-played weariness. Once the meeting came to a close, they even offered a token of grudging respect. It was a native foodstuff, non-sentient. They explained that over the previous three years that they had actually fed it to POW’s and that they thrived on it so much so that it had to be taken away, as it wasn’t the point to allow POW’s to thrive.

The Admiral in charge, with a bio-mechanical hand gesture thanked the natives for the offer and handed it off to an aide. It was against regulations for officers of Earth Guard to accept tokens of any sort, especially from an enemy force. The gift would probably be used for a subsidiary food-stuff for the initial group of colonists. Personally, the admiral could care less and just wanted to get off of Horatio-17 as quickly as duty allowed. Let the civilians eat the salad!

A year later the heavy cruiser Guaranteed Analysis dropped into a defensive polar orbit. It had been tasked with an unscheduled stopover to investigate the loss of communication with the entire planet. Personally I was surprised and unhappy to be back here again. The thoughts of all of those I knew who had died here rushed back in a tide of sorrow.

I could still see the look of pain on Smara’s face as that thistle had torn through her, or Reynolds as he’d fallen onto a root, and the fifty other faces of pain I’d never forget. I was going over my 28’s read-out when my cabin door chime sounded. I’d been promoted and rated a private, though cramped cabin. “Come in.”

Training got me to my feet on the double as a full colonel walked in. He waved me at ease. “3B1st Miles Catch, correct?”

I nodded and belted out a “Yes, Sir, how can I help you, Sir?” He asked me if I’d care to join him for a walk.

We left my small cabin and made our way to the secondary row of shuttle bays in a easy silence.

As we approached bay 27 I thought for a moment that I could hear screaming of a kind I had never heard even during combat. We both entered the bay as the senior officers’ net cleared the security system.

Before us stood a type-5 planetary shuttle with its forward hull stripped and replaced by a clear armor used for view ports. It had been converted for observational purposes. What we were observing was human, but one so pitiful that I nearly had to turn away.

The colonel noticed my reaction and led me back out of the bay into its upper control deck and closed the shutters. “You’ve been to Horatio-17 before, eh?”

I nodded, still trying to clear my head. “Yes, sir, almost four years ago, during the initial strike.”

The senior officer nodded “What were your impressions?”

I started with “brutal” and ended with “unforgiving.” For some reason this was enough to make the colonel smile. “The person you just saw in the shuttle is one of the guards stationed along Horatio’s island 8, the one used as a reservation for the planet’s remaining natives.”

The colonel paused for some effect but I thought it the wrong time for it. “Okay, I give, what’s wrong with him?”

“Withdrawal.”

“I beg your pardon?” I had seen people go off a drug before, and it wasn’t anything compared to this. This wretch had torn most of his skin off and had been stacking it in piles. With what he held in his hands he was squeezing droplets into his mouth.

“All we know is that the substance is made on the planet below and that we can no longer reliably contact over forty thousand colonists and service members.”

I repeated myself. “I beg your pardon?”

I already had my suspicions of where the drug had come from, but it’s never wise to guess in front of your superiors. I waited for the explanation. When I got it I wasn’t happy. Not at the natives but at our own forces for being so stupid or blind as not to pick up on it sooner. Hell, we’d had four colony ships approaching with almost a half million people on a slow burn in Gallagher Safes. Everybody had been in a hurry and gotten careless.

Once again, here I was dropping onto this little dirt-ball of a planet. This time I had even less to go on than before. Was I only going to be fighting and killing the natives or would I be up against drug-crazed colonists and armed troopers? We went in under stealth and heavily armored. The ship felt sluggish even to a non-pilot like myself.

We landed rather than doing quick-drops. The drop-ship began to erect fortified defense layers, with everything from inflatable sleeping units to a make-shift factory and hospital. Hatches popped open and out flew a dozen drones to take up a perimeter.

My ship and a dozen others secured a perimeter of a hundred square miles. Overhead, the Guaranteed Analysis was watching. Orbital bombardment could be called up at a moment’s notice. We were as well defended as we could get.

I stepped back onto the surface of Horatio-17 for the first time in years. We were expecting the worst. My peripheral Heads Up Display showed my squad — a hand-picked bunch — taking their assigned spots around me. Each of us covered one another in a classic defensive pattern. At the moment there were no weak spots.

My senses were assaulted by odors, and my armor automatically damped down the synth-sense. We were all buttoned up to protect against any bio or chemical attack, but I knew enough to identify the smell as the stink of decay and neglect. But in all of my years of combat I had never come close to smelling anything quite like it. Had the natives tried to stink the place up? It seemed beyond uncaring for themselves, and it gave me a fright.

They came at us quick, frenzied, as if starving. It was all we could do to pick them off. We barely realized at first that we were killing fellow humans, even soldiers. Our minds simply registered threats and acted accordingly.

What followed, over the next four days, was unlike anything a modern battle force had ever had to deal with. Historically it was akin to allied forces at the end of World War II discovering concentration camps with their overwhelming, incomprehensible sense of loss.

With each day our sense of anger, with each death of another human, our sense of hatred grew. I believe that it was the last colony village we came across that sealed it for us. We couldn’t take it any more.

The small colony village was nothing I had ever been prepared for. The population was squeezing the absorbed drug from the skin of their dead fellows. And there were the distilling vats. What really took us over the edge were the natives on the outskirts of town, docile and seemingly dormant, knowing what they had unleashed.

We broke the treaty by killing the natives, and I took full responsibility. After three more days on the ground, killing everything in sight, my squad rotated back to the Guaranteed Analysis. We made our argument to N-bomb the place.

Apparently we were not the only senior squad to tender the same opinion, and we were all given the chance to sign our names or scrawl a personal note onto the Neutron-tipped bombs that were about to be dropped from orbit. Very little would be left. Geological features, mostly.

I pulled a few strings to get my squad a ringside seat: an auxiliary armored bubble near the primary missile bays. Watching a Merit-Class ship like the Guaranteed Analysis fire a planet-wasting salvo of N-bombs is not something one ever expects to see in a career. The show was thoroughly impressive and satisfying. I imagined the deaths of the natives and was — in a merciful way — glad for the deaths of the rest of the humans on the planet below.

We spent another month on Horatio-17. Deep scans had showed us that, amazingly, not everything had been killed. Teams were rotated quickly in and out to minimize radiation exposure. Our squad was one of the last.

The place was a horror show; we knew it would be, just looking into the faces of the teams on their way back up. They didn’t talk to anyone as they left the shuttles.

I didn’t really know what to expect. Most of the native survivors had been tucked away deep in valleys and under ledges. It would take a month to eradicate the lot of them, but their day was done.

I sat, taking a pull from my water pack, and inspected the root system of a small native I had just upturned with my trenching tool and contemplated herbicide.