“Let’s have a look at the ranks, shall we?” Klyber said in a comfortable voice, but he paid little attention to the rows of Marines as he walked by. “Have you encountered any resistance?” Klyber asked.
“No, sir,” McKay replied.
“No one challenged the air wings, either?” Klyber asked.
“No, sir,” said Olivera.
“Have you found evidence of terrorist activity?” Klyber asked.
“One of my platoons sighted a large tunnel just west of town,” McKay answered. “It was over three miles long.”
“A three-mile-long snake shaft?” Klyber asked. “Religious fanatics, mobsters, racial segregationists…It’s getting hard to tell the riffraff apart. I understand the Mogats have a large presence on Ezer Kri. Are your men prepared to lay down the law?”
“Yes, sir,” said McKay.
“Then we have little to worry about, Captain,” Klyber said, sweeping his gaze over the ranks. “This seems like a very pleasant planet; let’s hope our stay is uneventful. Admiral Barry, I wish to conclude our tour of Ezer Kri within the month.”
The name of the city appeared as “Hero’s Fall” in our orders and in the mediaLink accounts of our operation, but as usual, we were misinformed. The local signage said “Hiro’s Fall.” Apparently the city was named after Takuhiro Yatagei, “Hiro” for short, the planet administrator who stocked the planet with people of Japanese descent. This was the spot where he and the original colonists landed—in legend talk, they “fell from the sky.”
Searching for “riffraff ” in Hiro’s Fall proved to be problematic. The bureaucratic tangles began the first day. The mayor of Hiro’s Fall complained to Governor Yamashiro, and Yamashiro formally inquired of the Senate if the Unified Authority was declaring “martial law” on Ezer Kri. The historic reference did not go unnoticed.
I wish we had declared Martial Law. I wish we had launched a full-scale invasion. Enemies do not demand their rights when you bully them, citizens do. Several shopkeepers refused to allow us to inspect their businesses. The president of a car manufacturer called his congressman in DC when Captain McKay sent an inspection team to visit his plant. The Hiro’s Fall police department even arrested one of our fire teams for assaulting a local resident. When the police discovered that the victim was a burglar caught in the act, they let the squad go with a warning.
None of this should have mattered, but the more we scratched the surface, the more we found evidence of deeply rooted corruption. An inspection of the port authority logs showed that the local police ignored smugglers. The Senate’s problem might have been with the Japanese population of Ezer Kri, but the problem in this town was a Mogat infestation. The Mogat community had become so deeply rooted in Hiro’s Fall that people referred to one of the western suburbs as the “Mogat district.”
I had read more than a few stories about Mogats since taking Aleg Oberland’s advice about following current events. The Mogats were a religious cult that took its name from Morgan Atkins, a mysterious and charismatic man who vanished about fifty years ago. I did not know anything about Atkins himself, and the only thing I knew about his movement was that it was the first religion created in space.
The U.A. government promoted Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These churches had holy sites on Earth, and the government encouraged any activity that strengthened ties between frontier planets and Earth.
Atkins’s beliefs were pangalactic. His preaching stressed independence, stopping just shy of outright rebellion. While the U.A. Constitution called for general freedom of religion, the Senate spun out a litany of obtuse laws designed to discourage Mogat expansion. The laws did not succeed. Protected by the courts, Mogat communes sprang like daisies across the frontier. News stories about the Mogat movement inevitably started with accusations about smuggling and ended with warnings about Mogat proselytizing and predictions that Atkinism would one day be the largest religion in the galaxy.
No matter what we found, Barry and Klyber seemed unwilling to do more than patrol the streets. We sent platoons on routine patrols through the Mogat district—an industrial area lined with warehouses and factories. We sent “peacekeeping” missions to monitor spaceports. Klyber wanted to make our presence felt without creating confrontations. His strategy worked. Most of the residents of Hiro’s Fall resented our presence. We made ourselves hard to ignore.
I did not mind patrolling Hiro’s Fall, though it was fairly dull work. The town was not especially picturesque, but you could see the Japanese influence everywhere. A few downtown parks had pagodas with rice paper walls and fluted roofs. The canal running through the center of town was teeming with gold and white koi. Less than 30 percent of Hiro’s Fall was Japanese; but if you were in the right part of town, you might see women dressed in orange-and-red kimonos. My sightseeing ended when the shooting began.
We began sending routine patrols into the Mogat district the night after we landed. These patrols were uneventful. We would hike past warehouses, steel foundries, and gas stations. Workmen stopped and stared at us. There was no way of knowing if these people were Atkins believers, though I suppose most of them were. One thing I noticed during a patrol was that few people in the Mogat district were Japanese.
Seven days after we landed on Ezer Kri, Staff Sergeant Ron Azor led the Twenty-fifth Platoon into the Mogat district for a late-morning patrol. The goal was to follow a random path, marching through alleys and small streets as well as main roads. Azor’s path, however, was reckless.
Our combat helmets were designed for standard battlefield situations. They offered good visibility in most situations, but anything above a seventy-degree plane was a blind spot. Whoever planned the attack must have known that.
Azor opened his platoon up for an ambush by marching through a labyrinth of tall buildings and narrow alleyways. A four-story cinder-block building lined their final stretch. Walking beside that building, Azor’s platoon had no hope of spotting the enemy that watched from above.
Just as the platoon reached the middle of the block, somebody fired two rockets from the roof of the building. Four men died instantly. Gunmen, hiding behind a ledge, picked off three more men as the platoon dashed across the street for cover.
Desperate to regroup, Azor shot the door off a warehouse. He and his men ducked in and radioed for assistance. Moments later, three rockets slammed into the warehouse. The corrugated steel walls blew apart as did a fuel pump inside the building. No one survived.
***
I was off duty when Shannon burst into the barracks and announced the attack. Every available man was called in. I threw on my armor and climbed into a truck. As we drove from the camp, I looked into a blue sky filled with feathery clouds, wondering how there could be an attack on such a beautiful day.
I asked that question again as the truck dropped us next to the pile of rubble that had once been a thirty-foot-tall warehouse. Twisted fingers of what once was a wall stood in the corners of the lot; everything else had crumbled. We were the third platoon to arrive on the scene. Men in green armor dotted the rubble. Shannon led us to a corner of the ruins, and we began pulling up metal sheets and concrete chunks by hand. I felt the urgency, but I knew that we would not find survivors. No one survives that kind of devastation.
I heard the thudding engines of gunships passing overhead. Long and squat and bulky, three Warthogs floated across the sky. They hardly looked airworthy, but there was something menacing about the deliberate way they scoured the rooftops.
The tension was thick. Had a pedestrian carelessly strolled down the street, we might have shot first and asked questions later. But the streets were empty. Perhaps they had been empty before the ambush as well. I wondered how many people knew that the ambush was coming.