Grass Eaters 2 | 17 | The Real War II

Atlas Naval Command, Luna

POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Admiral)

Hunched over at her desk, Amelia absorbed herself in the tedious paperwork on her Navy-issued tablet. Its soft glow illuminated her face, casting sharp shadows that accentuated the deep lines etched by years of service and stress. The room, silent except for the occasional tap of her fingers on the screen, felt more like a cell than an office.

She was used to her warnings being ignored, but it was usually by the ignorant… by people who were unaware of the grave Znosian threat to the Terran Republic. Now, they insisted they were convinced by her imperatives, but they nonetheless shrugged and explained what she asked for was unrealistic, too difficult, or politically impossible. Amelia preferred it when people were just wrong instead of unwilling to be right.

Her seething was interrupted by a sharp knock on her office door. She looked up.

It was an unfamiliar middle-aged man. Bald. Tall, muscular build. No uniform or lanyard badge, which was unusual but not unheard of this time of the night at Atlas Naval Command.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he replied casually as he shut the door behind him with a soft click and sauntered toward her desk without her permission. “But I might be able to help you.”

She tensed. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

“I’m Hersh,” the man smiled, holding out his hand, which she hesitantly shook. “I work… around here.”

Amelia raised an eyebrow in suspicion. “Which office?”

“Royal Ranger.”

She put on her most convincing frown. “Never heard of it, so if you don’t mind—”

Wordlessly, he presented her an ID card, which she verified with her tablet. It beeped out a confirmation ping and displayed on its screen: Operator “Hersh”, Terran Reconnaissance Office, Alien Politics Division.

She looked back up at the operator. “Where’s the regular liaison? And why didn’t Mark introduce you to me?”

Hersh shook his head. “Not here, Admiral Amelia— may I call you Amelia?”

“I prefer Admiral, if you don’t mind,” she replied suspiciously.

“Admiral it is. Let’s take a walk.”

She joined him on a short stroll deeper into the complex. Descending a few floors down, into a section she’d rarely been in. He picked a conference room, seemingly at random, and led her into it, closing it behind them.

“What’s with the cloak and dagger, spook?” she asked as they settled down across from each other. “Did someone bug my office?”

The operative shook his head. “Not in the traditional sense. Just your office recorder,” he said, referring to the legally mandated recorder embedded within every office, its contents sealed and never opened unless… she was being investigated for a serious crime.

She felt her mouth dry. “Am I being—”

“No,” he shook his head again. “Well, there was an inquiry into you a few months ago, but we killed it in the crib. Pardon the expression. This isn’t about that. I just wanted a chat,” he continued, “in a more casual setting.”

“I see. And where’s the rest of your secret squirrels? I hear the weather in Grantor is nice this time of the year.”

“Yes, Mark’s team is still on vacation,” Hersh dismissed with a quick wave of his hand. “High value target mission, you know the drill.”

She snorted dismissively. “Hostage rescue, they said. I’ve never seen a hostage rescue mission that required as much ordnance and additional cargo as they packed onto the Nile before they took her from my task force.”

“Well, we all have our hobbies,” Hersh replied nonchalantly. “And that’s not the reason I wanted to talk to you. It’s this upcoming… Red Zone war.”

“So, what is it? You guys got a new mission for me?” Amelia asked.

Hersh shook his head. “Not quite. This is more about the upcoming Red Zone sanitation campaign. Big effort this time.”

“What about it?” Amelia asked, feeling her eyes narrow. “You want my opinion on it?”

“Hey. Look,” Hersh said, raising his open palms as if to show his sincerity. “I’m on the Alien Politics Team. My entire career is— you know— we’re in the same line of business. Same priorities. The real war, not small-time threats on Titan and Mimas. That’s where I’m coming from, alright? You with me so far?”

“Sure…”

“With that context, I’m hoping you might be more receptive… What I’m saying is… the anti-terrorism campaign could use someone like you, with your years of experience in the Red Zone. No, no, no— wait, before you object, hear me out: it’s not quite the disaster for the real war that you’re thinking of.”

Her mouth hung open, disbelief etched across her face. “How so? How is this distraction anything but a catastrophe for the Malgeir war?”

Hersh seemed to choose his words carefully. “The operational plan for this campaign is — it’s predictable. The Navy will carry out raids in the Red Zone against suspected pirates and known cells. Some of them will be Resistance operatives. Some of them will be unrelated pirate gangs. And many of them will be civilians just going about their daily lives. The Navy officers who are currently running this operation will set their sights on destroying the operational capabilities of the Resistance.”

“I’m with you so far,” she nodded reluctantly. “Last I heard — and I don’t get briefed on Red Zone ops anymore — the SRN has a small operation on and around Titan and on a few hundred other rocks. About half a dozen combat ships, maybe even one or two capital ships they’ve managed to cobble together. We’ve mostly refrained from dealing with them because it would be expensive and they’ve been mostly dormant. Live and let live unless they make a big ruckus. But it seems like the political equation has changed.”

“Precisely so. This time, the Navy’s objective would be to burn them to the ground.”

“And the locals?”

“The SRN might have some support in the outer colonies, but many of them hate the Resistance as much as Martians do. Besides, insurgencies still require logistics and weapons, and the Navy can very much blow those up, regardless of hearts and minds. They just need time to find them.”

She snorted. “Time. ‘You can ask me for anything you like, except time.’ What you’re describing takes months, at least. Months of high Marine casualties in a dangerous operating environment. You’re old enough to remember the vacuum raids, right? Might even take years. And we both know the Republic doesn’t have that kind of time before the public sours on the Red Zone campaign. Again.”

Hersh continued unperturbed. “Exactly. In some of these raids, we will take Marine casualties. This will be bad for public opinion. The current swell of support for a military campaign will go away, and once the public loses interest, the politicians will eventually instruct the Navy to wrap it up. We will count the number of weapons we confiscated, the terrorists we captured, and we will call it a victory. The Resistance will lick their wounds, and we will do this all over again in a decade or two. We know this because this is exactly what happened last time. And the time before that. And the time before that.”

Amelia crossed her arms. “And how exactly would this waste of time help us in the war against the Znosians?”

“What if there is a way to ensure that the Navy succeeds in its mission in the Red Zone this time? That we can finish this threat for real?”

“I would say… you should nominate whoever came up with the idea for a fancy medal,” she said sarcastically. “Not the first time I’ve heard that line either, by the way. Don’t forget, I made my career in that last Red Zone war. I’m sure you’ve read that bit of trivia in that thick file you keep on me in the TRO.”

He ignored the jab. “The problem with these counterinsurgency operations… is that you need real people. And in space, on a fragile space station, it is much easier for enemies to kill peacekeepers than it is to stay alive. There is no solution to that arms race. There is, however, an alternative—”

Amelia pointed a finger at him. “If you’re going to say disposable combat robots, I’m walking out of here. There’s a reason those were banned from operations on civilian stations. Someone needs to pull the trigger and be held accountable for mistakes. And in case you weren’t alive when the practice got banned… deliberately using combat robots in civilian areas is a terrible idea. We’re lucky they didn’t kill any of the civilians at Tharsis or that—”

“No, not combat robots,” Hersh interrupted dismissively. “Another alternative. One that satisfies the lawyers’ obsessive need for accountability. Real troops. Real Marines. But troops who don’t have families that call in to complain to Republic Senators when their children are deployed into dangerous combat roles where they can get shot at. A near endless supply of troops, in fact—”

Her jaw dropped in disbelief as the realization dawned on her. “You’re talking about—”

“I’m talking about the Malgeir. Their Federation Marine Infantry.”

She gaped at him incredulously. “There’s no way that would work! They aren’t trained for our counterinsurgency operations. And whatever screw ups you see in their Navy, it’ll be ten— no, a hundred times worse when we hand their Marines our guns and ask them to spot which of our people are civilians and which are Resistance. And the Red Zone districts and stations would never accept occupation — however temporary it is — by literal ET! You think they’re having trouble keeping order out there now? They’re going to be furious if we drop this on them!”

Hersh shrugged. “There are only a few Senate districts out there; the real bottleneck for operations has always been public sentiment inside Ceres. Which is why these campaigns are always a race to see whether the Resistance can kill enough Republic Marines fast enough before we finish the job there. Everything else is just rationalization. Take away the casualties, and we buy time to complete our objectives. All of them. As for training and unit integration, that’s what you wanted in the first place, right? Besides, observing their behavior in combat will allow us to better model how we can best use them for the actual war. We can get hundreds of thousands of them—”

Still in shock at the brazenness of the suggestion, Amelia shot him a frosty glare. “I assume you bastards at the TRO have calculated and computer modelled exactly how many dead alien Marines on the frontpage of The Atlas Times are equivalent to one Republic Marine on public opinion of the war.”

As if not sensing her hostility to the idea, Hersh nodded. “After the initial novelty, quite a few as it turns out. Just look at the apathy with which people now respond to the Znosians chewing through them like hot knife—”

“You’re talking about people like Senator Eisson and—”

“He’s not alone, just so you know. People aren’t exactly thrilled about their taxpayer credits going to pay for an interstellar war they can’t see. And the fear of the Znosians, well… perhaps we did too well in our first campaign against them. Our simulations say that the number one emotion our people feel for them now is contempt, not fear. They don’t care about that war anymore. The Red Zone, though… we can get the public onboard for this, especially people like Seimur. We help him win the war he wants; later, he helps us win the war we need to win.”

“You know what they say about sleeping with rats, don’t you?”

“We are the TRO. We are the rats.”

She rolled her eyes. “And I assume you have a plan for how to convince the Puppers to get on board with this insane scheme as well.”

Hersh’s face betrayed no emotion. “We specialize in alien politics. We have what they need. They have what we need.”

“This conversation sounds super illegal. Doesn’t the Republic Security Act bar the TRO from operations against domestic—”

“That’s why this is a suggestion… and why we’re not meeting in your office. What? You going to report me?”

Amelia pointed a finger at him again. “Don’t tempt me, spook. So, you want me to get on board with the Red Zone campaign, throw alien Marines at the bad guys, and then what? The people of the Republic will be so grateful for their sacrifice that they’ll support pitching in to fight the war against the Buns after we destroy the Resistance?”

“Now that you mention it, that does seem like a helpful side benefit… Are you in?”

“Hell no! That’s a dumb idea that only you politics-obsessed eggheads at the TRO could come up with!” Amelia shouted at him.

Unfazed, Hersh gave a nonchalant shrug. “War is the continuation of politics with other means—”

“Don’t throw Clausewitz at me, you wiseass! This plan of yours… it will get Malgeir Marines killed, and it will get civilians killed.”

“And yet… it is the best chance we have. At both victory in the Red Zone and victory in the Federation. Like you said in your own reports, there is no easy solution. This war requires sacrifice. Sometimes, these sacrifices are tactically senseless and counter intuitive.”

“If you just need someone to lead Malgeir Marines to their deaths, why me?” she challenged. “My last command didn’t even have jarheads. We used ODT.”

“You’re experienced in Red Zone operations with a stellar service record in—”

“Cut the shit, spook. What’s the real reason?”

Hersh looked away. “We need someone with credibility for people who care about the Malgeir war too. Nobody can complain when the admiral who’s been aggressively pursuing the war against the Buns since day one finds the Red Zone campaign important enough to personally lead a task force into it.”

Amelia rolled her eyes again, pointing accusingly at his bald head. “Your idea is— it’s so dumb… you know, it’s so idiotic and unworkable that if it showed up on my desk… I’d think it came from the Ministry of Defense on Malgeirgam.”

His expression tightened from the stinging insult. “Then you fix it. This idea of using Malgeir Marines — it’s happening whether you want it. Some of the planners in the Marine General Staff have already been quietly asking around. If you’re in charge, you have a chance to do it properly. Your Republic needs you, Admiral.”

“If you spooks use that line on me one more time, I’m going to find an airlock, and one of us is going to jump out of it and I’m not sure who…”