The Incident on Gamma Seven by Stefon Mears

Author:Stefon Mears [Mears, Stefon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thousand Faces Publishing

Aminu covered our tracks. I know that much. Officially no report ever mentioned human involvement with the incident on Gamma Seven. I did ... dig a bit. I had to. I had to know what happened.

Facts are hard to come by from a war zone. Politics always get in the way. Body counts, damage estimates, they go up and down depending on what those in power want the rest of us to believe.

The Ik-Choka got the blame all right. The war got hotter for a while, and no one suspected humans had ever set foot on Gamma Seven. Officially, anyway.

As far as I could tell, Johnson and Duke hit the trigger before all of the explosives were in place. Blew out a third of the building's bottom coil. Killed maybe twenty.

I tell myself that it could have been much, much worse. Probably hundreds of kids in there. Little snake heads, all hoping to grow up and live good snake head lives. That doesn't even count the teachers and any other adults.

Maybe that day, for the first time since I enlisted, I saved a few nonhuman lives instead of taking them.

I "didn't make it" back to the rendezvous. I claimed to have been spotted. Separated from the group. Gave them orders to bug out while I pursued on foot to kill the witness. That way the most they could get was one of us.

Yeah, Jameson tried to argue that leave-no-man-behind thing. I gave her an order. Maybe the look in my eye spooked her for a change.

Once they were gone, I made my own way off Gamma Seven. I took the better part of a year laying false trails, just in case. I'm rated to do hull repairs, which meant I could find work on pretty much any ship flying, especially the type that wouldn't ask questions, if I didn't.

And I didn't want to answer or ask questions.

Eventually, though, I made it back to Earth to hide in plain sight. I set myself up someplace nobody knew me. I was an Arizona boy, born and bred. The PNW was just about the last place anyone would think to look for me. I'd hide here among the rain and the tall trees and avoid space like the plague. Act like an air-breathing rockfoot instead of a hardened vaccer. New name, new ID, and officially, no one had any reason to look for me.

Except...

Except that the Navy has to have figured out that I made it off of Gamma Seven. Otherwise the Sarkaanan would have said something about my corpse by now. Though maybe politics kept it quiet. Some high-level deal, maybe.

Except that the Ik-Choka know they weren't there on Gamma Seven. And that means there's only one spacefaring race who could have done it and pointed the fingers at them. Which means it's only a matter of time until they put the pieces together. At which point, no doubt Earth will hand me over wrapped up with a bow.

Except that the Sarkaanan

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