The Ares Decision by Kyle Mills Page A

shook hands and Blankenship clapped him on the shoulder. “Next time you’re in town let’s have a drink. Since you don’t like the subject of current events, we’ll get hammered and relive the glory days.”
    “Sounds good. Maybe even take a dip in your pool if it has water in it.”
    His old friend grimaced and ducked back into the stairwell as Smith made his way down the hall. He found the door and paused with his hand on the knob, mentally running through the list of questions he’d put together and wondering again about the best way to handle them.
    When he finally entered, the young sailor struggled to his feet.
    “At ease, Lieutenant.”
    Rivera ignored him and, teetering on his casted leg, gave a sharp salute. “Good evening, Colonel.”
    Smith returned the salute. “Good evening. Please. Sit.”
    He did, and Smith took the only other chair, placing Rivera’s personnel folder on the table between them. Blankenship’s description of a washing machine and bowling balls was right on—in addition to the leg, the young man’s face was bruised and stitched, and his left shoulder was in a harness.
    Despite that, though, he was in a dress uniform meticulously altered to work with his injuries and complete with gleaming sidearm. A soldier’s soldier.
    “I appreciate you agreeing to see me on such short notice,” Smith said. “I know how difficult this has been for you.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I’ve read your report, but I’d like you to tell me what happened in your own words.”
    “My entire team was wiped out,” he said, the bitterness clearly audible in his voice. “Except me. I understand they made a movie about it. You should try to catch it sometime.”
    Smith kept his expression impassive and didn’t respond. Eventually, the silence went on long enough that Rivera felt compelled to fill it.
    “A kid came running up the road with people chasing her. She seemed to know we were there. She wanted us to help her. To save her.”
    “The people behind her weren’t normal soldiers, though.”
    “Not the way we think of soldiers, sir. It just looked like random people from a village or a market or something.”
    “Were any of them armed?”
    Rivera shook his head in shame. “A few may have had sticks. I’m not sure. Some of them didn’t even have clothes. They were covered in something that looked like blood…” His voice trailed off and his expression turned blank.
    “You fired into them,” Smith prompted.
    “Didn’t really want to kill them, sir. Just get them to back off so we could disappear. But they didn’t back off. It was like they didn’t care. Like they didn’t even notice.” He paused for a moment. “They tell me you know who we are. Who we were…”
    “The very best of all our special forces combined into one elite team.”
    “That’s right. And the best of us was a guy named Donny Praman. He was a high school football player from Ohio, and even by my standards, the guy wasn’t human. He never got scared, he never got tired, he never got hurt or sick. And I watched a fat woman chase him down like he was nothing. How does that happen, Colonel? Can you tell me that?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t. But I’m going to find out. What happened next? After Praman went down?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, his bitterness becoming more and more intense. “I was too busy running.”
    Smith looked down at his pen, rolling it back and forth across the tabletop with his index finger. “Could you have saved them, son?”
    He could feel Rivera’s eyes lock on him but didn’t look up.
    “It doesn’t matter if I could save them or not, sir.”
    “I disagree. If you couldn’t, then it was your job to survive and report back.”
    “Report back? Report what? That I let my team get killed by a bunch of unarmed women and children? That I walked into an ambush?”
    “Calm down, Lieutenant.”
    “You look like a pretty hard man, Colonel. But with all due respect, you’re just a