The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

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  For Hannah.

  This is all her fault. . . .

  Don’t just fight the darkness. Bring the light.

  They dragged the insurgent out of the ruins of Saint Petersburg. Ash danced in the sky. The insurgent had the bruised knuckles of a fighter, and broke a soldier’s nose: crunch and splatter of blood and snot. When they finally got the insurgent to the ground, they heard a terrible howl: not one of fear, but of triumph.

  “You poor ageless grunts,” the insurgent said, showing teeth: one rotten incisor, a chipped canine. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  1.

  They said the war would turn us into light.

  I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world. That’s what I told the recruiter. That’s what I told my first squad leader. It’s what I told every CO, and there were . . . a couple. And that’s what I’d tell myself, when I was alone in the dark, cut off from my platoon, the sky full of blistering red fire, too hot to send an evac unit, and a new kid was squealing and dying on the field.

  But it’s not true.

  I signed up because of what they did to São Paulo. I signed up because of the Blink. All my heroes stayed on the path of light, no matter how dark it got. Even bleeding-heart socialist drones who play paladin can take an oath of vengeance to justify violence. I did.

  The enemy had eaten my family and the life I once knew; a past I now remember in jerky stutter-stops, like an old satellite image interrupted by a hurricane. I wanted to be the light: the savior, the hero, sure.

  But more than that, I wanted the enemy obliterated.

  How many other corporate soldiers signed up for money, or voting rights, or to clear a debt, or to afford good housing, or to qualify for a job in one of the big towers?

  I believed my reasons were nobler.

  When I signed up after São Paulo, me and my friends were shocked that the recruiting center wasn’t packed. Where were all the patriots? Didn’t they know what the aliens had done? I thought all those people who didn’t sign up were cowards. While you were all upgrading your immersives and masturbating to some new game, we were fighting the real threat. We were the good guys.

  You were cowardly little shits.

  I didn’t think about what would happen after I signed up. Or who I would need to become. I thought the world was simple: good guys and bad guys, citizens and ghouls, corporate patriots and socialist slaves.

  You were with us or against us.

  Pick your side.

  I was at a party not long after the Blink, drinking a jet-fuel tasting concoction out of a pulpy compostable bag, when a kid from my basic education class wandered over. I’d signed up with the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps with six friends, four of whom shipped out immediately. Me and the other two, Rubem Mujas and Andria Patel, managed to make the party. Rubem had gone inside, probably to pass out, leaving me and Andria on the lawn to answer everybody’s questions. Andria was in high spirits. She didn’t drink alcohol; her good cheer was all coltish excitement over our new career.

  “You get a signing bonus?” a snaggletoothed kid asked. “They give you citizenship on the spot?”

  “No,” I said.

  Andria laughed outright. Pushed back the heavy cascade of her black curls. Freckles smeared the apples of her cheeks. I remember thinking she was thin, back then, leggy and athletic, but I hadn’t seen what true starvation did to a person, not until later.

  “You have any other family but the ones they blitzed?” asked another girl. I knew her from basic physics class, one sponsored by Teslova Energy.

  “No,” I said.

  “Be kind,” Andria said. “The war has taken a lot from all of us. I look forward to bashing in alien heads.”

  “I heard they’ll teach you eighty ways to kill a man,” the snaggle-toothed kid said, “when you get to Mendoza.”

  “I don’t want to kill men,” I said. “I want to kill aliens.”

  “I heard they were human once,” the girl from physics said.

  “Bullshit,” the other kid said. “No human would do what they did to São Paulo.”

  “I guess I’ll find out,” I said.

  “They’ll take away your name,” said a tall guy coming over from under the balloon of the main party tent. “I bet that’s the biggest advantage for a ghoul like you.”

  I grimaced. Franklin Kowalski outweighed me by over twenty-five kilos and was almost two meters tall; I had to kink my head up to meet his look. He had beaten me out for first-string quarterback two years before. All the streams preferred faces like his, the coach said, and the corp could only justify an American football team if they kept their viewership up. I could play second string. I told the coach to fuck herself and played two years of rugby instead, until the Blink. I didn’t like people telling me what I could do.

  Ironic, then, signing up for the goddamn military.

  “I hear they eat the rich in the corporate corps, Frankie,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll be delicious. Why wait to sign up?”

  “Already did,” he said. He hooked his big thumbs in his pockets and gave a wry little smile, the one I knew preceded the word-vomit of some shitty-ass thing he’d just thought up.

  Andria rolled her eyes. “I’m going to check on Rube. He’s probably vomiting into a messenger bag.” She reached for my sleeve, but I stepped away from her.

  That was Andria—always looking after me. And me? Always self-destructive.

  “You know you’ll have to fight the aliens,” I said, before Frankie could get a word out, “not just fuck them.”

  The snaggletoothed kid snickered. Andria made a moue and got very still. The girl from physics got all big-eyed and turned abruptly and marched back to the party tent. She was probably the smartest of us all.

  “Didn’t they call your dad Mad Dietz?” Frankie said. “The one Teni had reeducated four times? I heard they sold him off to Evecom for stock options.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Frankie,” I said.

  He leaned over me, faster than I expected—I was a couple drinks in—and mashed his tongue against my cheek, leaving a long tail of gin-soaked saliva. I recoiled, so startled I froze. I’d think about that moment a lot, later. I’d wonder what I should have done immediately, instead of freezing like a dumb kid. In some other time line things went differently. I would have broken his nose, kicked out his kneecap—all in an instant. It’s what a soldier would have done, what I would have done, later. But I didn’t know anything about proper fighting—just the grappling we did on the field. I hadn’t been conditioned for violence. I still had to be provoked. If I’d acted differently, I wouldn’t be me. We wouldn’t be here
.

  He ducked away, laughing. “You keep dreaming about that, you little fucking grunt.”

  Andria said, “Hey, leave it—”

  I leaped at Frankie in a full tackle. The smile fled. He went over.

  Yells from the crowd. Some cheers. Smell of grass and dirt and the chemical tang of fertilizer. Frankie slobbering, spitting at me. I shoved my elbow over his throat.

  “Yield,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and punched my temple.

  A flash of bright light. Darkness juddering across my vision. I swung, but he was already up on his hands and knees. I tackled him again and bit down hard on his left ear.

  He screamed and clawed my face. A hunk of his ear came away. I tasted coppery salt. Spit the chewy bit of flesh.

  Somebody grabbed me then, many hands pulling me away and dragging Frankie up. The world spun. The thump-thump of the music inside beat in time to the throbbing in my head. My face was wet. He’d busted my nose. The wet was blood. I bared my teeth. I spit up my blood and his. I raised a fist at the sky, blotting out the distorted specter of the moon. A great chunk of the moon was missing, had been for nearly a year. It still took some getting used to, that silhouette with the blinkering satellite of debris spinning around its equator. It had rained hellfire for weeks afterward, each shattered piece hurtling toward Earth like a nuclear warhead.

  “You keep your eye up there,” I yelled at him. “That’s where I’ll come from when I kick your ass.”

  “They only took you because you’re a ghoul,” Frankie said. “You’ll be dead your first drop.”

  The BLM—Business Loss Management squad—showed up, fit men and women wearing Kevlar and riot glasses, Tasers already out. They swarmed us from the mouth of the tent. Andria ran, probably to grab Rubem. She was already a good little citizen, and wasn’t looking for trouble. I didn’t blame her for ghosting.

  “Shame,” said the woman who zip-tied my hands. She turned the recording feature on her riot glasses off. I winced. The glasses were meant to reassure us that the agents weren’t using personal retinal displays to record encounters with us. Personal retinal displays were worn as external lenses in the eyes; they were almost impossible to detect unless actively streaming data across the eye. I’d been a ghoul long enough to know that a BLM agent turning off her external device was often prelude to a good beating—or outright death.

  She leaned over me and whispered, “Shame to get worked up with your whole future ahead, huh? You want to be a soldier?” BLM’s all had face recognition built into their riot interfaces and a direct line to our files. She no doubt knew all the intimate details of my last relationship and where I took a shit this morning.

  I kept quiet. Never talk to the BLM unless they invoke the Corporate Disclosure clause in your residency contract. My mom had drilled that into my head after we became residents of Tene-Silvia. She and my father had worked their asses off to get us all attached to a corp, but it came with a whole new set of rules. Those rules were probably why I wasn’t getting beaten up or murdered like I would have if this shit had gone down before then.

  “We need good kids up there,” the BLM agent said. “You’ve gotta figure out what side you’re on. Don’t waste your life here, kid. The fight’s on Mars.” She turned her recorder back on.

  I wanted to be the hero who would have known exactly what to do when Frankie pulled his bullshit that night. The sort of kid who had a family to go back to, after that party, instead of a dorm for unaccompanied minors. The sort of kid who was driven by more than some dumb gory oath of vengeance. I didn’t care if signing up killed me because I didn’t understand what dying was, then.

  Be a hero, I thought. Get revenge. End of story.

  But that’s not really living.

  I had no idea why living mattered at all, after the Blink.

  Not until the end.

  2.

  About the war . . .

  There are many fronts in this war. Humans are spread out as far as the asteroid belt. We were on the moon, too, before the enemy hit it so badly that we cleared out.

  Our corp, Tene-Silvia, had a lot of interests on the moon: mining operations, research labs, and citizens engaged in top secret work. Some of the bigger corps, like Masukisan, ShinHana, and Evecom had interests there too, but most of the Big Six had moved core competencies to Mars by the time a chunk of the moon got blown out. Mars was the next frontier, for the corps. They didn’t care that there were already separatists from Earth up there building cities and calling themselves Martians. The corps all put some flags in the ground and tried to muscle their way in using friendly words like “science” and “research” and “building community relationships.”

  So how do we get around, on so many fronts?

  That’s the trick, isn’t it?

  How do you get out further than Mars? Humans aren’t designed to leave Earth. We’re bound to it—blood, guts, and bone.

  The biggest hurdle to traveling outside Earth is the distances. They’re massive. I still look at the sky some nights and think about the universe—the sheer enormity of it. It makes my head hurt. The Big Six built on concepts like quantum entanglement and particle physics to figure out how to build an instantaneous communication technology that could span those distances. But moving people?

  Well, mass is harder.

  I guess if you know anything about the limits on the speed of light, it makes sense what they came up with to solve the mass problem.

  The fastest way to travel from one front to the next is to turn us into light.

  Think about it. How long does light take to get to Mars? About twelve and a half light-minutes. The asteroid belt? About twenty to forty light-minutes, depending on its orbital position.

  Like most world-changing discoveries—like penicillin or the cure for cancer—the switch to busting us down into light happened by accident. The Seed Wars ended, and the Big Seven became the Big Six after the Great Corporate War. In the aftermath, people tried to pull away from the Big Six and start their own communes and radical republics. It was a scary and dangerous time. That’s what’s on all the immersives. Desperate times call for desperate plans of action. How do you preserve a way of life that’s unraveling on all sides, descending into lawless anarchy? Everyone likes to pretend they’d be high and mighty about it, but how would you govern five billion people?

  They turned us into light.

  My mother said she remembered the first time she saw somebody corporealize in front of her. Hearing voices, she walked into the shared kitchen on her work floor. Two women in the gray garb of military police stood around the food printer, waving away a worker who had come up for coffee. A burned lemony scent filled the air. Sagging out from the center of the food printer was the torso of a young man.

  “His face was so peaceful,” my mom said, telling me the story years later. “That’s what stayed with me.”

  She had immediately gone back to her console. “I knew what happened to people who saw things the military didn’t want them to,” she said. “That coworker of mine they were waving away disappeared that day. Never saw her again. The official line was there had been a military training accident.”

  A decade passed before they formally announced the new tech. Until then, all the piloting was done manually. My father spent the next war working as a freight laborer on shuttles that ferried the dead from Mars to recycling plants on the moon. That’s where he learned to pilot. He and my mother served Teni during early conflicts between Mars and the moon. Their service is what got us residency.

  There’s a lot to say about the world leading up to the Blink. What I knew for sure was that something happened on Mars between the actual Martians who had left Earth decades before and the increasing corporate interests trying to bully their way onto the planet.

  Whatever happened, coms on Mars went dark.

  Most corps pulled out their researchers and scientists from Mars, leaving the civilians. What happened to the civilians
from the corps, they wouldn’t say.

  Tene-Silvia gave us the corporate line about how the Martians were crazy socialists bombing their research stations, but Evecom had a different story about how Martians were dragging corps civilians into cults; and the other four corps shared equally strange stories. It happens sometimes; they can’t all agree on reality. Listening to the Big Six—when you’re allowed to get media outside your corp at all—is like listening to a bunch of nattering old people at a dinner party trying to remember some esoteric event from when they were kids. Everybody has a different memory. When they get frustrated, they start talking real loud, like that will make their memory more true.

  What I knew for sure was that nobody had talked to anybody on Mars for almost ten years. And Mars hadn’t talked to us. I didn’t know what kind of tech they had, or what leverage, to keep the Earth corps out when they went dark. It was like Mars didn’t exist anymore. Everybody left on Mars became unknowable. Someone else. Alien.

  A decade after they went dark, a splinter group of Martians opened communications with us. They said they yearned to help out Earth, and were chafing under their own socialist government. They said they could mend our most contaminated land with new tech, if only we let them come on down and colonize those blasted hellscapes from the Seed Wars. . . .

  A few corps allowed it. And the Martian colonists made the north grow food again, better and more than ever before.

  And then . . .

  One thing the Big Six all agreed on was that the Blink was unprovoked.

  Two million people were in São Paulo one day.

  The next . . .

  Blinked.

  Was the Martian government mad because we accepted the colonists? Or had they just been biding their time until we got complacent, so they could destroy us once and for all? Maybe they had never gotten over the corps trying to take over Mars. Maybe they had been planning to get back at us all along.