The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  Mars had always been ahead of us when it came to tech. You wouldn’t hear the corps say it, but we whispered about it. How else could they have broken away? How else had they Blinked two million people out of existence?

  The Martians who had settled here were rounded up and interrogated. But nobody seemed to know anything. Some revolted. They were still being tolerated when I signed up. For how long? That was the big question.

  That’s the war I knew. The events as I understood them. That’s how I decided which side of the war to be on. And I was. On the right side, I mean.

  Nobody ever thinks they chose the wrong side.

  We all think we’re made of light.

  3.

  It’s tough to understand a thing just by hearing about it or looking at it. It’s like having sex or getting into a fight. You don’t get it until you do it.

  That’s what the Corporate Corps is like.

  They inject you with a lot of stuff during that first week of mandatory training. They don’t even wait to see if you wash out, because even if you wash out, they still need you for support duty; dangerous drudge work they don’t want civilians doing. I had residency. I could have worked in a chemical plant or soldering military hardware until my teeth fell out and the corp approved me for a humane send-off cocktail of Pavulon and potassium chloride.

  But I didn’t.

  You don’t “opt out” of this war anymore, not like you could in the early days. If I wasn’t in the corps, I’d be supporting the war some other way. I’ve been hungry; I didn’t like it much. Having residency with a corp isn’t citizenship, but it’s better than being a contractor, or worse—a jobless ghost, a ghoul. Being a ghoul means being hungry. Living in other people’s waste. Praying a cough won’t turn into pneumonia. Being a ghoul is knowing what gangrene smells like. It’s dying from a scraped knee that gets infected. It’s shitting in a ditch. It’s eating roadkill.

  I’d rather be a hero.

  When you go through processing the first thing they do is strip you down and punch in your VT—vitals tracker. They inject that between your shoulder blades so they can get a bead on you at any time. That position also makes it tough for you to get it out on your own.

  “Afraid I’ll run away?” I asked the tech, thinking I was pretty funny.

  “It’s to ensure swift medical evac,” she said, “if necessary. And to ensure we can monitor your physical and emotional state.”

  “Emotional?”

  “We can’t take away your emotions,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. There was something in her face that, even now, I’m not sure I understood. “What’s this other stuff?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said, and jabbed me with another preloaded syringe of milky goo.

  She kept bringing out more of those syringes, working her way through a tray of them. I’d already been inoculated against everything, I thought, because the corp knows sick people aren’t productive people. Yet they gave me at least a dozen more shots after I saw her, moving me from room to room. New faces, new gloves, new needles. Nobody said what was in the vials and I didn’t ask again. It felt . . . rude. I’d turned my body over to them and signed all the forms I didn’t read. I figured it was my fault for not understanding what they were doing.

  We got outfitted with our heads-up displays next. The name makes it sound like a clunky piece of tech, but you just slide lenses into your eyes, like the retinal displays civilians have. The lenses give you access to coms, schematics, anything that the CO wants to beam out to you. You can even blink over to see your vitals. All the info runs at the bottom left of your left eye. You look down to bring it up and lift your gaze to clear it.

  I wasn’t impressed when we first got it. I had worn retinal displays before to run immersives and take classes. They pegged me as slow when I first came to school at six years old, after we got residency. I’d never been to school before. I spent a lot of time with immersives to catch up.

  I had never accessed the knu before I became a resident either. The knu was a complex system of quantum-entangled data nodes that stored and transmitted information for all the corps. The knu had tiered access to information, and not all the knu nodes from different corps could even talk to one another. As a resident, I had pretty low-level knu access. As a soldier, that was restricted even further. We were completely cut off from the outside world during mandatory training. Every time I tried to reach for the knu icon, I’d get a “restricted” warning and kicked out.

  The corps kept the coms pretty light those first few days. The messages rolling across the bottom of our vision, blinking at you to acknowledge them, were reminders about PT, wake-up times, lights-out, stuff like that. You could almost forget they were using them to record everything you saw and did, too.

  I heard rumors that they were inoculating us against diseases the enemy had brought with them. The diseases are what Mars had used to gain leverage over the Big Six. What better way to declare a prolonged lockdown than some engineered plague? Others said they were punching us full of drugs that were supposed to make us faster, smarter, tougher. Everybody wants to be tougher, right?

  That’s what Muñoz thought.

  I met Muñoz after processing and orientation. Everyone had the same regulation haircuts in the Corporate Corps. What was left of hers was black as midnight, same as her thick black brows. She was all knees and elbows, so underweight I wasn’t sure how she’d made the cut. They put her on double rations to fill her out. One corner of her mouth quirked up when she talked, so you always got the impression she was either amused or disgusted with you.

  All one hundred and thirty-seven in our class shared the same bunkhouse, stacked three high. Muñoz tried to take the top bunk of our rack. I dragged her out of it and got fifty push-ups from the drill instructor for it. Muñoz wasn’t fazed.

  “Your push-ups suck,” she said, handing me a piece of gum, after. It wasn’t from the ration kit, which meant she’d smuggled it in. No small feat.

  I took it. “The hell you know?”

  “I can do a hundred.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Didn’t you do any training before coming here? Hope you’re smart enough to keep up, or really fast. Gotta admit, you don’t look fast.”

  “Easy to be fast when you’re so goddamn small.”

  “Played American football.”

  “Flag football?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Kicker?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You a receiver? A quarterback? You have an attitude like a goddamn quarterback.”

  “Rugby. What, you on debate team? Corporate messaging? You here because you want a multiple marriage license?”

  “Better luck with that as a ghoul. You don’t need a license. You look like somebody who’d know that. I’m here to go into corp intelligence.”

  “Oxymoron.”

  “Big word, jock.”

  “Lots of syllables.”

  “I’m Muñoz.”

  “Dietz.” We bumped elbows.

  Muñoz and I sat together in the cafeteria after our first PT. That’s when she gave me her theory on what the medical orientation maze was about.

  “They’re making us into superheroes,” she said.

  We were eating ground protein concentrate on mashed tubers, maybe sweet potatoes, all piled on toast.

  “Grandpa called this shit on a shingle,” Muñoz said, stabbing into the chunky, dripping mess and letting it slide off her biodegradable spoon. “Said they ate it out on the belt, because it was the only thing the printers could shit out with any accuracy. Still true, I guess.”

  “Thought heroes ate better,” I said.

  “Maybe it gets better.”

  It did not get better.

  We all got sick the next day.

  The drill instructors—the DIs—made us do PT anyway. When you’re running, shitting, and vomiting, it puts you in touch with the fact that you’re just a bag of guts.


  “We’re all shit,” Muñoz said during that first PT. She stumbled along the track and puked up her breakfast. “Shit that’s gonna move at the speed of light.”

  I slapped her on the back, yelled, “Only if you can keep up!” and hauled ass past her. The drill instructor barked some expletive, but I didn’t hear it. I thought I was in good shape, before the corps. Could run eleven kilometers without stopping. But the meds ruined us that week. In two cases, it killed. A wiry kid called Faros and a young woman, Acosta—both on their second attempt at getting through training—died, choking on their own vomit, dehydrated, raving at ghosts. Me, I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Got hooked up to a saline drip. It was like having stomach flu, a twisting monster in my gut, trying to claw its way out.

  “It’s gonna eat me, Dietz,” Muñoz said that night, heaving over the side of the bed.

  Our third bunkmate, Rache, swore at her, and threw a blanket over the mess. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

  I stumbled to the head; barely made it before a stream of shit left my body. It was so intense it felt like I’d busted something in my ass.

  I wasn’t the only one in there. The sounds of misery rose like a chorus of zombies denied dinner.

  “Average person only shits about a pound a day,” said the kid on the can next to me, his dark, round face slathered in sweat. He was bent forward; moisture collected at the end of his broad nose and dripped to the floor, a mixture of sweat and snot. He was a stout guy, about a meter seventy-five tall, and soft around the middle.

  “Heroes don’t shit,” I said.

  “What’s that make us, then?”

  “Soldiers.” I laughed until I felt the bile rise in my throat again.

  “I’m going to shit my way through this whole fucking war.”

  “We can dream.”

  He snorted, moaned. Another explosive burst of wet gas moved through his body. “I’m Jones,” he said.

  “Dietz.”

  “Can’t wait to be a soldier.”

  “All starts here,” I said, and vomited all over my feet.

  4.

  How will you react, when you’re physically broken?

  Can you use a compass to find your way?

  Do you have the skills to scavenge when you’re a starving soldier dropped into enemy territory? Will fear paralyze you?

  These are the questions they need answered in mandatory training. If you can’t learn, you wash out. You are stripped of citizenship if you have it, residency if you’ve earned it. You become less than what you were when you came in, and they still own you. They use you somewhere else.

  Let me tell you how they break you.

  You are shit. Everything you do is shit. From the minute you step off the transport at the training base in Mendoza, you aren’t doing anything right. You don’t walk right. Look right. Talk right. You are a bag of human excrement. No one likes you, let alone loves you. In great shape? It’s not enough. Smart? That’s worse. Nothing is ever good enough for the Corporate Corps. They want blind obedience.

  After a week of that, you’re hungry for anything. Hungry for a “That’s right,” or a “Good job.” You want love, acceptance. Humans want connection. I thought that was bullshit until mandatory training. I didn’t believe we were all bags of meat propelled by emotion, but I was wrong. The DIs know. They know exactly what we are, and how to play us.

  That’s how they teach you to kill.

  You might be surprised, but it turns out most people don’t want to kill anybody. We aren’t born murderers.

  You want to gouge out the eyes of a stranger? You tried it? How did that go? Hardly anybody does that shit. If they do, it’s in a fit of rage or madness. But cold, calculated killing? Only one percent of people are psychopaths. The rest of us have to learn.

  I’d been in fights, before mandatory training. With guys like Frankie, mostly, and a few women who were the same. But fighting isn’t about killing. It’s about posturing. Submission. What good is it to kill the guy who screws you over when instead you can beat him to the ground, force him to yield, and show everybody else what happens when people fuck with you? One submission can save you a lot of shit later. Rugby, hard living before residency, my basic education, they all taught me that kind of fighting.

  Mandatory training taught me to kill. They taught me to want to kill.

  They made me want to kill more than I wanted air, more than I craved food, more than the desire to fuck. You yearn to kill because it’s the only thing that gets your DI to love you. When you withhold all praise, people will do anything to get it. They’ll eat each other, if they need to.

  Do you know how they train fighting dogs?

  The dogs are raised alone and captive from when they’re small. They attach them to chains, close to other dogs, but far enough away that the dogs can’t reach one another. They add weights to the chains, to increase the upper body strength of the dogs. The dogs are beaten, prodded, antagonized, starved.

  They get trained by using “bait animals.” Could be rabbits, sure, but mostly it’s other dogs. You chain up the bait dog and let your starved, beaten, antagonized dog get riled up with it in the enclosure.

  When you think the dog is ready—when it’s nine or ten months old—you let it loose. You let it kill the bait dog.

  When it kills the bait dog . . . you praise it. You feed it. You reward it. You tell it, “Good job.” The first time it’s ever known any human kindness in its life is when it kills one of its own kind.

  We are not so different, me and that dog.

  I wish I had known that back then.

  I wish I’d known a lot of things.

  “Why you join?” I asked Jones in the mess hall, two weeks in, while Muñoz gagged over her food.

  “My family’s all citizens,” he said. “We all joined, going way back to the Seed Wars. Everything’s different than what they went through, though, before Mars went dark. You?”

  “I had my reasons,” I said. “But my family, they—”

  “Ghouls,” Muñoz said, waggling her fingers next to her face. “All ghouls.”

  “Fuck you, Muñoz,” I said.

  “You a citizen?” Jones asked her. It was a rude question, but that was Jones.

  “Just got legit,” she said. “Both my dads had citizenship, but when mom came in, she didn’t. She just got it, though, right before I turned eighteen.”

  “That’s a lucky fucking break,” I said. “You can’t pretend that isn’t lucky.”

  She shrugged. “I’d already signed up for Corporate Corps. I would have made citizen on my own.”

  “In, like, twenty years,” I said.

  She glared at me.

  “It’s good. I mean, we all start somewhere.”

  “I’m not a ghoul,” I said. “I’m a resident.”

  “And your mama earned that when you were a kid, right?” Muñoz said. “Don’t tell me yours is fair either. You didn’t work for it.”

  “I’m working for citizen,” I said. “I’m not going to die of fucking cancer, or get ground down by some chronic bullshit like my mom.”

  “My great-granddad was a resident,” Jones said. “Drove a bus until he fell over. Died in the seat. Earned his way. You’ll make citizen. If not you, maybe your kids.”

  “Nobody can expect handouts,” I said, because that’s what my dad always said.

  “Right, right,” Jones said. “No free lunch.”

  The drill instructor appeared. Mealtime over. I forked in a couple more bites. I never ate fast enough.

  Everything we did those first few weeks got us beaten or yelled at. The way we stood. The way we talked (or didn’t). The way we said “sir” (or didn’t). The way we ran. How we did push-ups. How we took a shower. They teach you how to walk. How to eat. How to dress. Make your bed. They bust down all those basic things you thought you knew. Hygiene! Who doesn’t know how to wash themselves?

  But there the DIs and handlers were in the head, barki
ng orders while we showered. There was a sign on the wall for people who forgot:

  LINE UP.

  MARCH TO SHOWERHEAD.

  WET YOUR HEAD.

  SOAP YOUR HEAD AND FACE.

  RINSE.

  SOAP YOUR LEFT ARM.

  RINSE.

  SOAP YOUR RIGHT ARM.

  And et cetera. If you thought you knew how to wash your own genitals, the Corporate Corps was there to say you’re wrong. The military knew better. It knew better about everything.

  We relearned how to dress. How to shit (Knees up! Squat, don’t sit). How to clean our boots. How to talk (Sir! before you speak, and Sir! when you’re done). You adapt quickly or you wash out. You lose everything.

  You need to remember that a lot of us had no real choice once we got into this. They tell you you’ve got all this freedom. Freedom to work. Freedom to leave the corp. And that’s true. You could not work. And get kicked out of the corp. You could leave the corp and live in some squatter labor camp like me and my parents did, hoping you don’t die of the flu. But that’s hardly a real choice, is it? That’s how they fool you. It’s like playing one of those immersive games where you get a choice of three doors, but all the doors lead to the same final boss. There was never any choice at all.

  I’m competitive. That worked well the first couple weeks when we were mostly performing on our own. Every morning but Sunday we ran five kilometers and did two hours of PT. I came in top three every time, but there was no praise for that. No praise for performing the expected.

  They saved the praise for the killing.

  We met our weapons in week two.

  Our pulse rifles only weighed half a kilo. One shot breaks apart biomass with such explosive power that there isn’t much left to clean up. It’s like having a personal laser-guided grenade launcher, without the shrapnel. All that’s left when you make a direct hit is a fine red mist.

  We slept with those rifles. Took them apart and put them together so many times that by the end of that week, we could do it blindfolded. I was a good shot, but Muñoz was better. That didn’t seem to give her as much satisfaction as I thought it would.