The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  I took a deep breath as we were dismissed. The new recruits were left to mingle with us.

  Private Landon was a tall, lanky guy, pale and dark haired, with perfect teeth. “You Dietz?” he said. “You the one who lost a squad on Mars?”

  “Yeah. I’m Bad Luck Dietz.”

  “Bad Luck Dietz, huh? That’s funny.”

  He reminded me of my brother, too handsome for his own good, bighearted, constantly trying to be a better human. There was no malice in how he spoke, just honest interest. People die. Like my mom. They get disappeared, like my father. They get Blinked, like my brother and cousins in São Paulo. No use getting attached.

  “Why you looking at me like that?” he said.

  “You remind me of my brother.”

  “Good. I’m not into you either. Where’s your brother?”

  “He was in São Paulo.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Wasn’t you who did it,” I said.

  “Got anybody else?”

  “Naw, just you shits. Ate my aunts, cousins, uncles, everyone.”

  “Parents?”

  “You this chatty with everyone?”

  “Habit. I worked in sales.”

  “Selling what?”

  “Governments.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, the corps sell these ideas to one another. I was one of those people.”

  “The hell you here, then? Sounds like a cozy job. Boring, but cozy.”

  “My wife’s family died on the moon,” he said. “That’s what we think, anyway. This is my wife.” He fumbled in his pocket for something. I took the laminated card in my hand. It had been folded many times.

  “I had it printed out,” he said, “so I could see them when coms are still out on drops. Reminds me what I’m fighting for.” His own little good-luck charm. It was funny how we still clung to these physical things. They were harder to erase.

  His wife looked like a pleasant enough sort of person, a soft, round young woman with thick black hair and a tawny complexion. Big smile. Dimples. Not the sort of person I expected him to be with. She held a fat baby in her arms, a look of such pride on her face, like that fat baby was a gold medal from the corporate games.

  When was the last time I looked at a picture of my family? My mother? Father? The dead were dead to me, and even the living, well . . . I knew they would die too. Muñoz gone, Jawbone . . . all gone. I had done Vi a favor by breaking up with her. That’s what I had thought at the time. Fate was funny that way.

  I peered at Landon’s affable face. He reminded me of an especially friendly golden retriever. He would die, too. And if this war went on a long time, maybe his family would die. Maybe all of us. I handed back the picture.

  “Good to have,” I said. “A reason.”

  He tucked the photo away. “Jones says you’ve read Amado and Machado de Assis. Have you ever read Vega or Martínez Herreros? They were banned in, like, four corps.”

  The call for dinner came. Thirty minutes to chow down before they took it away from us.

  “Some other time,” I said.

  “I’ll send you some files!” I didn’t bother telling him reading wasn’t exactly my favorite pastime. He was nice enough, and I knew I needed allies right now. But after you lose people—you don’t want more people.

  I still figured I could fix this. New people like Landon didn’t know any better; but he would soon. The way the rest of the platoon treated me would get better once we dropped again, I figured. I’d fight. I’d have their backs. They’d have mine. It had to get better, right? Because I’d jumped ahead further than this, and they were all right. Or, better than this.

  But when we were called up for the next drop, the CO said, “You’re grounded for this one, Dietz.”

  “But I did the eval.”

  “They asked we ground you for this drop. Sorry. They’ll keep you busy in coms training. You need to work toward that specialist promotion, right? Good op for that.”

  “Yes, sir.” I didn’t like the look on her face. I didn’t like that she understood, that she felt sorry for me. Had she ever lost a team? Of course she had. She lost mine, same as me. Shit. I was a fuckup. But I remembered how, after my second fuckup, she was going to recommend that they ground me, and got overruled. Had she been the one to ground me this first time? Or was it intel? And if it was intel, why did they agree to reinstate me in the . . . future? But not . . . now? Or . . . shit, this version? If this was a Martian torture module, it was terrible.

  I spent my time during their drop running through training on the torture modules. I didn’t go through the modules themselves, but the guided training, which was less intense.

  In the immersive, I hung chained at the center of the room. My training guide stood nearby, hands behind her back, coaching me through it. Your guide can be whoever you want it to be, but I chose the generic avatar, one based on Admiral Sokai, the trim, dark woman who had led Tene-Silvia to its first victory during the last Corporate War. Something in her stance reminded me of Muñoz, and I found that vaguely comforting.

  “You aren’t trapped,” the avatar told me. Three suited soldiers came in behind her, passing through her like she wasn’t there, and I guess she wasn’t. None of us were. “This is the lie they tell you. That you are trapped. That you have no control.”

  I concentrated on my breathing. I was bad at meditation, but it was pretty much the best tactic here.

  “You are waiting for them,” she said.

  “To do what? Kill me?”

  “You are waiting for them to believe they have broken you.”

  “What if they really do break me?”

  “Then we start over.”

  “Shit.”

  “Focus.” The guards brought out their shock sticks. They began to beat me. I registered pain, but it was dulled, like watching pain happening to a body that had once been mine. I had turned down the settings on purpose. The worst wasn’t going to happen to me here, not until I could figure out how to control it.

  “Take control,” the avatar said.

  “Of what?”

  A stick came down on my face. My nose burst. Blood sprayed. In the world of the construct, the blood seemed to float in the air like dust before dropping, flat and wet, to the floor and disappearing.

  “Your enemy is not these soldiers,” she said. “Your enemy is your own mind. Your mind is also your only means of liberation. Take control.”

  “How?” The thwap-thwap of the shock sticks against me, the lightning flare of pain that was meant to register a broken rib. “There’s nothing to control!”

  The avatar moved to my side as I writhed. She regarded me coolly, black eyes so deep I felt lost in them. “You must rip yourself open. Break yourself apart. That’s the only way to leave this world.”

  “End construct!”

  I came back to myself. I sat in one of the padded immersive chairs, safely strapped in, room dim. All around me were a dozen other rigs, most empty. My platoon was gone, living real life. I was here, still trying to figure out how to hack real life through a fake one.

  When the platoon came back, I was having my heads-up display recalibrated; just regular maintenance. Jones came into the med tech room and hopped onto the bed beside me.

  “Go well?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “What you in for?”

  “Caught something in my display.” His left eye drooped; a smear of tears wet his left cheek, with no sign of stopping.

  The med tech examined him and popped out his display lenses. “I’ll get your right one cleaned and issue you a new left,” the med tech said, and walked out.

  For the first time since outside the immediate aftermath of a drop, I sat with another human being without anything I did or said being recorded. Jones figured that out before me. He rounded on me as soon as the tech was out of sight.

  “What really happened?” Jones said. “Did you kill them? Did you fuck it up?”

  “Don’
t lecture me about fucking up, Jones. Compare our records on fucking up.” I saw the bloom of Grandma’s burst torso again, the glistening innards. Wondered if I’d have to spell it out for him.

  “Just tell me.”

  “I don’t know what happened. But”—I glanced at where the tech had gone—“I don’t remember going to Mars, Jones, not ever. Me and some other team I didn’t know—we were in the fucking Cape. But . . . dead. It was dead there, nobody alive, except: Masukisan uniforms? In ShinHana territory. That was weird, too. I don’t know. There was a blast, a burst . . . Everything went dark. I swear to you.”

  “Maybe it was fake. Some immersive the Mars people put you in when you were captured.”

  “It felt real.”

  “No shit. It’s supposed to feel real. The torture modules all felt pretty real in training, too.”

  “What if I’m still stuck in one?”

  “What, now?” Jones laughed. “That would make sense, I guess. Who’d be left in your ultimate torture scenario? Muñoz down, Jawbone down—and you’re stuck with me. What next, they dig up some old girlfriend?”

  Something must have shown in my face because Jones said, “What?”

  “After the drop, in the hospital. I saw . . . somebody I used to be with. Not somebody I wanted to see. Then she was just . . . gone. Have you ever had this shit happen, Jones? Am I going nuts for real?”

  I thought Jones would look at me like the psych did, like intelligence, like I was crazy, but he just nodded slowly. “Yeah, I mean, no—I don’t think it’s what you think it is.” He lowered his voice even further. “You’re not the only one to go through this shit. Muñoz did, before you. She had one real bad drop; she told the CO, and the CO told her she was imagining things, just overexcited, but I know code when I see it. The CO didn’t want the conversation to get tagged for review by intel.”

  “If the CO knows this happens, why does she want me to quit?”

  “Maybe because she doesn’t want whatever happened to Muñoz and those others to happen to you.”

  “The others?”

  “That’s why we always stick to the brief, Dietz. I’ve seen them haul off other people when they come back from a drop raving about having been somewhere else. That is why we’re in quarantine, after. It’s not because of the physical stuff—they know right away if we’re messed up there. But because of the mental stuff. They want to know if we went . . . somewhere else. Soldiers who get . . . confused get discharged. Not the good kind, latrines and labor, but discharged, disappeared. You get me?”

  “Killed?”

  “Nothing good. Maybe the top brass kills them, maybe they run experiments on them? Who knows? But we never hear from them again.”

  The tech returned, bearing a freshly serviced pair of lenses for me.

  “Stick to the brief,” Jones said, and we both shut up.

  My display flickered. For the first time in a while, it occurred to me to check the date again. There were no clocks, no calendars. We could mark the time via our displays, and we had countdowns and timers and alarms. But the day? Was it Friday? December or March? When I tried to access that information, I got a little red flag of denial from my system.

  I glanced over at Jones.

  How long had we been doing this?

  That’s when I remembered the marks I had seen on my bunk, the first time I came back to base. Ninety-three marks.

  I went back to my bunk and laid down. Stared at the smooth metal. Ran my fingers across it. There were no marks yet. Those marks I’d seen hadn’t been counting kills. They had been counting days. Time. Days between drops? Between bad drops? I wasn’t sure. But if this was my first time back to base after Mars recon, now was the real time to start counting.

  I counted out the time I’d spent in quarantine, the days I’d been grounded, and recorded them each as a mark on the metal.

  I was going to count all the time I spent living like normal people did.

  I was going to figure it out.

  And learn how to control it.

  16.

  The strangest thing, even after jumping around like I had, was getting introduced to a team I had already been on a mission with, and pretending like this was the first time.

  It was two more drops before I got clearance to go again. I figured I only got it because I made myself a pain in the ass with the CO. Every time she came back from a mission, I requested an update. I sent messages to her superiors. I even sent messages to Jasso, telling her I was fit for duty. They made me see the shrink twice more. I stuck to my story about forgetting what I’d been through. I marked off the days on my bunk. I spent eleven days on base that time. I wanted to remember.

  When the CO finally called me in, I said, “Sir, either discharge me or send me out. I can’t sit here going through the same six immersives and running a treadmill. I’m going nuts. Sir.”

  “They cleared you. Apparently your shrink thinks you’re fine. Intelligence has taken an interest, so watch your ass. I’m putting you on a squad with Jones. If you have a problem with him as squad leader, I’ll just transfer you to another platoon. I heard you two had issues in training.”

  “Sir, not at all. I’m fine with him as squad leader.”

  The CO also assigned Prakash to our squad. I noted how Prakash’s eyes got big when the CO announced it. The CO called her out for having hair a quarter of an inch beyond regulation—which was a quarter of an inch. Prakash ignored me for a while, but I caught her smoking one afternoon. She offered me a hit, and we stood there in companionable silence.

  “My father smoked,” I said.

  “My mother. Every time she went out to fix our wonky knu connection. She thought none of us noticed.”

  “These aren’t regulation.”

  “Pissed I have to roll them. You kill your squad?”

  “No.”

  Hell of a way to start an acquaintance.

  We got another new guy, Marino, a transfer from a platoon that had been decimated on Mars. He was more fucked up than me, maybe. Only he had watched his whole squad burst apart by pulse rifles, and came gibbering back to the drop point, still covered in the misty residue of their bodies. They didn’t question him as much as they did me, and I suppose that was fair. They had all the intel on that one. When I tried to look him up, my heads-up display denied me, denied me, denied me. I wondered what kind of op it had been.

  The other was Omalas, already on our platoon and also familiar to me from the banana drop. Which of course no one remembered but me, because we hadn’t done it yet. She was a fresh-faced young woman built like a tank. She towered over me; twice as wide and maybe twenty-five kilos heavier. The Corporate Corps had clearly worked at getting her lean, but she wasn’t meant to be that way. Her teeth flashed white in her dark face as she loomed over me. I tensed for a fight. This was going to be just like Frankie.

  “You know the way to the head?” she said in a soft, even voice. Her tone was so low I barely understood her. Her eyes twinkled.

  I pointed. She didn’t laugh out loud then, but she did later. All I knew about them was what I saw now and what I’d seen during that weird drop, that stutter in time. Their files were closed to me.

  • • •

  We had some normal drops. I suppose that’s important to know. I recognized they were coming, when I came back from a drop and the mission brief I had before the drop matched the mission brief I had during and after the drop. I looked forward to long, uninterrupted periods of linear time. It was never as good as I thought it would be, though.

  The normal missions—when time was normal—those were the worst. When you got back to living linearly, it felt like soaking in a hot tub. I got comfortable. Complacent. I thought about just telling the shrink everything. Thought about sending a message to intelligence and laying out what I knew about the war so far. Thought about how lucky I was that Teni couldn’t read and record thoughts yet . . . could they?

  Going through normal time with a platoon, a squad
, during active combat . . . it’s worse. You know they’re going to die. I knew Prakash was going to die. Is that why we got drunk and started fucking? Maybe. Maybe we would have anyway. I knew I was on borrowed time, marking the days off on my bunk.

  Even if there was a better explanation—like me being stuck in some Martian simulation—and yeah, a lot of days, I figured that was a happier explanation—it would eventually have an end date too. Enjoy the time while you have it.

  Jones got me copies of Amado’s books: Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Captains of the Sands, and one of Machado de Assis’s books, The Alienist. They were real paper books sent to him from his mothers. Apparently, none of the works were allowed to get transmitted digitally. Corp policy on restricted work, even for citizens like Jones.

  I figured I’d humor Jones since he went to all the trouble. I needed time away from the treadmill and the torture modules. The shrink asked a lot about the torture modules. Banned literature was easier to justify.

  “Are you concerned it may be unhealthy,” the shrink said, “to spend so much time in such an intense immersive experience?”

  “It fucked me up,” I said, “the idea that maybe I was captured on Mars. I didn’t test well on the modules in training. I want to get better in case we drop on Mars again. It’s only a matter of time, right?”

  She ate that one pretty easily. I almost felt bad about it.

  But mostly, between drops soldiers do two things: drinking and fucking. Or drinking and thinking about fucking. Or drinking and pursuing somebody to fuck. We were young. Crowded together like rats, without a lot to do. You can only run so many kilometers and lift so many weights.

  “It’s like this in the north,” Prakash said after we had sex outside the barracks. The air was warm, but insistent. She tucked her shirt into her pants. “We smoked a lot of weed, too. We should get a weed ration.”

  “Evecom does. I heard.”

  “Shit. I’d trade cigarettes for that.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “You and Jones fucking?”

  “No.”

  “Landon?”