“God, no.”
“We’ve fucked around a few times.”
“What, with both? Shit, I spend too much time in the torture mods.”
“Just Jones. But surely you and Muñoz were fucking.”
“No. Shit, Prakash, is this orgy confession hour?”
She grinned. I saw it again. The arm splayed through her torso. I blinked furiously and turned away.
“What is that?” she said. “You look at me that way sometimes. Can’t tell if you’re sad or horrified. Am I scary?”
“Not you. Just thinking about the war.”
“Your team. Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought up Muñoz. I really liked Muñoz.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not. We’ve all lost . . . a lot of people. I’ve been serving three years. Can’t believe I’m alive. You know the average length of service right now? Eighteen months. How wild is that? That’s average, so it means lots of people are dead first day, first week. What’s the point of going through all that training for fifteen minutes on the field?”
“It’s them or us. You want to end up a communist?”
“Starting to think communism is better than being dead.”
I raised a brow. It was easy to forget you were being recorded. I had heard of soldiers disciplined because of something they said, but never seen it. Better safe than sorry.
I probably spent more time with Prakash than I should have, knowing what I did. Or maybe I didn’t spend enough. On Sunday mornings when we weren’t on a drop, I’d read her Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. She found the book hilarious. Jones gave us shit, but I figured he was jealous.
I knew the morning I was going to drop back out of time. Knew it because that was the day I carved a thin line into the frame of my bunk, a third line next to eighteen sets of five.
Ninety-three days.
My reprieve in real time was over.
“For those of you who haven’t been to Mars,” the CO said after we gathered for our brief, “this is going to be a special experience. We have been called on to secure a base that’s recently gone dark. For many of you, this will be your first combat mission on Mars.”
That caught my attention. Was this the combat mission Prakash and Jones had talked about? As the CO went over the warnings and precautions, I thought, Great, this is it, Mars. Is this when I get to be some big damn hero? Because I was really ready for that. I was tired of being a shitty soldier.
“This is a full company mission,” the CO continued. “Our company is tasked with breach of the compound, with support from Tangine Company. To reach our target, we will be moving through an urban combat environment. We expect mines, booby traps, and the occasional hostile. Intel says we should not meet an organized force, but I don’t need to tell you about the dangers posed by a single well-placed sniper. Heat signatures will not always be visible. Lots of their snipers use cloaking tech. The old ways of detection are still the best. Watch for the glimmer of a scope. Pay attention to where shots are coming from. I don’t like being dropped into an urban combat situation, but them’s the breaks.”
They took us out to the drop field. I secured my pulse rifle. Jones to my left. Prakash in front of me, Marino next to her, cooing at his own rifle, and Omalas to my right, still and silent as a statue.
We began to tremble.
My teeth chattered.
I figured it wasn’t likely I was going to Mars, or, if I was, that it wouldn’t be now, at any rate. Try to relax, I thought. Let it be a surprise. Our forms began to judder apart. I saw Prakash’s arm again, rammed straight through her body. Had to blink rapidly, confirm she was still there, still mostly whole.
I hate surprises.
We broke apart.
Interview #3
SUBJECT #187799
DATE: 26|05|309
TIME: 0100
ROOM: 99
I: We’ve started the recording. Third recording with . . . subject one-eight-seven-seven-nine-nine. Performed by . . . see the notes.
(SILENCE: 05 seconds)
I: Can you hear me?
(SILENCE: 07 seconds)
I: Is she awake? This seems to be a great number of scars. Did she come with all these?
(UNINTELLIGIBLE: 15 seconds)
I: We’ve given you a hit of adrenaline. Hold her up, please. Do you want some water? I can give it to her. Here you are. I apologize for what’s happened to you. I did tell you it would be necessary. We’re running out of time. I told you that. On an accelerated timetable . . . without your cooperation . . . our options narrow. Surely you understand that now?
(UNINTELLIGIBLE: 25 seconds)
I: I can’t understand her. Hold her up. Is there a reaction with the adrenaline? Does she need another—
S: Go fuck yourself.
I: Ah. You’re back.
S: Never left, Sergeant. Just . . . drifted awhile.
I: Where did you go?
S: The front. Always the front. You?
I: We’ve suffered great losses.
S: But you were never there to witness them, were you? You don’t strike me as a woman who spends time on the field. You’re the type to go door to door, watching as homes are busted into, gleefully bringing back subjects for interrogation. . . .
I: I saw enough. Let’s not pretend there’s any clean place in this war or any other.
S: You saw it streamed. You saw it on an immersive. You never lived it. You just enforced it. Round and round.
I: Does that devalue my experiences, in your eyes? Do you feel it makes me lesser than you, or is that simply because I am your enemy?
(SILENCE: 15 seconds)
I: I have lost things in this war too.
S: Things, yes . . . A sense of security. An unshakable ideal. Perhaps even faith in your cause. But people? Besides your Corporate IP Protection team, your commanding officer, some fly girl who got blown up over—
I: Are you trying to guess at my history again? You’re doing poorly.
S: No. Not at all. I know more than you will ever believe. It helped me get here. You know what they started to say in the military corps in Tene-Silvia and Evecom, after the Dark? They said, “Fire when you’re told. Don’t disobey an order. Surrender to the first Martian you see.” Know why they said that?
I: Because they were cowards.
S: Because Mars was—is—good to its prisoners. Disarmed them. Sat them down. Fed them a pack of rations. Most POWs spent the war in warm, comfortable rooms with access to entertainment options and education courses. Toward the end, you know, after the Sick, soldiers from the Big Six were hungry. Mars got a reputation for treating POWs decently. Even decadently. The Big Six . . . didn’t. It’s why so many of yours started to defect. Maybe you should have considered that before you invested in advanced interrogation techniques.
I: Taking prisoners has never been practical. I cannot believe you learned any better where you were raised.
S: In World War I, the what . . . Americans, they were, at the time . . . they got such a reputation for treating prisoners well that when conscripted Germans got sent off in the next war, their parents told them to surrender to the first American they could find. Sound familiar? If you think that didn’t make a difference—
I: And see what happened to America, after. It became everything it accused others of being. It tore itself apart, riddled by the rot of unfettered free speech, drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalized training in critical thinking. Liberal democracies and scheming socialist regimes were doomed from the start. You give a human being freedom and personhood as some innate right, and what do they have to fight for? Personhood is earned. Residency is earned. Citizenship is earned. If you’re not earning for the company, you are costing it.
S: They won that war, is all I’m saying. They started losing when they forgot how to be decent. People will fight for the idea of decency. They will fight for someone who treats them like people. They fight for beli
efs far longer and harder than out of fear.
I: The ghouls have fought well for us.
S: Right up until they could surrender to Mars and get treated with dignity. The corps think like corps—all short-term benefits. No long-term strategy. No greater vision. Just profit. Just winning. You can only win for so long before it all topples out from under you.
I: Is this your way of begging for mercy? Arguing politics? Morality? Trying to get me to see your side? A side which conveniently asks me to stop interrogating you? You think I haven’t heard all this before, in some other form, from some other prisoner? I’ve interrogated better, smarter, and certainly prettier subjects than you. They all cracked. Every one. They cracked because they knew there was no way out of this. No going back. This isn’t an immersive. It’s real life. And here, I am your god.
S: Let us be honest. Words matter. You are torturing me. Stopping that would be nice, but it won’t win you my loyalty, only my exhaustion in the face of continuing pain and hope for the release of death. Of course, I know we’re too far into the war for that. I know you’re desperate. I knew where this was going from the start.
I: You keep saying that. But if you knew where this was going, why would you allow yourself to be captured and interrogated? At the very least, you’d have already told me what you know.
S: Then I would be dead.
I: We won’t kill you.
S: Of course you will kill me.
I: We may want to trade you. Prisoner exchanges are still done.
S: Trade me for whom? I’m nobody important, however much you wish I was. You could promise me anything. Promises are nothing, here.
I: Tell me about Saint Petersburg. Why did you go there?
S: It was the decent thing to do.
I: Who were you saving?
S: Everything that matters to me. Everything that can be saved. I’ve run through it again and again, and there’s no stopping this war. There’s no winning it. All I can do is save a few pieces I care for.
I: Answer one question for me, and I will have them cut you down. A single question. No bullshit.
S: Ask away.
I: What is the Russian word for doppelganger?
S: Dvoynik.
I: That was prompt. Good. You, take her down. . . .
(SILENCE: 45 seconds)
I: There, is that better?
S: I’ve been worse.
I: They teach Russian on Mars?
S: I’ve had a lot of time to learn things up there. The Russian is so Martian soldiers can accept the surrender of NorRus conscripts. They’re all conscripted ghouls, did you know that? They don’t pretend military service is some glorious or noble sacrifice. It’s simply about serving the whims of the corporation. It’s always been the rich pushing us around, making up stories about how we’re fighting for a noble cause when it’s just about, what, some old guy insulting some other old guy’s dick, measuring their relative genius based on how many people live stream their breakdown. You know the ratings for the war broke records? The corps made a killing on that. I heard Tene-Silvia even ran ads for NorRus and Evecom during that broadcast, it was so profitable.
I: Why did I ask about doppelgangers? You tell me. You’re always giving me lectures about history and morality.
S: The word comes from the German, meaning “double-goer.” To see a doppelganger of a loved one or relative was said to be a harbinger of their death or illness. If you saw one of yourself, it was an omen of your own death. The Egyptians had a related concept, a spirit double. But if you go back long enough, yes . . . the Zoroastrians, back in Babylonian times, in Persia, the idea of these doubles, these twin selves . . . they represented good and evil. You see that idea brought forward in a lot of other cultures. A doppelganger isn’t just a double, but an evil double, a terrible twin to you. I always found it funny that the doppelganger is supposed to be the evil one, though, don’t you? Just as likely that the original is the evil one, and the doppelganger the good. But that goes against our natural inclination to see ourselves as the heroes of our own stories, and the other as the outsider, the enemy, the one trying to take away everything we have. I . . . could go on, if you’ll allow me a cup of water.
I: You answered my question, so yes. Will you get her . . . ? Thank you.
(SILENCE 35 seconds)
I: Here it is.
S: Thank you.
I: You must be hungry.
S: Less than you’d imagine. Pain lessens my appetite.
I: We believe that you may have spent the last few years impersonating one of our agents, which would explain how you acquired your intel. What do you think of that?
S: It sounds like you’re grasping for straws, there, trying to throw something at me and see what sticks. Impersonating an agent sounds enormously difficult.
I: It would make it much easier to achieve what you have, thus far. Pretending to be a corp soldier. We have seen Mars brainwash some of our own, even, send them to Martian camps where they are “rehabilitated” and come out littered with new organic and nonorganic hardware. We dispatch them quickly, but they have gotten more sophisticated. Someone has been leaking communications to Mars. Someone told you Saint Petersburg was the best place to land, the city least touched by the Sick. They told you our CEO was there. The only way to get that information is to be one of our own. Yet we have destroyed all our traitors. We cut them each out at the root.
S: You sound so certain.
I: It was a very thorough purge.
S: It’s a convenient theory. It’s wrong, but convenient.
I: Why do you seek to destroy a free Earth?
S: Even if tossing a petrol bomb at your CEO’s hotel would destroy anything, really, the fact is there is no free society on Earth. Everyone is owned by someone else. The resistance here wants to unshackle you, but that’s too frightening for most people. So what does that leave us? Free people who believe they are already free? They think they have chosen their servitude, and that makes them individuals, powerful. Freedom to work? Ha! Freedom to die on the factory floor, behind a desk, pissing in place because they don’t get bathroom breaks. Freedom to be fired at the whim of a boss bleeding you dry on stagnant wages you can only spend at the company store. But the choice of the whip or the chain is a false choice. Sometimes you have to leave people behind. They’re part of the old world. They aren’t capable of building something new. To build something new is to admit that the lives they lead aren’t what they believed. And to lose that belief . . . threatens their sense of themselves. The annihilation of beliefs is the annihilation of the self.
I: Spare me your rhetoric.
S: You asked.
I: Another question, another answer, and I’ll send in a surgeon.
S: Surgeon and a vodka.
I: You will need to think carefully about your answer.
S: I’m thinking already. That’s something we have in common now. I made sure of that.
I: Who ordered you to attack that building? Who told you where our CEO was?
S: You did. How do you think I knew you’d be there? How I knew it was free of plague? How I knew you’d pick me up?
I: What do you—
S: That’s two questions. I want my vodka.
I: I told you to think very carefully about your answers—
S: I have. You string me back up, you’ll get the same answer.
(SILENCE: 09 seconds)
I: String her back up.
S: You lose, Dvoynik. Of course, I suppose that’s as good a name for me as any. You, though . . . you are easy to anticipate.
I: End interview.
(END RECORDING #3)
17.
I do a lot of thinking when we break apart.
You aren’t supposed to be able to think when you’re just a collection of atoms transformed into light. But then, you’re not supposed to be able to do a lot of things when you drop. Even my memories were muddled. What was yesterday? What was today?
We’re
all just animals reacting to stimuli, like runnels of water headed downhill, or blobs of mercury beading apart around an obstacle. I heard something in a biology class once about how animals can’t detect things they aren’t designed to. That might sound obvious, but how often do you assume that everything just sees and reacts the same way you do to the world? If we aren’t designed to detect or perceive a thing, if it doesn’t impact our ability to survive, then we can’t comprehend it. Think about space, stuff like dark matter, black holes, the expanding universe. We spend our whole lives making up stories to explain these things because we can’t figure them out; not the way we can figure out how vision works or how gravity keeps us rooted to the ground. Vision and gravity are things we have evolved to be able to sense. If we don’t understand those things, we’re at a disadvantage. But the universe? It doesn’t matter if we understand that, does it? Maybe on a grand scale, but not day-to-day. So we never evolved the capability to understand it. We aren’t made for it. It’s the same with the light, with traveling the way we do now. This isn’t something we’re designed to do. No wonder my memory is so messed up.
No wonder I broke apart over some great golden field under a blue sky, instead of the Martian vista I’d been promised.
Oh well.
I wondered who my team would be. Wondered how long it would be until coms came online. Wondered how I was able to wonder all those things before I’d corporealized.
We came together.
I tried to breathe, but my lungs weren’t ready yet. It was like sucking vacuum. The air finally came, cold, so fucking cold. Where would it be this cold? When? The bodies of the platoon were flickering in and out, still solidifying.
I scanned the horizon; just flat, rolling wheat fields as far as I could see. No buildings. No towers. I didn’t say a word over the platoon channel or the squad channel. I waited for coms. I waited for the updated mission brief, just like Jones and Muñoz always told me to do.
I may be stubborn, but I can be taught.
All around me, platoons began to appear on the field. Platoons generally had four or five fire teams each, making a platoon twenty to thirty strong. It wasn’t long before it became clear we were a very large deployment, probably a brigade, which was anywhere from fifteen hundred to thirty-five hundred soldiers.
The Light Brigade Page 13