Everything the Martians had made grow again in Canuck we turned back into dust.
We were the weapon.
We were full of light.
• • •
I would like to tell you I knew what I was going to do, before that. But I had not seen the true measure of the destruction that the corporations were willing to wreak to consolidate their power.
I wanted to be brave. To be a hero. To carry out orders like a paladin would. I did those things even knowing what the outcome was going to be. I wanted so badly to be the good guy.
But it truly was not until that moment, after I had destroyed everything still good in this world, that I realized I wasn’t a hero . . . I was just another villain for the empire.
38.
There weren’t many of us left to see what we did, and maybe it was better that way. I stayed broken up there in the ether between things for a long time. I didn’t want to go back. Didn’t want to come together.
Take control of the construct.
And I did.
A part of me, a conscious part of me, cruised the coms and tipped a toe across the world, trying to understand what had happened. We were all just bits of data.
It was all over the networks, the destruction of half a continent. They didn’t say we shot one another up to do it or say how many of our people died in the explosion, their essential elements broken apart. And right beside these pictures of this barren, smoking wasteland were pictures of our own people cheering in our dingy little cities built on the bones of our ancestors. We had scorched the fucking earth, but everyone cheered because we’d gotten back at those aliens, those liars, those immigrants.
I saw the streams and I knew what I had to do. I still wanted to be a hero. I had a chance. But it meant giving up everything I believed in. Betraying everyone I cared about. Being everything I’m supposed to hate.
I knew what I needed to do because I’d seen it. We’d been moving here the whole time.
A loop.
I knew what was next.
They had lied to us on the networks. The Martians weren’t bumbling refugees that we had benevolently allowed to stay here. They had come to help us, come to share what they had learned when they transformed Mars. They had made a beautiful world from the over-heated toxic desert we’d created, and we hated them for it, because they were free to create a better world. No one owned them.
Betrayers, they said, on the networks. Liars. Martians.
They had made the land grow things again, but that was all they were supposed to do. They weren’t supposed to be free because no one is free, and they weren’t supposed to be able to defend themselves because no one can, not from the corps. The corps won’t allow it. The corps take care of you, as long as you give them everything.
Now that I’d been light, I started thinking that maybe all those ghouls in São Paulo didn’t die after all. Maybe they just went somewhere else. Maybe the Martians found out what we were too, and tried to save us from ourselves.
The São Paulo Blink showed the corporations what was possible.
It was the Martians who had given us the light.
Nearly two million people, gone in a blink.
And our response: half a continent scorched of all life. A ruined Martian landscape. Murdering our own children.
Maybe the light was our downfall. Or maybe we’d been falling the whole time.
39.
I fell back to Earth like a broken drone, shattered and exhausted, split into a million pieces.
We need to go back, back . . . I thought as I came together, fearful of losing myself, of breaking so far apart I could not be retrieved.
I came together, experiencing the rush of inhabiting a body on the cusp of the corporeal. Is this how ghosts felt? I held up my fingers, marveling at them. I reached for my helmet before I’d fully come together, something you aren’t supposed to do, but it felt natural. I lifted it from my still fuzzy head and tossed it to the ground. It sank into the soil and came together within it, half submerged.
I fell over, and my hands hit solid ground. Ten fingers. I huffed in a long breath, feeding my newly formed lungs.
As I raised my head, I saw a wide expanse of grass all around me. The sky was dark save for the flickering image of the cloud-streaked moon and her satellites. I leaned back on my heels. I was alone on the deployment field.
From a little guard tower up on the hill, a flashing light approached. Sound of a motorbike or ATV. Two technicians rode down. One leaped from her vehicle and came straight to me.
“Name and rank?” she said.
“Dietz, corporal.”
“My God. We thought we’d lost you. Your platoon came back six days ago, before we lost power. You were listed MIA.”
“Well, now I’m found.”
She shone a light into my eyes. I always wondered what they were checking, with that. Could you see if someone was an alien agent, by looking in their eyes? Maybe test for sanity?
Whatever she was looking for, she seemed satisfied. She turned to her colleague and said, “Call in medical. This one needs to go straight to quarantine.”
• • •
Once again, I was in quarantine alone, my own platoon having gone in and out four days ahead of me. I wiped my hands over my skull. Hair still short. My stomach wasn’t shrunken. It was hard to get a line on anything else, though, in quarantine. I expected to hear from intelligence first, as usual, but it was the therapist I got sent to immediately after quarantine.
The doctor came into the room, wiping her hands on her blue skirt, the same color as the blue walls. She looked harried.
“No intel?” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’ve met,” I said, before she could ask. “I was missing for a week, they said. What happened? Nobody will tell me anything.”
“I’m sure you will be debriefed. I apologize. There have been some events that took intel away.”
“They said the power went out, but the lights are on?”
“Generators. We have been on emergency power. There was an attack on the power grids.”
“Which ones?”
She sat across from me, tucking her skirt under her legs. “All of them, I believe.”
“That’s . . . a lot.”
“They believed it was an EMP. And in many areas, it was. We had some protection here from that, most bases did, but not civilian areas, unfortunately. What most concerns us now, however, is your mental state after your ordeal. Do you have any memory of where you’ve been?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“Your squad came back from a very stressful mission in the far north of the North American continent. Do you remember that mission?”
“Which one?”
“Your squad leader, Jones, was injured. He lost an arm. How did that make you feel?”
“The fuck do you think?”
“I’m trying to assess where you are in—”
“In time?” I suggested, and she started. “Yeah, me too.”
She leaned forward and whispered, “The records server is offline due to the attack. What you tell me here is in confidence.”
“What I tell you here belongs to Teni.”
“Trust me.”
“No. You trust me. You tell me what the fuck has been happening to me.”
“We know some of you are experiencing this war . . . differently. But the results are highly individualized. Some only cross once, some twice, and most have no observations to share that amount to anything except a profound sense of confusion. They are overwhelmed, just following orders.”
“You mean, cross . . . to other parts in time.”
“You remember, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
Her tone became energetic, almost frenetic. “That’s wonderful! You’re the only one who has retained full awareness and memory throughout your experiences, or so you say. You must understand—for years we assumed you were all experiencin
g psychosis. There was no way to prove the crosses were real, especially because so many would simply tell us about events we had already experienced. The people like you, you are giving us insights into events that could be days, months, or years into the future. We had no idea how to prepare for that future without having more details. When we pulled you back, our locators told us you were physically in one time, and of course, the issue was not your physical location. The issue was how your brain recalled those experiences. Our best guess is that breaking you apart changed the structure of your mind in some way.”
I blinked at her. What more had I expected, really? “We’re just some test to you. Some experiment. That’s the best you can do?”
“The human mind has always been among the deepest mysteries of our bodies. We want to pretend science has all the answers. But it simply gives us the tools to uncover those answers. It doesn’t mean we have them. It’s why so many still cling to religion. We need answers to the unknown.”
“You threw us all out there without knowing what you were doing. You—”
“Every soldier is a sacrifice. You are owned by the corporation, or the state, before it, or the king or landlord before that. It’s the first thing they drive into you in training, isn’t it? Your body is not yours. Most soldiers died of disease and infections before the rise of antibiotics and the seemingly basic knowledge that one should wash one’s hands before sticking them into a man’s guts and wash again before hacking off another’s leg. Soldiers were the sacrifice. We needed an advantage over Mars. This technology did that. The losses, the side effects, were calculated to be worth the advantage they gave us. We are all of us scrambling around in the dark.”
“Like now,” I said bitterly. “In the dark. You knew this whole time.”
She nodded eagerly. “How many times have we met?”
“I have no idea. This has been a long war for me.”
“It ends with the sickness?”
“How did you hear about that?”
“Other soldiers—”
“Like who?”
“That . . . I cannot tell you.”
“How about Frankie Kowalski? How cracked was he by the time I shot him on Mars?”
“Corporal Kowalski . . . did have some unfortunate drops.”
“And what did he see?”
“That’s what’s so stimulating,” she said. “You all saw different events. Different futures.”
I lost my breath. Had to sit back in the bed. “But there’s only—”
“One would think. And yet.”
I considered that, the idea that Rubem, and Frankie, and Muñoz and me—maybe Marino, too—all saw some other end to the war, and then looped around and experienced it again and again.
“Do you think a lot about mortality?” she said.
I had no idea where that had come from. “Now? Sure.”
“What are your thoughts on it?”
“I never thought much about dying when I first signed up,” I said carefully. It was a relief, I realized, to sit here with someone who believed me, even if I was just some test subject to her. But I wasn’t a thing. I was alive.
“Nobody really does,” I continued, “even when you see your friends stuck inside walls, or watch their torsos bust open, or hold their guts in your hands. It takes a while to really get that it could happen to you. You’re the hero of your own story. The hero doesn’t die, can’t die, because then the story ends. But I’ve had a long time to sit with death, now. I have stared death in the face. I don’t like it much. I want to choose how this all ends. I don’t just want it taken from me. When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want. The death that means the most to me. That is the good death, the best death, and that is the death I wish not only for myself, but for you, too. Our lives are finite. Our bodies imperfect. We shouldn’t spend it feeding somebody else’s cause.”
Dr. Chen was quiet for a bit. I waited her out. I didn’t want to say anymore. I’d said enough. I was always saying too much.
“Are you working toward that end?” she asked. “What do you think about life after the war?”
“That’s it. That’s about all I think about it.”
“Death?”
“Sure.”
“Your brother was killed in the Blink.”
That didn’t sound like a question.
Silence, again.
“A lot of people ask how you can be a paladin and be a soldier,” I said. “Even if you take an oath of vengeance. But you’re committing to fight the greater evil. It doesn’t mean you won’t sometimes do some evil yourself. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t sometimes fighting for the empire. It just means that in the end, you do the right thing.”
She leaned forward. “But that’s the vital question. What is the right thing?”
40.
Fuck if I knew.
But I was determined to find out.
Dr. Chen had fucked with all of us this whole time. Knew everything. All of them knew pieces of it. And here I had been, fearful of talking to anyone and getting disappeared, when they were doing this to us on purpose, rolling us like dice to see which of us came up with a way to win the war.
But none of us did, did we?
Because they were going to lose the war. Everyone loses in war.
I came out of quarantine, and it was Tanaka who got up and ran over to me. He wrapped his arms around me like I’d been dead, and I suppose they had figured I was.
I pulled away from him, remembering his words in that Martian city. Little fucker hadn’t listened to me, and here we were. But as far as he knew, we had just fucked in the woods a few days ago.
“Dietz?” he said. “You all right?”
“No.”
Omalas and Jones, Deathless and Sandoval, and a few others crowded around. I saw Marino up in his bunk, paging through a comic book someone had smuggled in.
“Where were you?” Jones said. “You did another one of those weird . . . Dietz things you do.”
“How’s your arm?” I said.
He grinned. Rolled up his sleeve to the scar around the area where it had been severed. “Good work, huh? These medics are fucking magic. I’m glad I made you keep my arm.”
“Me too.”
“But where were you?” Tanaka said.
“I just got . . . caught somewhere, I guess. Where we all go when we jump.”
Tanaka narrowed his eyes. I gave him the “bullshit” sign so he knew I was giving them a show. Deathless was the only one who didn’t catch it. She was still too new.
“I’ve never gone anywhere but the drop,” Deathless said. “They all say you drop funny, you come back somebody else. Like, you get remade.”
“I wish,” I said. “Sorry. Same bullshit.”
“Dietz!” Andria, from her office.
I went.
She ushered me inside. Shut the door. Produced her own pocket watch. “Got mine fixed up,” she said, and peeled open the inside to reveal a scrambler chip.
“You figured it out?”
“I sent Captain V a recording of what you told me, before that drop in Canuck. Fuck, we lost Vela, and Jones and his ar
m . . . I made him a priority evac. Probably only reason he kept that goddamn arm.”
“And you sent our evac?”
“Yeah. Barely got ahead of that NorRus ship. Thought we could get Landon . . . I’m sorry.” Andria set the watch on the table and pulled out two liquor glasses. “That’s when Captain V confided in me about what the fuck they figure is going on with you and the others. The Light Brigade.”
“Motherfucker,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Had a chat with my therapist, too. She knew. The brass all knows. What the fuck are they playing at? It’s working, though, the torture modules. Have you said that to me yet?”
She shook her head. “Not sure when that comes along.”
“Fuck.” I sat down.
She poured again. Sat.
“How are we going to fix this, Dietz?”
“I tried,” I said, “during the final . . . shit, you told me to shut the fuck up. I don’t know what that was about. You—” You died before I could ask, I thought, but shut my mouth.
“What else happened?”
“Listen, the shrink thinks we all saw different wars. Different futures. All the ones who jumped out of order. You think that’s possible?”
“I don’t know,” Andria said. “I know you can see shit and then it happens. I just don’t know how to change it.”
“Me neither. Sorry.”
“For what? It’s not your fault. The war’s not your fault. Not my fault either.” But she said the last part differently, like she didn’t quite believe it, and downed her drink.
I wondered if she was right to have that tone, though, because it was our fault, wasn’t it? We fought this war willingly. We gave our bodies to it, even if we’re only here because of the lies Tene-Silvia told us. What if there was a war and nobody came? What if the corp voted for a war and nobody fought it? You can only let so many people starve. You can only throw so many people in jail. You can only have so many executions for insubordination to the latest CEO or board of directors.
Why did we make all this possible? Why didn’t we just go home and take care of our fucking dogs and tell the corps to fuck themselves?
The Light Brigade Page 29