Contact Front #1 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  I was going to have to get out.

  I grabbed at the bank on my right-hand side and it collapsed when I tried to dig into it, sand, mud and muck giving way until I thought I might be burying myself in it. The emotional inertia that had carried me this far waned in the space of an instant and I settled back against the bank of the dry creek bed and sucked in air. Every shuddering breath was an effort and I felt more exhausted and drained than I had running through the train terminal, more afraid now than I’d been when that guy Ivan Jaropillo had been chasing me with a real gun that could really kill me.

  I wondered what Pris was doing now. Had she made enough off the score to get out of the tunnels, get out of the Underground even? Probably not. She was tough and smart but she didn’t have the kind of connections to get that much money from one shipment of Kick. She’d probably try to use the profit to buy more Kick, or Spindle, or Zero, or maybe some illegal ViRware, try to sell it on her own. Eventually, she’d either get snapped up by the cops or killed by the gangs. There wasn’t a third option for people like us.

  Unless I was ready to consider this a third option. Maybe it was, but it amounted to being snapped up by the cops for an opportunity to get killed, which sort of made it the worst of all possible worlds. At least it was something new.

  I sucked in a breath and tried to draw energy into my body along with the thick, humid air. The only tool I had was the rifle, so I used it like a shovel, digging the stock into the mud and dirt and sand of the bank until it went in far enough to stick, then levering myself up out of the hole. I nearly slipped back in getting the rifle free of the dirt, but finally collapsed at the top, resting on my back for another few seconds.

  The sky was still grey above me, but it was a light, morning shade of grey, with thick clouds promising the possibility of rain later on. I hadn’t felt rain in over a decade. Rolling over onto my side, I used the rifle again, this time as a stick to force myself to my feet. A copse of trees boxed me in, taller than the ones down in the valley but still twisted and warped, their bark black and scaly, their leaves dagger-sharp. They looked mutated, warped, and they fit in just right in this place, on this world.

  I stumbled through the trees, out of the enclosure, needing to get a better idea of where I was and how far I’d come from the Op-For. Underbrush tried to trip me up, pulled my attention downward, making me watch each step. Multiple twisted columns branched out into winding spirals, each with spiked leaves and five-centimeter thorns, reaching out as if they were trying to trap me. The tip of one of the leaves brushed against my neck and I bit down on a curse, slapping a hand against the sudden pain. My palm came away with a speck of blood, and I began to suspect the trees on Inferno were carnivorous, planted here by the military to sort the wheat from the chaff.

  There was light past the trees, an open area somewhere, but it seemed hazy and nebulous past the much closer and more immediate maze of thorns. I twisted and ducked and sidled through what seemed like an intentionally designed barrier, using the rifle to smack the thinner, more malleable tendrils away. The tangle seemed to be thicker as I went and I thought I’d either have to try crawling beneath them or turning back when one last contortion through one last layer put me out into the open at the base of the hill.

  The valley stretched out in front of me in the full light of dawn, open and broad and mottled in dead brown and insistent green and yellow. It was empty of people, empty of anything, nothing at all to be afraid of.

  And yet I was petrified. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I didn’t remember falling yet I was on the ground, curled into a ball, eyes squeezed shut. The blackness was a comfort, but not enough of one. I couldn’t see the terrible nothing, the vast emptiness, yet somehow its presence was wriggling through my closed eyelids, penetrating my attempts to shut it out. I knew it was there and I couldn’t un-know it.

  I grabbed at sanity with both hands, but it slipped through my fingers like smoke and all rational thought was gone.

  Seven Years Old:

  Heat mirages wavered at the horizon, turning saguaro cactuses into the silhouettes of silent giants, watching him suffer and not offering their aid. He had no words for the heat and the thirst tormenting him, no way to describe the pain and longing, no concept of the grief. He had no water, no food, no shelter, no idea where he was or where he was going, just a conviction he had to keep going, that sitting still meant death.

  That was what Anton had told him before they’d left Tijuana in the old car, before hours of rattling and shaking and bumping through the night, before its inevitable breakdown and the cursing and pounding on the old, rusty hood of the ancient vehicle. He’d been scared then. His father never cursed, never raised his voice, not since Momma had died.

  And then they’d seen the truck in the distance and Anton had told him to hide in the trunk where it was close and dark and hot, and not to come out no matter what he heard until he heard nothing. And when he did come out, he should run and not stop running until he couldn’t run anymore.

  He couldn’t run anymore. He could barely walk. Everywhere he looked was nothing but more of nothing, sand and cactuses and rocks and hills that never, ever seemed to get closer no matter how long he walked toward them. He wanted to sit down, wanted to cry, but he had no tears left. There was no one around to see them, no one around anywhere. Poppa and Anton were gone, just like Momma, and they were never coming back. Poppa had told him people didn’t come back from dying, not until you saw them in Heaven.

  This place was not Heaven. It felt more like Hell, the place where the bad people went, the people who had killed his father and brother. Like the people who’d killed his mother. They would all go to Hell one day, he was sure…but what had he done? He’d been a good boy. His father had always told him he was such a good boy. Why had God sent him to this Hell?

  He thought he saw something glinting in the sky just past the hills, but it was hard to tell through the shimmering heat. There was a city across the desert, his father had said. A place he’d called Trans-Angeles, a shining paradise where they would all be safe. He’d promised them that the city would take them in if they could only reach it, that the people there would give them a place to live and food, and it would be so much better than things had been back home, without the bad people trying to hurt them and each other. He had to reach the city. He headed for the glimmer of light…

  5

  “I guess you won, Alvarez.”

  I blinked as if I were only now waking. I was in the head at the barracks, staring at my own face in the bathroom mirror. The scratches still seemed raw, red, though they would be gone in a day or so after the treatment, but one of them bisected my chin, the other slanted across my nose. I must have run blindly through the thorns back to the riverbed where they’d found me.

  I turned and looked at Williams as if he’d grown another head.

  “What?”

  It was almost lights-out and he was dressed in the ridiculous undershirt-tucked-into-shorts outfit they forced us to wear to bed, though somehow it looked even goofier on him. He was a toothpick with google-eyes pasted to one end and oversized feet at the other.

  “You were the last,” he clarified, and I couldn’t miss the bitter anger behind the words now, though I certainly tried. “Took them ten solid hours to find you hiding in a fucking ditch,”

  “I didn’t know,” I admitted, shrugging it off. I couldn’t even remember them finding me. The first thing I recalled after freezing up on the hillside was the motion of the VTOL transport.

  “I suppose you think you’re some hotshot now, huh? You think you’re special because you abandoned everyone else and did it all on your own?”

  I stared at him the way I might have an aggressive rat warning me away from scraps of garbage in the tunnels. Did he think he sounded tough or intimidating? I didn’t even consider telling him the truth. It was none of his business.

  “What do you want, Williams?” I asked. “Did you think this bunch of stupi
d kids….” I waved a hand back at the platoon bay on the other side of the wall. “…was gonna form up into some sort of commando unit with you in the lead? Did you think we were going to ambush a bunch of trained Force Recon Marines and then come back and get steak dinner from the Drill Sergeants?”

  “We should have tried to work together!” he snapped, taking a step closer to me. I could smell the issue teeth-cleaner on his breath. “I asked you for help!”

  “You heard what the man said when we got dropped off. It was a test, and one we were supposed to take on our own. I don’t know you well enough to trust you.”

  “Then why the hell did you join the Marines, Alvarez?” He nearly yelled the words and I wanted to tell him to shut up, that he was going to bring the Drill Sergeants down on us, but maybe getting smoked for a few hundred pushups would shut him up, if nothing else.

  “For the same reason everyone else does,” I told him. “I didn’t have any other choice.”

  I turned back to the mirror and ignored him until he went away. I hesitated at the door to the bathroom. No, shit, I decided I’d better start using the terminology they’d taught us. I hesitated at the hatchway to the head. Straight ahead was the platoon bay, rows of bunk beds and work I still needed to do before lights-out. To the left was a narrow passageway leading to the office of the platoon’s training officer, a First Lieutenant named Harrell. I’d barely seen her since we’d arrived, but I knew she stayed in her office until lights-out.

  I also knew if I bothered her without going through the Drill Sergeants, I was asking to get my ass dragged out to the PT pit. But I needed an answer to this question. I knocked on the door, then braced to attention. I expected her to yell at me, either to come in or go the hell away. Instead, she opened the door and looked me up and down. My eyes were straight ahead, but I saw short brown hair and clear blue eyes and a spotless uniform, its edges pressed sharp and straight.

  “Alvarez,” she said, her voice firm and authoritative but not bellowing like the Drill Sergeants’. “I was wondering when you’d come by. At ease, come on in.”

  Her office was small, the walls white and bare, the only furniture a metal desk and two folding chairs, one behind the desk and one in front of it. They looked uncomfortable and, when she invited me to sit with an offhand motion, I found out they felt just as uncomfortable as they looked. If I had to spend as much time in an office as she did, I’d have tried to make it more comfortable. Maybe she thought that would make her look soft to us, or the Drill Sergeants or maybe senior officers, I didn’t know.

  The only personal item I could see in the whole room was a picture cube sitting on the desk, images and video clips cycling over all the visible sides of the thing. One I noticed was Lt. Harrell in civilian clothes but with her military haircut, standing beside a tall, good-looking man with skin the color of café-au-lait and long, flowing black hair. Husband maybe? Boyfriend? Hell, if her family was rich enough, it could be her father. The people who lived on the surface in Trans-Angeles never got old.

  “All right, Alvarez,” she said, falling into her own chair, elbows resting on her desk in a casual posture I wished I could imitate. “You want to ask the question or should I just save us both the time and give you the answer?”

  I opened my mouth, closed it again. She’d given me the choice between saying something or not, and silence had always seemed safer to me. She sighed, and I thought maybe she was disappointed with my choice.

  “You want to know why you aren’t on the first available ship back to Earth,” she said, “waiting to get stuck into punitive hibernation.” The corner of her mouth quirked up, a smile she wouldn’t quite let herself show. “You aren’t the first recruit we’ve found huddling in a ditch, babbling and incoherent. You aren’t even the first one this month.”

  I frowned, confused.

  “We get most of our recruits from the mega-cities,” she explained, her tone patient, almost gentle. “From the underclasses, people who live their whole lives without ever seeing the sky, without ever seeing an open field or a square meter of ground without humans on it. The biggest miracle is that more of you aren’t agoraphobic.”

  “Agoraphobic?” I repeated, forehead wrinkling with confusion.

  “An unreasoning fear of open spaces. We get it a lot.” She shrugged. “Some people have it worse than you, although I’ve rarely seen someone go into the sort of fugue you did today. It’s treatable. I can’t promise there’ll be time for you to get it in Basic Training or even Advanced Occupational Training, but if you don’t wash out, they’ll treat you for it eventually.”

  “How am I going to be a Marine if I can’t even walk outside without passing out, ma’am?” I blurted.

  “This test was a bit of drama,” Harrell admitted, “partially meant to impress on young people who’ve never been in this sort of situation just how unprepared for it they are. But partially to pick out candidates for Force Recon.” She cocked an eyebrow. “And although we don’t usually share this sort of information, I will tell you that if you hadn’t fallen apart at the sight of an open horizon, you would be on the track for Force Recon. You took out two of them without getting killed yourself, with no training or experience. But you can’t handle the wide-open spaces, so…” She waved a hand demonstratively.

  An emptiness filled my gut, a hole big enough to pull me down inside myself like a popping balloon collapsing inside-out. I sucked in a breath and nodded acknowledgement.

  It is what it is. Pris always said that, and I’d always hated it, but it seemed to apply here.

  “Does that mean I get to clean toilets on Inferno for the rest of the war then? Ma’am,” I remembered to add a beat too late.

  “No, it doesn’t. If you make it through Basic Training without washing out, you’ll be sent for AOT at Battlesuit Operator School. If you make it through, you’ll be a battlesuit Marine, what they call a Drop Trooper.”

  She picked a tablet as thin as a scansheet off the desk and touched the screen. An image appeared on it of what looked like a metal giant, an oversized caricature of a human form, bulky and broad and imposing.

  “Wow,” I murmured. I was impressed by the thing, which surprised me. I looked between it and her. “Have you ever been inside one of those, ma’am?”

  That almost-a-smile again. She pulled back the hair from the sides of her head and turned it slightly in either direction to show me the metal and ceramic implant jacks there. I’d seen them before, but only on netdivers working for the gangs, cracking security systems.

  “You need these,” she explained, “because neural halos are too slow. A microsecond, but it counts when you’re talking about trying to control something that big in combat.” She snorted, less amusement than disgust. “In the first models, they tried to use motion feedback from actually moving your arms and legs, but the reaction time was for shit. Thank God the Tahni didn’t have anything better.”

  She tossed the tablet back on the desk, frowning in what might have been regret, or maybe resentment.

  “I’d still be running a suit if they hadn’t decided they wanted me for training duty. God willing, I’ll be back in one when I make captain.”

  “What’s it like, ma’am?” I hated the way my voice sounded, too young and eager, too much like the teenagers from the surface I used to see in the Zocalo.

  Her eyes were far away, the way Poppa’s used to get when he talked about Momma.

  “It can be,” she told me, “like lying in your mother’s arms. Or it can feel like a coffin, if you’ve ever heard of those, Alvarez.”

  “I’m from Tijuana, ma’am,” I told her, and the too-young feeling passed as quickly as it had come. “I know all about coffins.”

  “Well, then,” she said, pushing herself to her feet, her chair legs scraping across the floor like a signal that the talking was done. I leapt to my feet, coming to attention. “Get back and get ready for lights-out, Recruit. Before you become a Drop Trooper, you need to learn how to be a Marine.
”

  6

  I ran the pad of my right thumb over the interface jacks on my temple and behind my ear. They felt cold, unnatural. In the mirror over the sink, they seemed huge and obtrusive against my freshly-shaven scalp. They were hooked up, so I was told, directly to my cerebellum, the part of my brain that controlled movement and balance. With the jacks, I could control the battlesuit without even thinking about it, as if it were my own body.

  Did they make me less human? And did I care?

  Something hammered against the bathroom door and I abandoned the self-examination.

  “Dude!” Trent’s voice was muffled by the door, but not much. It was cheap, thin plastic. “Get your ass out of the toilet or we’re gonna be late for the fitting.”

  I rolled my eyes at the tall, gawking teenager on the other side of the door. He looked as young and green as I did, but Trent Garner had been part of one of the roughest gangs in Capital City out on the east coast. It wasn’t as large or as densely populated or nearly as violent as Trans-Angeles, but you could die just as dead on the east coast as you could the west. I didn’t ask him what he’d done to wind up with the same choice I’d had, but it probably wasn’t something small.

  “Didn’t you learn anything in Basic Training, man?” I asked. “This is a head, not a toilet. And it’s a battlesuit synchronization and calibration, not a fitting.”

  “Oh Jesus, give me a break!” Trent raised his hands palms-up in surrender. “We’re still gonna be late!”