by Rick Partlow
“But you can blow that dish, right?” Shepherd asked. For the first time since I’d met the man, I thought he seemed worried.
“I’ll have to be close.” I yanked the interface jacks out of my sockets. “And I won’t be walking there in this suit.”
“If we’re going to do this,” Maria said to her father, “we have to do it now.”
“I don’t know about this.” That was the older woman, Delta they’d called her. “We’re staking a lot on this jack-head and one beat-up suit. We should evac the city.”
“As my grandfather liked to say,” Shepherd replied, “why not get both?” He pointed to Delta. “You and Charlie get the word into the city, get the people ready to go.” He smiled thinly. “If the Tahni hear about it, that should make them even more ready to believe we’re giving up.”
“How are we gonna’ get the suit to the base?” I asked him. “This banged up, I wouldn’t want to try running it more than a few kilometers.”
“At night,” Maria told him, eyeing her father with what might have been doubt. “And with a distraction. Are you sure about this, Dad?”
“We got next to no time, no other weapons that’ll do the job, and no one else who can make this thing work,” Shepherd said flatly. “You got a better idea, you tell me now.”
She grunted and regarded me dubiously.
“You have an itch to get yourself killed?”
I just want back in a suit. But she wouldn’t understand that answer. I just agreed with her, instead.
“I must. I volunteered for this shit.”
“What do you need, son?” Dak asked me. He was projecting a confidence I wish I shared.
I’m a Lance Corporal. I thought it but didn’t say it. They needed me to sound like I deserved their confidence.
“Can you get me some live drone shots of their defenses?”
“Probably,” he allowed. “Nothing high-resolution or three-dimensional, but I think we got some stuff that’s small enough to go undetected that can get you a regular two-D view.”
“If you have any way to transmit to the Fleet, you should tell them what we’re going to try. They might not call off the nukes, but at least they’ll know to support us if we can pull this off.”
“We do have a transmission antenna,” Maria said. “But it’s hidden in an old grain storage building, and we can only use it once before the Tahni detect it and send a missile down on top of the building.”
“If you’re saving it for a special occasion,” I told her, cocking an eyebrow, “I think this might be it.”
“Right,” Dak said, finality in his voice as if he was ending the argument right there. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at the busted chest plastron. “I need a wrench.”
21
“You don’t like it out here, do you?”
I looked up from the open maintenance panel in the chest of the battlesuit, taking the moment to wipe sweat from my forehead. Maria stood by the tailgate, holding a bottle of water and a military ration pack. I didn’t know where she’d gotten the rats; they certainly hadn’t come out of the battlesuit. Maybe Fleet Intelligence had dropped supplies for them.
“Why do you say that?” I wondered, setting down the tools they’d loaned me and taking the food eagerly. I felt like I hadn’t eaten anything for days, and enough raw hunger could even make military rats palatable.
“When you go from the trailer to the truck, you keep your head down and walk just as fast as you can.” She leaned against the bed of the truck, watching me rip open the packaging and begin spooning down a self-heating packet of stew.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but she was sort of pretty. Not the kind of flawless beauty you got when the doctors worked your genes to perfection before you were even conceived, like the rich people back on Earth, but something more natural and appealing. I shrugged it off. She was probably older than me, likely not interested and certainly way too preoccupied.
I finished off the mouthful of stew I’d been using as a delaying action and started to form a likely-sounding lie, but hesitated.
What the hell difference does it make?
“I don’t like it outside; haven’t since I was a kid.” I scooped up another bite before I continued, trying to loosen up the tight controls I usually wrapped around the truth. “Have you ever been to Earth?”
“I was born here.” She tilted her head in a philosophical shrug. “I’ll probably die here. But I’ve done ViR tours of a few of the mega-cities.”
“Over half the population lives in them, and everyone that doesn’t, wants to. Except for the people rich enough to have a house, but I never met one of those.”
“Only rich people have houses?” She seemed shocked; maybe her ViR tour program hadn’t included that tidbit.
“There are hellacious taxes on anyone who doesn’t live in the cities. Only rich people can afford to pay them. Everyone who doesn’t live in Trans-Angeles or Capital City or one of the other mega-cities is stuck in the old towns, the pre-war towns.” I looked down at the remains of the heated food packet; it didn’t seem as appetizing as it had a few minutes ago. “My family lived in Tijuana…what’s left of it. It’s a hell-hole, a place everyone forgets about because they’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist or it’s someone else’s problem.”
My mouth felt dry; I grabbed the water bottle and sucked down a gulp.
“When I was seven, my dad stole an old junker of a car from one of the local gangsters and tried to make it across the desert to Trans-Angeles. Mom…she’d been killed in the gang fighting, and Dad was desperate. He’d heard if you just showed up, they’d take care of you, get you an apartment, that no one cared if you were registered or not. It was just me and him and my big brother, Anton. He was twelve.”
I could see Anton’s face, long, narrow and serious, always so serious, like the weight of the world was on him. He already had a scar across his chin where he’d caught a fragment from a car bomb. More than mom’s face or dad’s voice, I remembered Anton’s sad, haunted eyes.
I realized I hadn’t spoken in a while, and that Maria was staring at me.
“We didn’t make it. The bandits caught up with us in the desert south of the city. They took everything we had. Anton should have stayed in the car with me, should have tried to hide, but he had to try to…” Pain squeezed my chest worse than any g-forces ever had. “Afterward, after the bandits had left, I walked through the desert for two days before I collapsed. I woke up in the Trans Angeles East Hospital; a maintenance worker checking the solar power satellite rectennae outside the city had found me.”
“Jesus Christ.” I thought at first Maria was just cursing, but I looked up and noticed her crossing herself. Something else you didn’t see much in Trans-Angeles. It reminded me of Momma.
“I bounced back and forth between the government youth centers and one foster family after another, until I ran away and did the best I could on my own.” I laughed softly. “That usually meant petty scams, ripping off the gangs, whatever, just to make a quick score. I got caught and would have wound up in an Ice Cube—a punitive hibernation center. But the war meant I had a choice, and enlisted in the Marines.”
I picked up a wrench and made a show of going back to work on the chest latch, trying to shove the emotion back down where it belonged.
“I’m no psych councilor,” Maria said softly, “but I’m guessing you don’t tell many people that story.”
I shook my head, still pretending to concentrate on the armor.
“Everybody’s got their own problems.”
She put a hand over mine, stopping the clanking of the wrench and bringing my eyes back up.
“I’m not out here because I’m some kind of patriot,” she said. “I’m out here, my dad is out here, because the Tahni killed my mother, my husband, my daughter. They killed everyone I ever loved.”
I would have expected the words to be tinged with anguish or fury, but instead I thou
ght I heard something softer, something that might have been empathy, if I even knew what that sounded like. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d heard it.
“I’m sorry.” It sounded totally inadequate, but it was all I could think of. “How…how old was your daughter?”
She squeezed her eyes shut for just a half-second, the only indication she might be on the verge of tears.
“She was thirteen. Her name was Jackie and she loved horseback riding and soccer. And not a day goes by that I don’t think about her, and how old she’d be.”
She wiped at her nose.
“Everyone has a reason to be out here,” she went on, letting her hand slip off of mine. She smiled, and I thought it might have been the saddest expression I’d ever seen. “Listening to yours doesn’t make mine less important, it just means I know why you wear the armor.”
“Some days,” I admitted, “I wonder if the armor wears me. I’m not sure if there’s anything of me inside it. Every new group home I went to, every new scam I pulled, every rip-off, I stripped away another little piece of that seven-year-old boy from Tijuana, and I’m not sure what’s left.”
“Dad says we’re all like coral reefs.”
The non-sequitur stopped my thoughts in their tracks and I stared at her, uncomprehending.
“Oh, you’re from the city,” she realized. “Have you ever heard of a coral reef?”
“They’re in the ocean or something, right?” I guessed, fishing blindly back into my memory for something I might have read as a kid.
“Coral,” she explained with the patience of a teacher, “are little sea animals that live together in colonies. They find something like a rock formation or an old shipwreck or whatever, something solid, and they stick to it and secrete these little shells. Millions of the shells grow up around whatever piece of rock or metal was down on the ocean floor, and they just keep building up over time until there’s this huge, colorful mass of life built on dead memories. It makes a home for fish and other sea creatures, a sort of oasis in an underwater desert.”
She waved a hand as if she were wiping the image off a screen.
“I’ve never seen them live and in person, just videos from Earth. But Dad says our lives are like that, built on hard, cold rock, or the wreckage of someone else’s junk, but we keep making new memories on top of those, building up in layers, something new always on top of something older, life on top of death. And you aren’t that rock at the center, or that old piece of discarded junk, you’re what you built on top of it, one layer at a time.”
“So, I should go jump in a lake and shit all over myself till it hardens?” I was trying for funny, but managed only bitter sarcasm and I shrank in on myself, knowing I was doing the same thing I always did, and I’d get the same result.
I expected Maria to realize what a worthless shit I was and leave me stewing in the sun. I was ready for it, preparing a rationalization in my head; how she was just some backwoods local girl and we had nothing in common and I should learn to keep my mouth shut.
Then she kissed me.
An electric shock ran down my spine and back up again, the lightness in my head and the warmth in my face reminding me I hadn’t as much as touched a woman in nearly a year, since Pris ran off with a bag full of Kick and left me to the cops.
Had that been a year? Shit, I wasn’t that kid anymore.
“Make better memories,” she told me, drawing away, her hand still burning white-hot against the skin of my cheek, “and you’ll make a better Cam Alvarez.”
“We, uh…,” I stuttered as she rose to her feet and pulled me with her. “We don’t have a lot of time. I still have to fix the suit.”
I wasn’t sure where we were headed, just someplace back behind the cluster of buildings, towards the lean-to’s shaded from the afternoon sun.
“You have plenty of time to fix the suit,” she assured me. “Let’s work on the man inside for a little while.”
“That’s gonna be a stone-cold bitch,” I declared with morose certainty, staring at the frozen frame of black-and-white video from the drone feed.
“Well, it’s all gonna be a gigantic….” Dak hesitated, squinting over at me in the dim light of the trailer. “What’d you call it again, Cam?”
“Clusterfuck,” I supplied.
“Yeah, that. But what specific bitch are we talking about?”
“Those.” I touched the screen to freeze the video, then swept my finger back and forth across what looked like a line of dirt mounds stretching across the front of the Tahni installation. “They’re fortified bunkers. Each of them has a heavy KE gun turret and at least two or three Shock Troops inside.”
“Shock Troops?” asked Charlie, the one I’d mentally designated as Toothpick when I first met him. He still had the toothpick, or another just like it, walking back and forth across his lips.
“It’s what the military types call their line infantry,” Maria reminded him. “The ones in the powered exoskeletons.”
I tried not to stare at her, but I knew that was nearly as obvious as staring would have been. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail hanging down her neck, but I’d preferred it loose and wild and spilling across my chest. She’d smelled of dust and sand and the faint fragrance of whatever body wash she’d last used, and her skin was preternaturally smooth, and I could have stayed with her on the ragged old mattress inside the tin storage shed for the rest of my life.
Shit. I was staring, and not talking. Maria rolled her eyes. I shook my head and tried to ignore Dak Shepherd’s sly smile.
“Anyway,” I went on, trying to wrestle my thoughts back to the subject at hand, “you’ve got over two kilometers of cleared, flat ground all around the base, and those emplacements will rip your trucks apart before you can get anywhere near them.”
“Well, how the hell do we get past them, then?” Delta asked, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into a plastic cup. I shuddered. I’d never seen anyone chew tobacco back on Earth, not even in Tijuana. “You’re the fucking Marine. How would you do it?”
“I’d do it with air strikes and missiles, but we got no air support and only two missiles.” I rubbed the heels of my hands against my temples, trying to concentrate. “I never thought I’d say it, but I wish we had some Force Recon pukes along. They could sneak in ahead of time with sniper teams and take these things out from two kilometers, easy.”
“Snipers, huh?” Dak murmured, peering closely at the image. “How?”
“The Tahni religion is weird,” I told him. “They believe they’re all sort of the living embodiment of the will of their god, so they like to stay as close as possible when they kill someone. They don’t have remote firing turrets, they have a crew on every one of those guns, which means they have to be able to fire from cover…”
“Which means a gap in their armor,” Dak surmised. He was a man who was quick on the uptake. I appreciated that.
“Two kilometers, Dad,” Maria mused. “That’s a hell of a long way, especially at night.”
“Better at night,” he corrected her, shaking his head in a curt, decisive motion. “Less heat mirage, less chance of updrafts at the end of the trajectory.”
“You think you can make that long a shot with your rifle?” I asked him, a little skeptical. “I mean, it’s not a Gauss rifle or a laser, right? It’s just a hunting rifle, right?”
“It’s an 8mm electric-ignition, electromagnetically stabilized Tannhauser,” he rattled off as if it would mean anything to me. “It fires variable-velocity, tungsten-jacketed ammo at up to 2,000 meters per second with less than a meter of drop at two thousand meters.”
“I know all those words you said must be related, somehow,” I told him, shaking my head, “but when you put them together like that, they just seem like one giant wall of static to me.”
They all chuckled as if that was the funniest damned thing in the world, even Maria.
“I’ve taken elk at two thousand meters up in the mountains more than once,�
� he elaborated. “I reckon I can hit one of those big Tahni fucks, or at least make them keep their heads down long enough for you all to make it through their lines.”
“I hope you aren’t the only one,” I said, looking doubtfully at the others. Maria, I trusted, though maybe it was a mistake to judge her marksmanship by the fact she and I had knocked boots a few hours ago, and Dak seemed utterly competent, but Charlie, Delta and the others? I wasn’t so sure.
“I might could make the shot,” Delta ventured, chewing on her lip. “I mean, I’ve shot that far in practice, never had to take any game from that distance.” She smirked at Dak. “Some of us can actually stalk up on an elk or an oryx without having to try popping them from outside sniffin’ range.”
“I think Johnny could do it,” Maria said. “He’s got the rifle for it, and he always brings home an elk when they’re in season.”
I resisted an urge to ask who Johnny was, not wanting to sound jealous or possessive.
“Get him,” Dak ordered. “And someone go find Carmelita, too. She’s not as good as Johnny, but we need at least one sniper team for each bunker.”
“They’ll spot you after the first or second shot,” I warned him. “They have thermal imaging, sonic detectors, ballistic calculators to run reverse vectors on your shots…. You’re going to have to be ready to move.”
“Don’t worry about us, son. Whether we live or die, the only thing that matters is you getting that suit to the target. That city is the heart of this world. If the Fleet destroys it, this colony is dead, no matter how many of us survive. I’m too old to outlast my home.” His eyes were bleak. “I’ve outlasted too much already.”
22
“I still don’t like you coming along on this haul,” Dak insisted, having to yell into my ear to be heard over the rumble of the alcohol-fueled truck engine and the thump of the tires on the rutted dirt road.