by John Scalzi
The rest of Thomas' squad immediately cued their suits to provide faceplates, and not a moment too soon, since in a matter of seconds, slime mold leaped from every crack and crevice to attack. All over the colony, similar attacks were made nearly simultaneously. Six of Thomas' platoon mates also found themselves with a mouthful of slime mold.
Thomas tried to pull the slime mold out of his mouth, but it slid farther into his throat, blocking his airway, pushing into his lungs and down his esophagus into his stomach. Thomas sent via his BrainPal that his squadmates should take him to the medical quarters, where they might be able to suction enough of the mold out of his body to allow him to breathe again; the SmartBlood meant they would have almost fifteen minutes before Thomas began to suffer permanent brain damage. It was an excellent idea and probably would have worked, had not the slime mold begun to excrete concentrated digestive acids into Thomas' lungs, eating him from the inside while he was still alive. Thomas' lungs began to dissolve immediately; he was dead from shock and asphyxiation minutes later. The six other platoon mates joined in his fate, the fate that had, everyone later agreed, also befallen the colonists.
Thomas' platoon leader gave orders to leave Thomas and the other victims behind; the platoon retreated to the transport and made its way back to the Tucson. The transport was denied permission to dock. The platoon was led in, one by one, in hard vacuum to kill whatever mold was still lingering on their suits, and then subjected to an intense external and internal decontamination process that was every bit as painful as it sounds.
Subsequent unmanned probes showed no survivors of Colony 622 anywhere, and that the slime mold, beyond possessing enough intelligence to mount two separate coordinated attacks, was nearly impervious to traditional weaponry. Bullets, grenades and rockets affected only small portions while leaving other portions unharmed; flamethrowers fried up a top layer of slime mold, leaving layers underneath untouched; beam weaponry slashed through the mold but did minimal overall damage. Research on the fungicide the colonists had requested had begun but was halted when it was determined that the slime mold was present almost everywhere on the planet. The amount of effort to locate another inhabitable planet was deemed less expensive than eradicating the slime mold on a global scale.
Thomas' death was a reminder that not only don't we know what we're up against out here, sometimes we simply can't imagine what we're up against. Thomas made the mistake of assuming the enemy would be more like us than not. He was wrong. He died because of it.
Conquering the universe was beginning to get to me.
The unsettled feeling had begun at Gindal, where we ambushed Gindalian soldiers as they returned to their aeries, slashing their huge wings with beams and rockets that sent them tumbling and screeching down sheer two-thousand-meter cliff faces. It had really started to affect me above Udaspri, as we donned inertia-dampening power packs to provide better control as we leaped from rock fragment to rock fragment in Udaspri's rings, playing hide-and-seek with the spiderlike Vindi who had taken to hurling bits of the ring down to the planet below, plotting delicate decaying orbits that aimed the falling debris directly on top of the human colony of Halford. By the time we arrived at Cova Banda, I was ready to snap.
It might have been because of the Covandu themselves, who in many respects were clones of the human race itself: bipedal, mammalian, extraordinarily gifted in artistic matters, particularly poetry and drama, fast breeding and unusually aggressive when it came to the universe and their place in it. Humans and the Covandu frequently found themselves fighting for the same undeveloped real estate. Cova Banda, in fact, had been a human colony before it had been a Covandu one, abandoned after a native virus had caused the settlers to grow unsightly additional limbs and homicidal additional personalities. The virus didn't give the Covandu even a headache; they moved right in. Sixty-three years later, the Colonials finally developed a vaccine and wanted the planet back. Unfortunately, the Covandu, again all too much like humans, weren't very much into the whole sharing thing. So in we went, to do battle against the Covandu.
The tallest of whom is no more than one inch tall.
The Covandu are not so stupid as to launch their tiny little armies against humans sixty or seventy times their size, of course. First they hit us with aircraft, long-range mortars, tanks and other military equipment that might actually do some damage—and did; it's not easy to take out a twenty-centimeter-long aircraft flying at several hundred klicks an hour. But you do what you can to make it difficult to use these options (we did this by landing in Cova Banda's main city's park, so any artillery that missed us hit their own people) and anyway, eventually you'll dispose of most of these annoyances. Our people used more care destroying Covandu forces than they typically might, not only because they're smaller and require more attention to hit. There's also the matter that no one wants to have been killed by a one-inch opponent.
Eventually, however, you shoot down all the aircraft and take out all the tanks, and then you have to deal with the individual Covandu themselves. So here's how you fight one: You step on him. You just bring your foot down, apply pressure and it's done. As you're doing this, the Covandu is firing his weapon at you and screaming at the top of his tiny little lungs, a squeak that you may just be able to hear. But it's useless. Your suit, designed to apply brakes on a human-scale high-powered projectile, barely registers the bits of matter flung at your toes by a Covandu; you barely register the crunch of the little being you've stomped. You spot another one, you do it again.
We did this for hours as we waded through Cova Banda's main city, stopping every now and then to sight a rocket on a skyscraper five or six meters high and take it down with a single shot. Some of our platoon would spray a shotgun blast into a building instead, letting the individual shot, each big enough to take a Covandu's head clean off, rattle through the building like mad pachinko balls. But mostly, it was about the stomping. Godzilla, the famous Japanese monster, who had been undergoing his umpteenth revival as I left the Earth, would have felt right at home.
I don't remember exactly when it was I began to cry and kick skyscrapers, but I had done it long enough and hard enough that when Alan was finally called over to retrieve me, Asshole was informing me that I had managed to break three toes. Alan walked me back to the city park we'd landed in and had me sit down; as soon as I did, some Covandu emerged from behind a boulder and aimed his weapon at my face. It felt like tiny grains of sand were plunking into my cheek.
"God damn it," I said, grabbed the Covandu like a ball bearing, and angrily flung him into a nearby skyscraper. He zoomed off, spinning in a flat arc, decelerated with a tinny thunk when he hit the building, and fell the two remaining meters to the ground. Any other Covandu in the area apparently decided against assassination attempts.
I turned to Alan. "Don't you have a squad to pay attention to?" I asked. He'd been promoted after his squad leader had had his face torn off by an angry Gindalian.
"I could ask you the same question," he said, and then shrugged. "They're fine. They have their orders and there's no real opposition anymore. It's clean and sweep, and Tipton can handle the squad for that. Keyes told me to come hose you down and find out what the hell is wrong with you. So what the hell is wrong with you?"
"Christ, Alan," I said. "I've just spent three hours stepping on intelligent beings like they were fucking bugs, that's what's wrong with me. I'm stomping people to death with my fucking feet. This"—I swept out an arm—"it's just totally fucking ridiculous, Alan. These people are one inch tall. It's like Gulliver beating the shit out of the Lilliputians."
"We don't get to choose our battles, John," Alan said.
"How does this battle make you feel?" I asked.
"It bothers me a little," Alan said. "It's not a stand-up fight at all; we're just blowing these people to hell. On the other hand, the worst casualty I have in my squad is a burst eardrum. That's a miracle for you right there. So overall I feel pretty good about it. And the Covandu are
n't entirely helpless. The overall scoreboard between us and them is pretty much tied."
This was surprisingly true. The Covandu's size worked to their advantage in space battles; their ships are hard for ours to track and their tiny fighter craft do little damage individually but an immense amount in aggregate. It was only when it came to ground fights that we had the overwhelming advantage. Cova Banda had a relatively small space fleet protecting it; it was one of the reasons the CDF decided to try to take it back.
"I'm not talking about who's ahead in the overall tally, Alan," I said. "I'm talking about the fact that our opponents are one fucking inch tall. Before this, we were fighting spiders. Before that, we were fighting goddamned pterodactyls. It's all messing with my sense of scale. It's messing with my sense of me. I don't feel human anymore, Alan."
"Technically speaking, you're not human anymore," Alan said. It was an attempt to lighten my mood.
It didn't work. "Well, then, I don't feel connected with what it was to be human anymore," I said. "Our job is to go meet strange new people and cultures, and kill the sons of bitches as quickly as we possibly can. We know only what we need to know about these people in order to fight with them. They don't exist to be anything other than an enemy, as far as we know. Except for the fact that they're smart about fighting back, we might as well be fighting animals."
"That makes it easier for most of us," Alan said. "If you don't identify with a spider, you don't feel as bad about killing one, even a big, smart one. Maybe especially a big, smart one."
"Maybe that's what's bothering me," I said. "There's no sense of consequence. I just took a living, thinking thing and hurled it into the side of a building. Doing it didn't bother me at all. The fact that it didn't does bother me, Alan. There ought to be consequences to our actions. We have to acknowledge at least some of the horror of what we do, whether we're doing it for good reasons or not. I have no horror about what I'm doing. I'm scared of that. I'm scared of what it means. I'm stomping around this city like a goddamned monster. And I'm beginning to think that's exactly what I am. What I've become. I'm a monster. You're a monster. We're all fucking inhuman monsters, and we don't see a damned thing wrong with it."
Alan didn't have anything to say to that. So instead we watched our soldiers, stomping Covandu to death, until finally there weren't really any left to stomp.
"So what the hell is wrong with him?" Lieutenant Keyes asked Alan, about me, at the end of our post-battle briefing with the other squad leaders.
"He thinks we're all inhuman monsters," Alan said.
"Oh, that," Lieutenant Keyes said, and turned to me. "How long have you been in, Perry?"
"Almost a year," I said.
Lieutenant Keyes nodded. "You're right on schedule, then, Perry. It takes about a year for most people to figure out they've turned into some soulless killing machine with no conscience or morals. Some sooner, some later. Jensen here"—he indicated one of the other squadron leaders—"got to about the fifteen-month point before he cracked. Tell him what you did, Jensen."
"I took a shot at Keyes," Ron Jensen said. "Seeing as he was the personification of the evil system that turned me into a killing machine."
"Nearly took off my head, too," Keyes said.
"It was a lucky shot," Jensen allowed.
"Yeah, lucky that you missed. Otherwise I'd be dead and you'd be a brain floating in a tank, going insane from the lack of outside stimuli. Look, Perry, it happens to everyone. You'll shake it off when you realize you're not actually an inhuman monster, you're just trying to wrap your brain around a totally fucked-up situation. For seventy-five years you lead the sort of life where the most exciting thing that happens is you get laid from time to time, and the next thing you know you're trying to blast space octopi with an Empee before they kill you first. Christ. It's the ones that don't eventually lose it that I don't trust."
"Alan hasn't lost it," I said. "And he's been in as long as I have."
"That's true," Keyes said. "What's your answer to that, Rosenthal?"
"I'm a seething cauldron of disconnected rage on the inside, Lieutenant."
"Ah, repression," Keyes said. "Excellent. Try to avoid taking a potshot at me when you finally blow, please."
"I can't promise anything, sir," Alan said.
"You know what worked for me," said Aimee Weber, another squad leader. "I made a list of the things that I missed about Earth. It was sort of depressing, but on the other hand, it reminded me that I wasn't totally out of it. If you miss things, you're still connected."
"So what did you miss?" I asked.
"Shakespeare in the Park, for one," she said. "My last night on Earth, I saw a production of Macbeth that was just perfection. God, that was great. And it's not like we're getting any good live theater around these here parts."
"I miss my daughter's chocolate chip cookies," said Jensen.
"You can get chocolate chip cookies on the Modesto," Keyes said. "Damn fine ones."
"They're not as good as my daughter's. The secret is molasses."
"That sounds disgusting," Keyes said. "I hate molasses."
"Good thing I didn't know that when I shot at you," Jensen said. "I wouldn't have missed."
"I miss swimming," said Greg Ridley. "I used to swim in the river next to my property in Tennessee. Cold as hell most of the time, but I liked it that way."
"Roller coasters," said Keyes. "Big ones that made you feel like your intestines would drop out through your shoes."
"Books," said Alan. "A big fat hardcover on a Sunday morning."
"Well, Perry?" Weber said. "Anything you're missing right about now?"
I shrugged. "Only one thing," I said.
"It can't be any stupider than missing roller coasters," Keyes said. "Out with it. That's an order."
"The only thing I really miss is being married," I said. "I miss sitting around with my wife, just talking or reading together or whatever."
This got utter silence. "That's a new one on me," Ridley said.
"Shit, I don't miss that," Jensen said. "The last twenty years of my marriage were nothing to write home about."
I looked around. "Don't any of you have spouses who joined up? Don't you keep in touch with them?"
"My husband signed up before I did," Weber said. "He was already dead by the time I got my first posting."
"My wife is stationed on the Boise," Keyes said. "She drops me a note occasionally. I don't really get the feeling she's missing me terribly. I guess thirty-eight years of me was enough."
"People get out here and they don't really want to be in their old lives anymore," Jensen said. "Sure, we miss the little things—like Aimee says, that's one of the ways you keep yourself from going nuts. But it's like being taken back in time, to just before you made all the choices that gave you the life you had. If you could go back, why would you make the same choices? You already lived that life. My last comment aside, I don't regret the choices I made. But I'm not in a rush to make those same choices again. My wife's out here, sure. But she's happy to live her new life without me. And, I must say, I'm not in a hurry to sign up on that tour of duty again, either."
"This isn't cheering me up, people," I said.
"What is it about being married you miss?" Alan asked.
"Well, I miss my wife, you know," I said. "But I also miss the feeling of, I don't know, comfort. The sense you're where you're supposed to be, with someone you're supposed to be with. I sure as hell don't feel that out here. We go places that we have to fight for, with people who might be dead the next day or the day after that. No offense."
"None taken," Keyes said.
"There's no stable ground out here," I said. "There's nothing out here I feel really safe about. My marriage had its ups and downs like anyone's, but when it came down to it, I knew it was solid. I miss that sort of security, and that sort of connection with someone. Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to som
eone, having that part of being human. That's what I miss about marriage."
More silence. "Well, hell, Perry," Ridley finally said. "When you put it that way, I miss being married, too."
Jensen snorted. "I don't. You keep missing being married, Perry. I'll keep missing my daughter's cookies."
"Molasses," Keyes said. "Disgusting."
"Don't start that again, sir," Jensen said. "I may have to go get my Empee."
Susan's death was very nearly the flip side of Thomas'. A drillers' strike on Elysium had severely reduced the amount of petroleum being refined. The Tucson was assigned to transport scab drillers and protect them while they got several of the shut-down drilling platforms back online. Susan was on one of the platforms when the striking drillers attacked with improvised artillery; the explosion knocked Susan and two other soldiers off the platform and down several dozen meters to the sea. The other two soldiers were already dead when they hit the water but Susan, severely burned and barely conscious, was still alive.
Susan was fished out of the sea by the striking drillers who had launched the attack; they decided to make an example of her. The Elysium seas feature a large scavenger called a gaper, whose hinged jaw is easily capable of taking up a person in a single swallow. Gapers frequent the drilling platforms because they feed off the trash the platforms shed into the sea. The drillers propped Susan up, slapped her into consciousness, and then reeled off a hurried manifesto in her general direction, relying on her BrainPal connection to carry their words to the CDF. They then found Susan guilty of collaborating with the enemy, sentenced her to death, and pushed her back into the sea directly below the platform's trash chute.
A gaper was not long in coming; one swallow and Susan was in. At this point Susan was still alive and struggling to exit the gaper from the same orifice from which she entered. Before she could manage this, however, one of the striking drillers shot the gaper directly below the dorsal fin, where the animal's brain was located. The gaper was killed instantly and sank, taking Susan with it. Susan was killed, not from being eaten and not even from drowning, but from the pressure of the water as she and the fish that had swallowed her sank into the abyss.