by Brian Koukol
"No."
"But how do you—“
"It's sterile. That's why they sent it out here in the first place. It was useless for their breeding program, so they shipped it to Demeter."
Mort shook his head. Is that what this planet was? A dumping ground for the infirm and undesirable?
"So what am I looking for?" he asked.
"Anything earthly that looks trampled or chewed on..."
Mort noted the carmine ruts Artie had opened up the day before, but such disturbances precisely skirted any earthly plants. He walked along the track, checking and double checking any potential toxins on the way. And then he stopped.
At the end of the tilled path, he spotted a familiar plant. Jewelweed. Trampled.
He shuffled over to it, taking his time, hoping his eyes had deceived him. When he reached it, however, there was no doubt. He probed the slimed and matted remains with his imitation fingertips, unable to find the spent brass he'd dumped there as an insurance policy against eviction.
Reluctantly, he keyed the comm.
"I think I found something," he told Sook.
"What?" the vet asked.
"Looks like it ate a cartridge casing in with some jewelweed."
"Impossible. Why would it eat metal? And why would it have anything to do with a plant like jewelweed?"
"The casing had breatherfew smeared all over it. Maybe that confused the poor little guy."
"Breatherfew? I thought you said it was in with jewelweed..."
"It was. But I found it the first time in with the breatherfew. Then I dumped it in with the jewelweed."
"Why in the hell would you—“
"Just drop it, all right? Would eating metal do this to Artie... err, to the goat?"
"Sure."
Mort scratched at some earthly soil with a toe. "So how do we fix it?"
"We don't."
"What?"
"Or, rather, we can't. You said it's bubbling from both ends, right?"
"Yeah."
"Then it's already too far through the digestive process to extract through the mouth. Surgery would be the only way."
"Then let's do that."
"Can't. These buggers don't survive anesthesia. You killed it, Louka. I'll send Mejia out for the body tomorrow. That should be enough time. Sook out."
Mort sank to the ground. A ripple drove down his spine and wrapped itself around his ribs.
He thought he'd saved the little guy from a death by rifle the night before, but he hadn't saved anything.
A rustle behind him grabbed his attention. Pushing through a tuft of xenic foliage, deflated and trying its best, was Artie, making its pathetic way toward Mort. Toward its unstable friend.
Mort stared at the little guy, trying to visualize the spent cylinder poisoning it from within, and took a shuddering, involuntary breath. Even empty, the brass could still kill. Reincarnated as toxic plants, the dead Chokes could do the same. Was there no end to this war?
He gazed at a nearby patch of carmine soil that Artie had exposed the day before. The color came from the high metal content of composted Choke bodies, he knew. Choke plants loved metal. They thrived on it. Even their microbes did. That's why the brasses on Demeter weren't shiny, but matte. They were being eaten, transmuted into soil amendments by invisible teeth. The same thing would be happening to the cartridge in Artie's guts, but the process was way too slow to help the little guy. It had hours, not decades. If Mort wanted to help Artie, he'd need an entire field of the stuff.
He froze—paralyzed by a thought, a hope.
In addition to microbes, certain Choke plants could fix metals, enriching the carmine soil. He didn't know of any species that could consume a spent round in a matter of hours, but he knew where to look.
Spurred on by the power of possibility, Mort leapt to his feet and sprinted for the CHU. Once inside, he tore open the xeno-taxonomy book and flipped to the requisite table.
Choler peas, earthsbane, retchvetch—they all ranked as "low" for metal-fixation, along with the majority of entries. There were a handful of "medium" as well, but only one "high."
Carnage rose.
Mort had never heard of it, so he leafed to the noted page. After a ravenous skim, he learned that it only grew where excessive amounts of both metal and nutrients mixed. Hence, the carnage. The appearance of manwort indicated a location of suitable growth habitat.
Of course.
He closed the book and shuffled to the open doorway of the CHU. Leaning against the jamb, he stared into the hazy distance.
At a hillock, sprinkled in the telltale turquoise of manwort. A hillock, smothered in terror and death and hate. A hillock, the last place he wanted to go. Artie's last hope.
The air stank of pungent alkalinity and agony. Thunderous paroxysms of spent rage pummeled the muddy desolation. Mort lay on his back, staring up into a slate sky scratched white by trails of tracer and scramjet.
"Pataba!" he shouted, listening for a lull in the chaos and the Corporal's response.
But when the scream of battle finally paused for a breath, the only sound he heard above the growl of tinnitus was that of his childhood hamster lapping at its water bottle. Such an observation didn't strike him as particularly odd or notable. More pressing was just how thirsty the memory of that water bottle made him feel. He licked his cracked lips and probed for a handful of water in the mucky dents surrounding him.
His left arm, however, refused to cooperate. As he thought about it, he realized that he couldn't feel it at all. Panicked, he twisted to one side.
Directly into a Choke soldier.
The bastard balanced between its two front legs and prehensile club tail in a squat, chowing down on Mort's arm with its dirty undermouth. Several blue-black tongues studded in serrated crystals flashed beneath the crimson lips of its irised vent, flaying his deadened arm before his eyes.
Blessed with an autonomic burst of adrenaline, Mort snapped into a sitting position and threw his right fist at a soft spot of articulation in the Choke's obsidian shell as hard as he could.
Unfortunately, as hard as he could was not at all.
Before he could even turn to verify what he knew to be true, that his right arm was no longer attached, he collapsed onto his back in a swirl of vertigo. The sound of his hamster at the water bottle returned, but he now knew it for what it was: the rending tongues of a dirty Choke.
His heart hammered in his chest, but not from fear. He felt nothing on an emotional level, instead retreating to his brief medic training. Taken together, he knew what the combination of dizziness, tachycardia, and thirst meant.
He was bleeding to death.
Mort jerked back to the present and closed his open mouth. He was still against the jamb of his CHU, still staring at the distant hillock. He shook his head. There was no telling if he'd find any carnage roses up there, and even less that they would do any good if he did. Why should he risk going up there, facing those traumas, on a fool's errand for a dying head of Choke livestock?
Artie whined—a pathetic, bleating sound that drew Mort's ire. He should just end the bastard. That's what the Chokes would've done to a dog or a cow or a Marine. Mort imagined his rifle back in his hands, pointed at Artie the night before. He had spared the little guy, but why?
He thought back to his childhood hamster, Leroy/Lorraine. Shortly after it had given birth, Leroy/Lorraine had grown weird hair and stopped eating. Mort had begged and bargained, but his stepdad had popped the hamster's neck anyway, just like that. As if Mort's little friend had meant nothing.
Mort had laid his hamster to rest in a hole in the front yard, wrapped in a paper towel. A year later, dandelions sprouted on the spot. His stepdad snuffed them out with herbicide.
Blood rushed to Mort's head. His mom's husband had prepared him for war, the Corps had taught him the rules, and the Chokes had reinforced it all. Life was fragile and meaningless and cold—and if he left Artie to die, he would be complicit in that reality. But, if
he did the ridiculous and stormed the hillock for the sake of an insignificant alien, perhaps he could begin rewriting what had once seemed indelible into a palimpsest of mercy over rage.
His mind made up, Mort returned the portable comm to its recharging station in the CHU and headed for the wardrobe. Inside were several pristine bunny suits, still in their plastic. He tore one open and slipped it on. The hillock lay beyond the geoxenic heath, in an untamed thicket of supersized vegetation at the heart of the battle. The sporadic, immature Choke flowers of his and the adjoining parcels, and even the pioneering sprays of the heath, were safe enough to breathe around naturally, but the highly fertilized bramble he was about to face might not be. He needed to be prepared.
He shoved his feet into his old boots, still caked in dried soil and a film of pioneering lichen, then sealed them to the suit with an expeditious layering of tape. He peeled back the sleeves, drawing them two thirds of the way up his bionic arms, and then taped them in place as well. Next up, he donned the soft helmet and engaged the respiratory filters. Then, insulated against the outside world, he headed out, with Artie tucked under one arm and the binder on Choke plant taxonomy clutched in the other.
He abhorred returning to the hillock, to the last resting place of his arms and Krev and Pataba and Choke and Marine alike. If it had to be done—and, for Artie's sake, it did—he was glad he could do it with the distance the suit provided. He wouldn't have been able to face the place naked.
As he stomped through the heath, unconcerned by the defanged villains at his feet, his mind found room to wander. At first, the dread of the fast approaching hillock tempered this tendency, but the distraction didn't last.
Suddenly, he lay on his back, armless and bleeding out. The Choke squatted beside him, munching, refueling for another charge. Then gunshots, reinforcements, the Army bringing up the rear as usual. Ammonia. Rescue. Rehab. Redeployment.
Mort shook his head, returning to the present. Such reminiscences would only get worse as his looming target drew nearer, he knew. He needed something else to occupy his attention. A game, perhaps.
His eyes, protected and reassured beneath the soft helmet, drifted over the nearby terrain and he found that he could read it as a sort of battle map. Here, the scattered, parallel lines of a failed retrograde peel written in bachelor's button and New Jersey tea. There, a last stand of willow saplings defying a funneling channel of well-fed deathistle.
Mort kept at the game for a while, until the euphemism finally ruptured and he sat down with Artie amongst the graves. For that's what they were. This whole planet was a cemetery. So eager was the military to press its advantage after winning Limos that they abandoned the raw materials of that victory.
Oh, the strategic metals of wreckage and fallen arms were recovered, but the spent skins of lost Marines were left to succor barren Limos, to nurse it into Demeter.
During his rehab, the shrinks had told Mort that his fallen squad mates were the lucky ones. They were at peace. Their war was over. Only he and the rest of the survivors continued to suffer. But it was a lie.
Demeter lived on the blood of Marines. And, in a sense, the murdered Marines lived on in Demeter. Borne again into battle with the Chokes, an eternal conflict between the resurrected. Demeter was a Marine now, their union baptized in blood and pain. That Marine was under fire by the invasive Choke plants—ever at war, with only Mort and his fellow ruined golems to protect it.
Mort closed his eyes and raised his arms, allowing the breath of vital Demeter to play against them. Someday he too would die. Maybe being buried here wouldn't be so bad.
When he opened his eyes, he spotted several shooting flower clusters of summersweet nearby—particolored in pinks and creams. Though his sealed suit blocked the aroma, his nose remembered days of youth and unburdened glee, when the sweet scent filled his lungs on trips down to his grandparents' pond. But above that, a new, heavier memory—so heavy that it crushed the lightness of his halcyon days to a forgotten whisper. The party had become a wake.
The sweetness cloyed in his mind, choking him. It was no longer the perfume of happier days, but the stench of Redmond dead in his arms. Of crying, broken families who would wait forever for their loved ones to never return.
The Chokes had ruined flowers for him. A link to the cradle, severed for him forever.
Though even on Earth, the cost of life had been death. The cost of beauty, horror. For the humus of birth relied on the ashes of death. Who had died for Mort to be born? His great-grandparents? Presidents and emperors? Vagrants and cobblers? He'd have refused to pay the cost, but no one had ever asked him.
Mort wandered over to the plant and fingered one of its complicated flower clusters.
"Who were you, summersweet?" he mumbled inside his suit. "Did you die for kind or credit? Easy or hard?"
Mort glanced up. The hillock loomed above him. He froze at the sight.
Krev's golem skylined its apex, firing the M440 into certain defeat. Pataba stood at Mort's side, reminding him to retrieve his rifle. That would put Redmond...
His eyes dropped to the summersweet plant. To two summersweet plants, actually—linked by the pink, sausage-like flowers of a diminutive foxtail amaranth.
Recognition seized him and Mort collapsed at Redmond's grave. Tears streamed down his face, fogging up the inside of his mask. Nausea shuddered in his throat.
He rolled his hands into fists and looked for something to pummel. He found Artie, whimpering and inflated, so he crawled after the bastard. Artie didn't belong here. It was Choke. It had killed Redmond.
His stepdad and the Corps were right. Death to the weak and nonhuman.
Mort searched the ground for a weapon. It didn't take long to find an unspent BMG cartridge that the scavenge sweep had missed. Mort gripped it in a fist and raised it above Artie's helpless body, primed for murder.
Artie deflated in a thunderous, belching fart. Mort started at the sound, then bolted, spurred on by a conspiracy of place and mindset. Krev needed him at the hillock.
As he ran, bile burned in the back of his throat. A few more steps and it erupted, overflowing down his chin and soiling the inside of his suit. Yet still he stumbled forward, wading through the mud, struggling to reach the golem with the machine gun.
When he crested the summit, the whole of the battlefield opened before him. Scores of entrenched Marines engaged in futile combat against an unending tide of bloodthirsty Chokes. The teeming masses broke against, then inundated the hasty foxholes. An impervious line of adamantine armor blanketed the sky with ordnance beneath the screaming teeth of hungry air cover.
Mort vomited again, spewing his terror across the inside of his face shield, obfuscating the world behind wriggling streams of acid and chunk. The stench was febrile and noxious, suffocating. He dropped to his knees. The Chokes were coming. Krev needed him for a few minutes before he broke into bloody pieces. Pataba too.
But he couldn't help them if he couldn't see them. He clawed at the tape sealing his helmet to his suit, breathless, terrified. He had to get out.
His fingertips found an edge and he exploited it, unwinding his way toward freedom. When he'd run out of raw material to unwind, he tore off the soft helmet, plunging out of sour hypoxia and into the cool, quenching breath of Demeter.
Three thirsty inhalations of the endemic perfume and the raging battle vanished before his eyes. Gone were the formations and maneuvers and bottlenecks of mass death, replaced by a kaleidoscope of blossoming meadowland that swept down the declivity in front of him, ending in a wispy haze of transpired vapor.
He expected a tortured pall in the air at the very least, but there was nothing--as if he were not standing atop the open-skied deathbed of scores of thousands. As if the battle had never happened.
But it had happened. For without that gift of death, Limos would never have become Demeter. He should never forget that precious donation, leached from the recent past as a present to a thriving future of play and plenty.
For the first time, Mort noticed that he stood up to his armpits in a herbaceous melange of geoxenic foison. The rustling bramble of the hillock, whipped into motion around him at the behest of another roiling gust of wind, blew its sweet bouquet across his nostrils. Not the cloying, charnel sweet of composted human suffering, nor the fetid, acrid perfume of the Choke efflorescence, but a new aroma. The true breath of a waxing Demeter.
He inhaled deeply, absorbing hearty alien pollens and unstudied compounds that in turn triggered synapses and chemical releases in novel ways among his tissues.
Suddenly, Mort saw the sprawling paradise before him for what it was—Choke and human, forever fused down to the bedrock of an infant ecosystem consecrated in a pool of ichor and abbreviated lives on both sides.
Demeter was as much a reborn Choke soldier as a Marine—indeed, some inexorably linked hybrid of the two. Whether Chokes had mothers or not, he didn't know, but they certainly had dreams, or why else this war? Those dreams, like their human counterparts, now rested in the soil, birthing a union of opposites.
The only way to properly honor the sacrifice of the dead of both species was to let their cost be worth the return. The world after needed to be forged into a world worthy of all the death that created it. Mort would cultivate it—on his own if need be. That would be his gift to Redmond, to Krev, to Pataba, to the Choke soldier who had eaten his arms. Were they alive, they likely wouldn't understand his present, but he'd give it nonetheless.
But first, the carnage rose.
Mort slinked through the bramble, parting curtains of swaying needlegrass and brittle manwort, climbing over tangles of barberry and under briars of blood thyme. He knew where Krev had fallen to pieces, where his own arms had abandoned him, but he could find nothing in the undergrowth to denote those sacrifices. There was too much death on the hillock to differentiate side or individual.
Finally, beyond a thicket of benign chokewillow, he found his target.