Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

  “I wasn’t sure I was going to come out tonight, but Marco’s parties are always so much fun. And I was bored.”

  The conversational style was a reflex among the upper class and the ­people who mixed with them, a response to the ever-­present threat of surveillance. In an age of sophisticated circuitry the size of an eyelash, frank statements or pointed questions made in the wrong environment were greeted with suspicion, and repeated commission of such a faux pas could turn an insider into a pariah. As a result, public discussions among the upper crust were often so intentionally vapid that Ayliss feared the practice had turned one or two of her friends into morons.

  Python’s hand brushed against hers, and she took the expected delivery without being able to see it. A tiny capsule that she’d been anticipating all night. Ayliss tucked it into her bra, now able to discern the outline of Python’s massive head. His long hair, which he usually kept tied in a ponytail, hung down over his shoulders tonight. The tiny cylinder sat heavy against her breast, urging Ayliss to violate the conversational protocol.

  “What’s in it?” she whispered.

  “Truth.” Python murmured before rising and passing into the light.

  Ayliss waited, sitting there in the dark, until enough time had passed for Python to have left the party. It wasn’t easy.

  Rising, she passed into the bright room where the dancers were still going at it. One of the pleasant aspects of these gatherings was how much it reduced her status, making her just another face in a crowd of privilege. Though overdressed, she now attracted little attention while scanning the scene in front of her.

  Marco had not been in evidence when she’d arrived, but Ayliss spotted him over near the bar. Black hair, green eyes, and dark skin, tremendously fit despite a bruising regimen of drugs and alcohol that had been his habit long before they’d met at university. One of many sons in a fantastically wealthy family, he would have been a hit with the ladies even if a pauper. At that moment a woman with cocoa-­colored skin and red locks was standing close to him, her fingers toying with the mat of hair inside his open shirt.

  The redhead glared at Ayliss when she approached, but Marco silenced her protest with a stern glance. The jovial face he turned toward Ayliss was one she knew well from the many times he’d attempted to bed her.

  “Ayliss the Beautiful. Finally.” The words were slurred, and his hand hung at the base of her neck when he gave her a two-­cheek kiss. She didn’t respond when the hand brushed her nipple while being withdrawn.

  Leaning in closer, she whispered in his ear. “Would you mind if I used your safe room?”

  Marco gave her an appraising look. “Ayliss the Beautiful becomes Ayliss the Enigma. How very interesting.”

  He waved a hand in the air, giving the redhead the opportunity to step under his raised arm and grab on tight. The glare returned, but Ayliss wasn’t looking at her. One of Marco’s security ­people, a tall man in a tuxedo whom she recognized from previous visits, slipped through the throng to receive quiet instructions. He then gave Ayliss a tiny, convulsive nod before indicating that she should follow him.

  They were across the room in no time, through a door guarded by a jacketed security guard on the party side and a second one in full tactical gear on the other. Ayliss noted the attachments on the man’s body armor: handcuffs, emergency radio, a can of spray immobilizer, and a short-­barreled weapon designed for shoot-­outs in confined spaces. Selkirk was waiting for her, and Ayliss had to assume that Marco’s man had signaled ahead while they walked.

  Another tactical escorted them down a side hallway to a room that was a fixture in the dwellings and offices of the powerful. The safe room was where the elite went to have frank discussions, or to view communications they did not wish to share with others. Yards of insulating material shielded the room’s walls, ceiling, and floor, and the thick door made a scraping sound when it shut behind them. Selkirk opened his mouth to speak, but they’d been in front of ­people for a long time, and so Ayliss simply covered his lips with her own. The kiss was returned fully, and the iron bands of his arms crushed her to him.

  The capsule in her bra shifted just then, and she broke the kiss but not the embrace. Her eyes were alight when her fingers reached into her dress. “Guess what I have?”

  “I don’t have to guess. I saw him leave.”

  “Then let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The safe room was dimly lit, but Ayliss could see that Marco preferred his innermost sanctum well furnished. She moved a stuffed chair so that it faced one just like it, a few yards from the center of the room. Selkirk lowered the lights even more before returning and taking the capsule from her. He stopped, looked at the item, then at Ayliss.

  “I still don’t know why you take chances like this.”

  “Knowledge, Lee. Knowledge.”

  Selkirk shrugged at the answer, then produced a small metallic device from a jacket pocket. He inserted the capsule and stepped to the middle of the floor. Ayliss sat in one of the two chairs, and he looked in her direction.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  A tiny click broke the silence, and he lightly tossed the machine toward the ceiling. Paper-­thin blades sprung open from its sides to disappear in a blur of motion, stopping its descent, then carrying it upward. Selkirk found his seat, and they waited until a dull glow materialized overhead. A narrow beam of blue light shot out of the floating platform, measuring the room’s dimensions as it swung around in a circle.

  With that completed, the glow blossomed until they were seated inside a shifting cloud of bright blue. The light abruptly dropped to almost nothing, and Ayliss felt the claustrophobic sensation that always seemed to accompany the experience. Just after that she was no longer in the room, and Selkirk had transformed into someone she had never met.

  The floor was now hard-­packed dirt, and in its center was a low fire inside a ring of round stones. Men sat to Ayliss’s right and left, part of a circle that she quickly counted. Nine of them. It had been night when they’d made the prohibited recording, and so the figures were hazy at first. Fatigue uniforms, boots, and more than one bandage. A voice came from her right, and the recorder focused on the speaker by sharpening his features.

  He was young, no more than twenty, and so thin that his face appeared to be painted directly onto his skull. His voice was soft, the words hesitant at first.

  “I met Steve Wembley in Basic, and we were in the same squad once we got to the zone. Same team for four months, too, but after Locula they split us up to spread out the veterans. Same squad, though.

  “He was the kind of guy who would share his last ration bar with you, without being asked. Just break it in half and hand you a piece. He always had some crazy story ready, to make you laugh when things were really shitty. Sometimes I’d wonder if he wasn’t just making it all up.”

  The blurred figures responded with tight chuckles, bringing their shapes into resolution for the briefest of moments. All young, solemn, focused.

  “I’m not saying anything happened to Steve and me that hasn’t happened to everybody else, but we sure did end up in a lot of really bad spots. One time we were put outside the perimeter just a little too far. The lieutenant was worried the enemy would use this creek bed to sneak up on the platoon, so he had us hidden right next to it. Of course Sammy the Sim attacked in force that night.

  “They came in standing up, running flat out, didn’t even notice that creek bed, explosions all around and shit flying right over our heads. Incoming, outgoing, hugging the dirt, I swear some of them ran right over us at one point. Just after that I pulled out a grenade, but my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t arm it, so Steve reaches over and takes it from me.

  “Didn’t even look at the thing. He just tossed it away, shook his head like I was crazy, then crawled straight into the lieutenant’s creek bed. It was maybe six inches dee
p, but that was six more inches under that shitstorm, and we were still there the next morning when a patrol came out looking for our bodies.”

  The other shades chuckled at that, their faces flickering in and out of existence. When the original speaker spoke again his voice was lower, muted, as if he’d remembered what they were doing.

  “It’s important to have a buddy like that. Somebody who’ll stop you from doing that really stupid thing you were gonna do just because you couldn’t think of anything better.”

  One of the other figures began speaking about the dead soldier, part of a group eulogy that had been a standard practice in the war zone for many years. Recordings of these tributes were prohibited by a Human Defense Force command structure that took full advantage of the enormous distance between the inhabited planets and the deployed troops to exercise a one-­sided form of information discipline. Grieving families were receiving smuggled copies of the impromptu ceremonies more frequently now, and Command had labeled this trend a threat to the war effort. Possessing a copy of one of these rituals was punishable by a long term in prison, even for Olech Mortas’s daughter.

  Ayliss smiled when she pondered what the ­people running the war would do if they knew her true reason for watching the contraband recording. That she was actually looking for something that was a genuine threat to the war effort—­and the apparatus that supported it. Viewing the ghostly figures surrounding her, she couldn’t help thinking of Jan. Even then headed back to the zone when he could have avoided it. Once more an ignorant tool of their father.

  She almost missed it, the reason Python had handed her this particular recording. Ayliss had given him some general guidelines, little things to look for that wouldn’t tell him what she was trying to find. It made her feel like one of Command’s intelligence officers, passing information requirements to the troops in the field without explaining why they were important.

  A new face had taken up the collective story, a soldier so young that he looked like a child. He was smiling, reliving the memory.

  “I hadn’t even been assigned to a unit when I met Steve. He was a corporal then, sent to pick me up from this crazy Force facility where I’d been sent when I got to the zone. Stupid headshrinkers—­asking me all these questions about where I was from, did I get in a lot of fights, was I in a gang. I kept telling them I hadn’t seen any combat yet, but they just kept saying that they were trying to establish a baseline for some bullshit study.

  “Anyway, Steve had my orders when they finally let me go, and we were supposed to come right to the unit. Me, I didn’t know anything, but here was this corporal who’d seen all this action so I just went with him. Next thing I know we’d stowed away on this supply ship headed to this tre-­mendous base with clubs, hot chow, girls . . . boy did we have fun.

  “We were both privates when we finally got to the outfit—­”

  Ayliss didn’t hear the rest, her mind replaying the sentences that were most important to her.

  Stupid headshrinkers—­asking me all these questions about where I was from, did I get in a lot of fights, was I in a gang. I kept telling them I hadn’t seen any combat yet, but they just kept saying that they were trying to establish a baseline for some bullshit study.

  There. She felt pain in her palms, and forced her hands to release the arms of the chair. Finally, after all the long hours spent searching through the archives, all the mind-­numbing inspections of the military hospitals and veterans-­care facilities, all the interviews with returned soldiers whose distrust of Command—­and anyone associated with it—­was so complete that their every answer was evasive. But there it was. The first indication that her suspicions weren’t mere supposition, and that Command was actively digging into the psyches of the troops fighting the war.

  If what they were doing with that knowledge was even half as extensive as she believed, it was going to generate a scandal that would remove her father from office and take away the only thing he truly cared about. Not his dead wife, his two children, his cronies, or his mistresses. Olech Mortas was going to lose his place in the game. And he was going to know who’d taken it from him.

  The recording ended, even though she hadn’t heard a word after the young soldier’s revelation about a secret medical facility in the war zone where his personal aggression had been measured. The images and the fire evaporated, and she could see Selkirk again. Leaning forward in his seat, studying her with concern. Completely read in on her quest, and yet completely unable to understand why it was so important to her.

  “Lee. We have to identify the unit this came from.”

  “Approaching Unity, sir.”

  “Thank you, Jason.” Olech smiled at the young staffer before the man walked off down the rolling office that was the chairman’s personal underground train. Olech’s immediate staff numbered more than one hundred men and women, and he prided himself on knowing all of them personally. Many more attendants were waiting at Unity Plaza, the sprawling complex that was both his headquarters and his home.

  “You know what’s strange? Every time I come back here, I feel completely detached.” Olech spoke to Hugh Leeger, who was seated across from him studying a handheld.

  “You were only gone for two days this trip, in constant communication the whole time. You’ve got an unusual idea of what ‘detached’ means.”

  The underground train sped along without a sound and almost without vibration, and Olech looked out at the olive-­colored walls as they raced by. He briefly imagined himself as just a commuter on his way to work, but the sight of a security strongpoint studded with weaponry ruined the notion. He turned back to Leeger.

  “I used to be gone for months on inspection tours. Those were multi-­Threshold voyages, really deep space, and when I came back it was like I’d never left. Now that I’m not allowed to do anything even remotely like that, a two-­day trip completely disorients me.”

  “There was a time when you weren’t the Chairman of the Emergency Senate. And I’m not going to become the first security chief to lose a head of state in the Step.” Leeger didn’t make the obvious observation that he would probably share Olech’s fate if anything ever happened to him. Leeger’s predecessor had been killed protecting Olech during the chaotic gunplay that accompanied the murder of Interplanetary President Larkin.

  “You thought you could lose one in his own private train tunnels. If I’d listened to your paranoia this thing would have no windows, and what would I look at then?”

  “Plenty to look at right here in the car.” It was no secret that young, attractive ­people constituted most of Olech’s personal staff, and Leeger did his best to promote the mistaken assumption that the Chairman hired based on looks. Privately, he believed Olech had subconsciously replaced his own children when selecting the ­people who were his closest attendants. “And it was a mistake to put in the windows, no matter what kind of blast they can sustain.”

  “See? Paranoia. Utterly baseless concern. I’m directing mankind’s first war in space, yet I’m in almost no danger at all.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Olech continued as if Leeger hadn’t spoken. “I’m not sure if it’s a good sign or a bad one, to be honest. I do my share of the whip-­cracking in the alliance, and there are plenty of times when I have to say ‘no’ to ­people who are in a position to retaliate.”

  “You also hand out plenty of favors, and go out of your way to make the lesser members feel more important than they are. I’d say they balance pretty well.”

  “But I still have to call them out when they short the war effort. That actually costs them, in real terms and prestige. You’d think they’d resent something like that.”

  “Maybe you’ve only caught them on the minor things, and they consider themselves lucky. Maybe they’re getting away with murder, and you just don’t know it.”

  Olech looked around the spacious
compartment, glad to be away from the cramped office in the shuttle that had taken him to see Jan. Several of his private staffers sat on blue-­padded seats, busy with various tasks, which made Olech smile. If security concerns were going to cut him off from much of the population, he was darn sure going to have real ­people around him at work.

  One of those staffers, a pretty brunette seated on the blue cushions, abruptly set aside her handheld and donned a set of blacked-­out goggles. She quietly acknowledged the incoming communication while slipping an electronic glove onto one hand. Shortly after that she became deeply involved in a whispered conversation, the gloved hand tapping away at a keyboard only her eyes could see.

  Olech suppressed a laugh. “Remember the last full meeting of the Senate?”

  Leeger turned in his seat, trying to identify whatever had lifted the Chairman’s spirits. His eyes fell on the goggled staffer, and he almost laughed as well.

  “You’re thinking of Senator Bascom.”

  “Exactly. What an ass. Three times more assistants than anybody else in attendance, and he always had at least one them in the goggles. Even when they were walking.”

  The two men chuckled quietly, trying not to disrupt the work going on around them. “I remember that. Two attendants directing the poor guy’s steps while he was supposedly handling vital messages for the very important Senator Bascom. I had one of my ­people chat that kid up later on; he was pretending the whole time and trying like hell not to trip. No messages coming or going. There never were.”

  “But that just makes sense. Who would want to communicate with Bascom if he wasn’t standing right in front of them?”

  They laughed again, but Olech’s thoughts slowly returned to the disturbing topic of his own safety. No matter how distant the Sims might be, there was plenty of potential threat in close proximity. It was not lost on Olech that the tower he lived in had once been home to the murdered president of an earlier version of the same coalition he now led.