Candle

by John Barnes

  Aside from the Neocommies, we also had to worry about our hanging flank to the southeast. The plains and desert country beyond the mountains had been a sort of unclaimed no-man's-land ever since Denver Dome was nuked in '54. There were enough people in that big central stretch of the Rocky Mountain Front so that any government that tried to move in got into all kinds of trouble with resistances and liberation movements and so on, but it was empty enough so that an army could move through, and we had to figure that sooner or later we would have to wheel around, run southeast as fast as we could, and defend the whole Bighorn country until the citizen army could be mobilized. Fear that something big might suddenly come up the Bighorn or the Missouri kept a lot of our forces tied up around Billings Dome, which was frustrating for everyone, but that was the way it went.

  Over my three years so far in Burton's Thugs for Jesus, Tammy and I had settled into an existence that might not have been the ideal way for kids to grow up, but worked pretty well for us. During my weeks on the line or in the reserve camp, she stayed in the apartment in Spokane, took care of Carrie, and got whatever schooling she could, either on-line or live, against the day when there might be regular jobs again. Whenever I got a leave, I'd hop a diskster back to Spokane—four hours from Homestake, at first, and later only two from Snoqualmie—and zip home to get reacquainted with my daughter and to spend as much time as possible with Tammy. I suppose, except for our ages, there wasn't much about the life that a soldier in any long war of the past wouldn't have recognized.

  At the time I didn't know, either, how fortunate we were that most of the rules of war were still being adhered to. As far as anyone could tell, no one had unleashed bioweapons, most domes were not bombed or shelled, and geosync cableheads remained demilitarized neutral zones. Nobody was fighting to the last ditch; it was understood that the moment you knew you couldn't win, you surrendered or retreated. War, so far, was purely a matter between the mercenary companies.

  On the other hand, there were some drawbacks to being a mercenary, even in a very humane war. Attrition was taking its toll, and hyperaccurate modern smart weapons meant that a much smaller number of men was needed for the same firepower. Though Burton's Thugs for Jesus had begun the war at battalion strength, and our effective firepower had increased, in numbers we were no longer more than a reinforced company.

  By that time I was a corporal, leading a fire team, and the only way I was ever making sergeant was if my best friend Rodney, the squad sergeant, got killed. (Two squad sergeants stood ahead of Rodney for platoon sergeant, so I stood very little chance of a domino promotion.) The chance of advancement—or the lack of chance—didn't bother me at all. I could keep doing what I was doing indefinitely, and if the job was unpleasant, dangerous, sometimes terrifying, occasionally nauseating, well, it was a war, when you came right down to it. And my leaves were practically heaven on Earth; Tammy and I never saw enough of each other to have much to fight about.

  I turned twenty, Carrie turned five, and life turned to dead solid shit, all in April 2058. By then Real America had taken a hammering and was just trying to hold on. One True Church had become One True, and had successfully seized several of the older memes. Our old Unreconstructed Catholic allies were suddenly a branch of One True—so suddenly that we lost Madison in four hours of a savage attack out of nowhere. A week later we had to abandon the Twin Cities Domes after a bitter fight, and we were thrown back to Fargo-Morehead Dome, where we finally made a successful stand.

  We held through a bitter winter of fighting—I made platoon sergeant, having buried all my predecessors. We got things squared away, got the Natives north of us to come in as allies, and seemed to be making more of a real fight of it. After beating back two assaults in the summer, we felt much more confident, and when we retook the Twin Cities Dome in September, it looked like the worst of it was over. BTJ held the Twin Cities Dome against another winter assault, and that spring Burton told us that if we wanted to, we could move dependents up into Fargo-Morehead, so that they'd be easier to visit on the weekend.

  I figured we had the front stabilized, and I'd rather have Tammy and Carrie near. There were good reasons. I'd missed them, while there had been so few leaves; Spokane had been attacked a couple times by One True's hit-and-run raids out of Salt Lake and Boise; in the married-soldier barracks at Fargo, they could live under armed guard. It seemed like a rational decision.

  To this day I think I should have been able to see that it was completely stupid to bring them up to Fargo, considering what we were fighting. When we retook it, the inside of the downtown Minneapolis Dome had been piled high with corpses—noncombatants all. One True had had no way to evacuate that group of women, children, and old men. Rather than let them be captured, and turned by any other meme, it had made them all walk off the roofs of high buildings.

  It was One True that had broken all the truces and mercenary rules of engagement, and One True that had begun to aggressively infiltrate computer systems and weapons-control systems, seizing control of mercenaries wherever it could in order to copy what they knew. Then it loaded those aggregate mercenary memories into the brains of any kids it had, and sent them out with their badly working minds and their imperfectly assimilated training, to fight and die in the first wave of every attack. A regular mercenary company might kill eight or nine of those poor teenage zombies for every death it took itself—but a regular mercenary outfit, by then, wasn't much bigger than a hundred men, and One True could send three or five thousand of those enslaved kids against it. Every advance by One True made the war, and the world, uglier and dirtier; it seemed to be the one meme that didn't care what the Earth ended up looking like, as long as it got to rule.

  The world tried to resist. Maddened by the fear of having their minds erased and replaced, countless people, crazy, paranoid, perhaps as dangerous as One True itself, devised memes, large and small, to subvert or attack One True, and to promote violence and disorder within One True's territory. One True hit back with the same kinds of memes aimed at the world at large, not caring who it hit. There were legends about a meme, or a counter-meme, called a Freecyber, a sort of meme-inoculation that could liberate you from One True or any other meme's control, but then there were legends about free passes to the space colonies, and hidden cities in Antarctica, and secret bases on the sea floor, where you could take your family and live peacefully forever. I didn't credit Freecybers any more than I did any of the others.

  It was hard for anyone who had been in for as long as I had even to imagine the changes that were happening. One True was fighting to "win" in a sense that no one had seen since the Eurowar, now almost sixty years in the past. People with severe psychological trouble, particularly severe depression and stress disorders, were easier for a meme to self-install into—and so One True's troops were encouraged to traumatize the population wherever they went, and the all-but-forgotten custom of serbing captured women and children resumed in those last years of the war. As our electronic equipment became more and more vulnerable, we resorted to more and more primitive weapons and tactics, trying to avoid being hooked up to anything, even a phone, through which One True, or one of the rogue memes, or even the re-engineered (and much more aggressive) Real America might seize control of us. As memes increasingly were able to disguise their presence, and often to spread incrementally through conversation and ordinary daily interaction, we began to fight in pairs or trios, limiting our contact with anyone else. The almost civilized war I had joined was turning into the real Fourth World War, and it was rapidly catching up with the Eurowar and the two wars of the twentieth century for its savagery and lack of restraint—and it would probably end like all of them, in the sheer collapsed exhaustion of the losing side.

  It seems so obvious in hindsight. I should have known how the world was going. I should have resigned, or deserted if Burton wouldn't let me go, grabbed Tammy and Carrie, and run like hell to somewhere; taken all my saved pay, maybe, or robbed some place, gotten enough mone
y to pay our way onto a transfer ship, and emigrated to Mars. Sometimes I really did think about that, but at the same time I felt like I owed Burton a lot, and he was more and more shorthanded.

  So I procrastinated and didn't resign, didn't desert, didn't look for a place where my family could move far away from the fighting, read the emigration information for Mars a hundred times and even realized I could probably make a living as an ecoprospector and might even like the work. I thought about it frequently, but I did nothing and just let it drift.

  I had figured everything wrong. I found out just how wrong in the first week of August, 2059. I woke to the alarm in the middle of the night, rolled over, kissed Tammy, pulled on the fighting clothes, went into Carrie's room and gave her a quick hug, receiving a sleepy little kiss on the cheek, and pulled the gear out of my weapons locker. By then Tammy had come out in her bathrobe; she said, "Any idea—?"

  "It's what they call an urgentest," I said, shouting to be heard over the alarm, which would keep ringing until I went out the front door. "Usually means we've got to jump on a diskster, go someplace, and fight. Get on-line and make sure all my insurance is paid up, will you, honey?"

  "Is One True invading again?"

  "Could be. Or maybe some ally switched sides." I checked; I had all the gear I was supposed to be picked up with. I desperately wanted another quick leak, a snack, anything for twenty more minutes with Tammy, but the alarm was whooping (I could hear most of the other alarms in the married-soldier barracks doing the same thing), and no matter how often I did this, I always wanted twenty minutes more. I could pee and eat on the diskster, going in; it was really just that I wanted time with Tammy. I contented myself with a long, awkward kiss, as she managed to fit against me despite all the hardware hanging from the suit. "I'll see you soon. Love you," I said, and left.

  Two guys were already waiting at the pickup spot, and within five more minutes there were ten of us. My "headquarters" squad was a good one—I'd handpicked a bunch of experienced types to put plenty of vets around me, and everybody in the squad had at least two years fighting experience under his belt. The squad sergeant, Mark Prizzi, had been among the first squad of soldiers I'd ever trained, back when I was a corporal.

  My headset popped. "Dog Platoon, come in, Currie." It was Burton.

  "I'm here, sir," I said. "Headquarters squad is all assembled, waiting for pickup."

  "Check your other squads."

  I did; all were at stations. I reported back to Burton.

  "Good so far," he said. "But it looks like the enemy has managed to virus our pool of disksters. Figure a half-hour delay till pickup, while we reload memories into all of them. You can let men go back inside if they want to do anything for fifteen minutes."

  I passed the word along, but nobody went back in; once you've said your good-byes, that's just too hard. We stood around, not talking much, till the disksters showed up. I walked up the gentle slope of the gangplank and took my seat at the rear right, long-practiced hands strapping me in against the up-to-four-gee turns that these things could do—or the up-to-ten-gee jumps if something went bang too close to you. When my three squads were all loaded and strapped in, I reported back to Burton. "All right," he said. "Just a minute or so more for the disksters to pick up Bravo, and then we'll be in motion, finally. Looking bad."

  "Can you tell me what it is?"

  "Wait till we're on the highway," Burton said. "Then I'll let all the platoons know. But it ain't good, and this is gonna be a rough night, and I don't think we're all gonna see the sun come up." In some strange ways, competent and compassionate as he was, my CO was still a kid who had read one too many adventure books.

  About fifteen minutes later we were racing down the corridor formed by the old highway, making all the speed we could for the Twin Cities, and Burton was filling us in. No intelligence outfit had yet figured out how—none of the intelligence companies from the area were even reporting, which suggested we had been hit even harder than we knew about—but somehow defenses around Twin Cities Domes had gone down, all at once, and before the garrison could mobilize, the barracks had been hit with narrow-beam ionizing radiation from overhead, cooking most of the defending troops in their beds or while they tried to pull on their uniforms, and all their families with them. The few on guard, and the few who had gotten mobilized fast enough, were now trying to hold a ragged, thin line south of the domes, with too few people, too ill-equipped, and no idea what was going to hit.

  It hit before we got there, which is why we survived. At diskster emergency speeds with everyone strapped in, you could travel from Fargo-Morehead to Twin Cities in about an hour and a half. Within that time, the defenders at Twin Cities were overwhelmed by a force that was probably fifty times their size, plus more bursts from that damned irradiating satellite.

  We kept going anyway, because the forces of One True zipped right around the Twin Cities Domes, dropping off a small garrison force, and fanned out toward the other important domes in the area. One big spearhead was coming our way. At least our disksters were fairly radiation-resistant, and should be proof against the ultrahard positrons they had used on their two bombardment passes so far.

  Bravo Platoon had the lead, and they never had a chance at all. With onboard radar, a self-driving maneuverable vehicle like a diskster could normally dodge an artillery shell—but Bravo's disksters had had to spend a critical few extra minutes in the shop, and that was when, so far as Burton and everyone else could figure out later, they had been sabotaged with a sleeper virus that woke up when the first shells appeared above them, and they steered right under them. Bravo Platoon's three disksters flashed into smoke and debris, all of our disksters began to dodge and duck, and Burton did the only sensible thing and tried to have us pull back to form a fighting line somewhere where it might work. We swung east of the old highway in a tight, high-speed turn over the empty fields and meadows.

  That was when all kinds of heavy fire poured onto us from the east; we had turned into their trap. The automated defense weapons on our disksters shot back, but we were up against something overwhelming, and we did the only thing that seemed to be an option—turned to run west and north, evading and dodging all the way, never having the spare minutes that would have been required for us to stop and deploy forces.

  They pursued us for a solid hour, pushing us ever further west and further out of the battle, scattering our forces all over the landscape. Any time one of the disksters tried to turn and fight, it was chewed apart by heavy fire; we evaded in all directions, and we must have traveled more than a thousand miles in total by sunrise, while only being pushed a couple of hundred west, but we were getting beaten bad no matter how you figured it, and the most we were managing was to run away.

  At sunrise, we were way to hell and gone somewhere in South Dakota, they had just stopped shooting at us and broken off the pursuit, and Fargo was naked to the enemy.

  We raced north as fast as we could, and we damn near made it; Burton's Thugs for Jesus, or what was left of us, were running even faster than we had after the slamming-around we'd just taken. Most of us had families in Fargo, or at least girlfriends.

  Not long before noon, we were making a final dash, moving along at almost 200 mph over the prairie and meadow country that had been wheatfields once, about forty miles west of Fargo. It might have been a nice day if we hadn't all been worried sick about getting there, but theoretically in just minutes we could be taking up positions to the east of town, and calling in all the passenger disksters available. We weren't going to try to stop them, just slow them long enough to make it possible to get the civilian population, especially our dependents, out of their way. Burton had pledged to use the whole unit treasury, if need be, to evacuate all the civilians in Fargo-Morehead Dome.

  Now all we had to do was get there soon enough and hold long enough.

  Burton and his four headquarters staff were in the diskster just over a roll of land from us, maybe a mile and a half away—we wer
e staying spread out in case of attack—and so I didn't see it directly, but there's no mistaking an atom bomb. A white flash over the ridgeline blinded us for a moment, and the diskster slewed sideways and bounced along for half a mile or more in just a few seconds, before the AI got it back under control and brought it around. By the time we were back near where we had been, the classic mushroom cloud was already forming. Burton must have been right at ground zero when that went off.

  While we all wondered what to do—none of us had ever had any other CO and anybody else we might have turned to for leadership was on the diskster with him—one of the disksters for my platoon flared with blue arcs as it sank into the tall grass, its balancing capacitors all discharging. Our diskster went in to see if we could help, and the surviving parts of BTJ went with us because they weren't sure what else to do, but as we arrived, our com crackled and an unfamiliar voice said, "Burton's Thugs for Jesus, this is Shultz's Rangers. We've got you. Every one of your disksters has a weapon locked on it, and we are preparing to shut down your propulsion by our control of your software, which we just demonstrated with one diskster. Please have your senior surviving sergeant surrender, so we won't have to fire again."

  That was me, I realized. I grabbed the com. "Burton's Thugs for Jesus here. We'll surrender. Are you offering UCEMC terms?"

  "Our employer does not permit that," the voice said, flatly, and I realized that the other unit was memed with One True, so there wasn't going to be any negotiating. "Do you still wish to surrender or shall we fire?"

  I gave the order, and our surviving five disksters set down, grounded out their charges, and went inert.