No privates allowed, he thought. Only experienced warriors. Even as corporals, no longer green privates, he and Addy were the lowest-ranking soldiers here.
"Now follow me," Ben-Ari said. "Our training begins."
They walked through the space station and entered a locker room. They changed into black combat fatigues, then entered a gymnasium where they donned virtual reality helmets. For hours they trained through various simulations. They ran across a dry, alien landscape, the sun beating down on them, leaping over canyons, battling thousands of scum. They crawled through tunnels, firing at the nightmarish creatures. They delved into deep caves, battling towering monstrosities, each thirty meters tall. These were just simulations, of course. Just games, just images in their virtual reality helmets. But Marco could barely tell reality from dreams these days. It all seemed too real, even the stench the helmets produced whenever he fired into the creatures, shattering them, and as he fought, he found himself screaming, howling in fury and terror, and by the time the day ended, he was panting, tears on his cheeks.
I can't do this, he thought when he finally removed his helmet. He fell to his knees on the gym floor. I can't fight again. I can't keep seeing this death.
"On your feet, Emery!" Sergeant Bellet shouted, and Marco reluctantly stood up. They all shuffled out of the gym, sweaty, winded, and into the showers. Marco stood for a long time under the hot streams of water, staring blankly at the wall ahead of him. Addy was talking to him, but he couldn't hear. He was back in the simulation. He was back in the mines of Corpus. He was back at Fort Djemila. He was back in the snow on the day his mother had died. The hot water burned him. He couldn't feel it.
That night, the soldiers stretched out on their bunks, each squad sharing one room full of fifteen beds. Everyone fell asleep at once, but Marco left the chamber. He walked down the corridor until he reached Ben-Ari's bunk, a room she slept in by herself.
He hesitated for a moment. His eyes stung. The screams still filled his eyes.
He knocked on the door.
"Corporal Emery!" he said. "Reporting!"
After a moment of silence—"Come in."
He opened the door and saluted. He was surprised to see that Lieutenant Ben-Ari wasn't in uniform. She wore gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Pajamas. Her hair wasn't in a ponytail but flowed across her shoulders. It was strange to see her this way. As a person. A woman. Not just an officer. He was struck by how young she looked, only in her early twenties. In any other reality—just a girl.
"Corporal?" she said.
He closed the door behind him. Her bunk was small, containing just a bed, a desk, a chair.
Marco couldn't stop his damn eyes from stinging.
"Ma'am," he said, "I've come to request a transfer. I've come to ask to leave your new platoon. I don't belong in the Spearhead. Please, ma'am, allow me to transfer to another unit. A noncombat unit. I can work in the archives. I can guard. I can mop floors. I can clean latrines. I just can't fight anymore. I can't."
She looked at him in silence. "Marco, come. Sit with me." They sat together on the bed, and she continued in a soft voice. "I need you for this, Marco. I need my best soldier."
"I'm not your best soldier, ma'am," he said. "I'm not a warrior. Maybe I can be a good soldier doing something else, but—"
"You fought well in Corpus. In Djemila. You survived!"
He nodded, and now he couldn't stop his eyes from dampening. "I survived and everyone else died, and I can still hear them screaming. I can't see more death, ma'am. I can't. I can't. I feel so guilty that I'm still alive. I can't bear to even train for battle, let alone fight another battle. I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I think I need to see a psychiatrist, to get help. Please, ma'am. Let me leave."
He saw the pain that filled her eyes, saw the sadness in her smile. She placed a hand on his knee. "Marco, we all have PTSD. Every one of us. I do. Addy does. I bet half the people on Earth do. This is a brutal war that has broken us all. But we must remain strong. We must still fight."
"You won't even tell us what battle we're fighting," Marco said. "What our secret mission is."
"You will learn soon," she said. "I promise."
He rose to his feet. "I don't care what the mission is, ma'am. If you've appreciated my service up till now, grant me this request. Transfer me out of your platoon."
Her eyes hardened, and she stood up too. She stared at him steadily. "No," she said.
"No? Ma'am, I—"
"No," she repeated. "This isn't civilian life. You don't get to make your own choices here. None of us do. I need you, Corporal Emery. I need you perhaps more than anyone else in the Spearhead Platoon. You are integral for this mission. Nobody can replace you. You will understand when the time comes. You may not leave. My answer is no. Now leave my chamber. Go sleep. Training resumes tomorrow. Dismissed."
He left the chamber, eyes burning, rage flaring inside him.
No. No.
He clenched his fists as he walked back to his chamber.
No. No!
How had he ever thought of Ben-Ari as his friend? As a wise, kind leader? How could she refuse him? How could she condemn him to this pain after he had revealed how broken he was?
No!
Tears burned on his cheeks. He paused for a moment outside the bunk to dry them, then took a deep, shaky breath. He stepped back inside. Everyone was already asleep, and Marco lay on his bunk, fists still clenched, and when he finally slept, he was back in training, running again across the desert, the sun burning him, his friends dying all around.
CHAPTER EIGHT
For two weeks, they trained with their virtual reality helmets.
For two weeks, Sergeant Bellet led Squad One onward through swarms of scum on a desert world. For two weeks, they plunged through tunnels into the depths of the underground. They battled virtual scum. They battled massive monsters the size of dragons in underground halls. In simulation after simulation, they died. Scum claws tore them apart. Miasma burned off their skin. Tunnels collapsed, crushing them. Centipede scientists tortured them. Day after day, in their simulated world, they suffered brutal injuries, only to remove their virtual reality helmets, pant and shiver and spit, then start again.
Still Ben-Ari said nothing of the purpose of their training.
They were to invade Abaddon, the homeworld of the scum. They knew that much. But so would millions of other troops. The platoon's role in the invasion remained a secret.
When two weeks ended, the order came to dress in their service uniforms, the fine blue garments with the brass buttons. Prim, proper, and polished, the platoon walked through Space Station One, following their lieutenant. Marco wasn't sure where they were heading, but at least it wouldn't be for training, not in these uniforms, for which he was grateful. The past two weeks had left a deep weariness inside him, a near catatonic state of emotions, a deadness inside. Every week in the military, it seemed, was worse than the one before.
As they passed by a viewport, Marco saw more ships than ever floating outside, countless vessels. The invasion of the scum's empire was near, maybe only hours away.
The entire platoon stepped into a round, carpeted chamber deep within the space station. They stood in silence. They waited. There were no windows here, no monitors, just a large round table in the center of the room. And mostly silence. Marco wanted to speak, to ask what was happening, but a nervous tension filled the air. He stood among the others. When he glanced at Addy, she raised her eyebrows, gave him the smallest of shrugs, and worded, "I dunno."
A signal beeped. Sergeant Jones touched his headpiece, then nodded, stepped toward the doorway, and cried out, "Attention!"
Across the room, all fifty soldiers pressed heels together and squared their shoulders. The door opened, and a tall, white-haired officer entered the room.
Marco couldn't help but widen his eyes. The old officer sported two phoenixes on each shoulder. A two-phoenix general! It was the second-highest rank in t
he military, junior only to the Commander-in-Chief. Marco had never seen a higher rank than colonel up close before. He had always imagined colonels ranking somewhere between Jesus and God. But a general made a colonel seem as lowly as a private. There were only a handful of two-phoenix generals in the entire Human Defense Force, Marco knew. If junior officers like Ben-Ari could command a platoon of fifty warriors, generals could command millions, tens of millions of troops, orchestrating entire wars. If the Queen of England herself had entered the room, Marco would not have felt more awe.
"Hello, everyone, and at ease," said the general. "After hearing so much about you, it's lovely to meet you all. My name is Admiral Evan Bryan."
They had all trained under the harshest discipline, but now Marco saw the eyes widen, heard the stifled gasps. Evan Bryan? It seemed impossible. A practical joke. Perhaps just a man with an identical name. Evan Bryan was the pilot who, fifty years ago, had flown the only fighter jet to make it past the scum's defenses. The hero who had lobbed a nuclear weapon against Abaddon, killing millions of scum and ending the Cataclysm, ushering in the long War of Attrition. Evan Bryan's face adorned posters in half the bedrooms in the world, smiled from mugs, T-shirts, video games. Hollywood's best actors vied to play him in movies. Children and even adults collected his action figures, dressed up as him for Halloween, or played Evan Bryan Taskforce online. It was always the same face, taken from the same photograph, showing a smiling, handsome young man, twenty-one years old, a twinkle in his eye.
When Marco looked at the silvery-haired admiral, he saw the same twinkle, the same smile.
It's him, he realized. The living legend—it's him. He's seventy-one years old now and an admiral, but here stands Evan Bryan, the hero of Earth. Here in our presence!
"It's really him!" Addy whispered, eyes so wide they looked ready to fall from their sockets. "Ethan Brandon!"
"Evan Bryan," Marco whispered to her. "Shush!"
The admiral came to stand by the round table—right by Marco and Addy. Marco's head spun. He hadn't even realized that Evan Bryan was still alive, had always imagined that the hero had died years ago. He could scarcely believe this wasn't a dream. This man, standing only a few feet away, had flown a small, damaged jet—back from the days when Earth barely even had the technology to build proper jets—and nuked the scum homeworld. It was like standing by a Napoleon, by a Yuri Gagarin, by a Churchill.
"All right, all right," said Admiral Bryan. "Put your eyes back in your sockets, all of you, and pull your jaws off the floor. We summoned you here for serious business, not for you to gawk." Yet as he spoke, a crooked smile creased his face, and he actually made eye contact with Marco and gave a small wink.
An awkward chuckle passed across the room. The soldiers all relaxed, a few still rubbing their eyes. Only Lieutenant Ben-Ari and Gunnery Sergeant Jones didn't seem shocked. Both stared ahead with grave eyes.
"You're probably wondering why you're all here," said Admiral Bryan. "First a little background." He hit a control on the round table, and a hologram appeared above it, showing a familiar location: the moon Corpus orbiting the planet Indrani. "Two months ago, Captain Coleen Petty of the Erebus Brigade, flying aboard the HDFS Miyari, led an infantry company into the mining installation at Corpus, answering a distress call. On that moon, we encountered a hive of scolopendra titania where the aliens were conducting genetic experimentations on human captives. The scolopendra titania had created hybrids, fusing human and alien DNA, and producing more hybrids using a human-hybrid queen."
Marco shuddered to remember the queen he had seen in the mine, a creature formed from a woman's torso and a massive scum queen's abdomen. He still saw that creature most nights in his dreams. The creature he himself had killed. He still woke up drenched with cold sweat from those nightmares.
Admiral Bryan continued speaking. "Captain Petty fell on that planet, along with most of her company. Lieutenant Ben-Ari led the platoon that slew the alien queen, then slew the king of the hive on the gas giant nearby. With her fought Corporal Emery and Corporal Linden, who are here among us today." He gestured at Marco and Addy, and all eyes turned toward them. Addy beamed and puffed out her chest, but Marco didn't savor the attention. He didn't want to remember those days.
"Thank you, thank you, autographs later," Addy said, incurring a glare from Sergeant Jones.
"As you all know," said Admiral Bryan, "the enemy launched a terrifying retaliation. They destroyed Vancouver, killing half a million people, soldiers and civilians alike." His eyes hardened. "It was a massacre we will never forget. Since Vancouver's destruction, the scum have only increased their hostility, launching smaller attacks on cities across the globe. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction, which has remained in place for fifty years, has ended. Since the fall of Vancouver, we have been mustering our forces. A fleet has gathered here at Nightwall. Other fleets gathered around our other outposts on the frontier. We prepare for an invasion of Abaddon itself."
The hologram over the table changed, now showing a tan, rocky planet, covered in craters and canyons and mountains. Marco didn't need to read the caption to recognize it. Here was Abaddon, homeworld of the scum.
"My friends," said Bryan, "this will be the largest invasion in the history of mankind. This will dwarf even the invasion of Normandy two hundred years ago. We're going to send everything we've got to this planet. Tens of thousands of starships. Tens of thousands of fighter jets. Three million soldiers of the STC, and with them, millions of Earth soldiers who are coming to offer extra manpower. We're hitting the enemy with everything we've got, with every last bullet in our arsenal. Our purpose is one: To finally end this horrible war. To finally defeat the scum, once and for all."
An awed silence, followed by a low murmur, filled the room. Finally it was Addy who raised her hand.
"But sir!" she said. "Isn't the idea of mutually assured destruction that, well . . . if we completely destroy them, they completely destroy us? If we hit them with everything we've got, won't they just destroy every city on Earth, like they did to Vancouver?"
"They will certainly try," said Admiral Bryan. "Over the past several years, we've secretly been developing a new defense system for Earth, and we feel we're finally ready to activate it."
The hologram switched to show a vision of Earth. Thousands of rockets launched from the planet, raising thousands of satellites into orbit. The hologram zoomed in on one satellite, revealing it to be, in fact, a manned cannon. Three soldiers sat inside, and the gun stretched out toward space.
"We call this system the Iron Sphere," said Admiral Bryan. "As our attack on Abaddon commences, Iron Sphere will be activated. Thousands of gun turrets will circle Earth as satellites, providing complete coverage of all major cities. As soon as scum vessels approach . . ." The hologram showed a cannon firing, destroying a scum pod. "In all our tests, Iron Sphere has a ninety-eight percent success rate. We believe that we can stop nearly all the scum vessels sent to retaliate against us. We can now defend the Earth from space itself like never before. It gives us the security—and the time—we need to complete our mission."
Marco did calculations in his mind, then raised his hand. "Sir, there are five billion people living on Earth. If we can save ninety-eight percent of them, that means that . . ." He thought for a moment. "A hundred million will still die. That's two percent, isn't it? A hundred million. That's like two hundred Vancouvers, sir. That's worse than the Second World War."
They all stared around the room. Lieutenant Ben-Ari frowned at him, and in her eyes, he saw her warning: Do not question the admiral.
But Admiral Bryan did not seem to anger. Sadness filled his eyes. "That is the sacrifice we must make. That is the sacrifice that will always burden my shoulders. But I think too of the alternative. If we allow the scolopendra titania to continue their war against us, how many more generations will be terrorized? How many more cities will fall? I have seven grandchildren, two of them old enough to soon join the military, to fight i
n a horrible war. I do not want my great-grandchildren to suffer the same fate. I do not want billions of humans to keep living in fear, to wear gas masks, to live running from bomb shelter to bomb shelter. The enemy grows bolder. If they destroyed Vancouver, they will not hesitate to destroy more cities, perhaps with years in between each assault, throttling their terror just enough to hold our full retaliation at bay. We cannot allow this to continue. We must strike now. We must suffer horrible losses now. We must watch millions die now. And we must win this war."
"We will win," said Addy.
"We will win!" repeated others in the room.
Marco remained silent. Vancouver had been a major escalation, but this . . . this felt like the Cataclysm again. He wanted to speak out, to urge peace, but perhaps Admiral Bryan was right. Perhaps there could be no peace with the scum. Or perhaps . . . perhaps the man who had first nuked the scum was making this personal. Perhaps Bryan wanted to finally finish the job for his own glory, his own bloodlust. Marco didn't know. Too many conflicting feelings filled him now. And many of Bryan's words did ring true. If Marco ever had children, grandchildren, he didn't want them to suffer as he had suffered, to grow up in war, to join the army at eighteen.
Maybe Bryan is right. Maybe this is the only way to finally end this horror.
"Sir," he finally said, "why us? Why are we here?" He looked around the room at the fifty soldiers, most of them strangers. "What is our mission?"
"As I said earlier, I handpicked every one of you myself," said Admiral Bryan. "I chose soldiers who had fought in scum hives before. Who had delved deep underground to face their kings and queens. Each one of you has fought battles beyond what other soldiers have. Some of you fought on Corpus. Others fought in other hives. All of you have survived where thousands of other soldiers perished."
"You want us to enter another hive, sir," Marco said.
Admiral Bryan hit a button on the table controls, and the hologram switched back to the dry, rocky Abaddon. The images now showed thousands of tunnels burrowing deep into the dry planet.
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