Brothers in Arms

by Ben Weaver

  I took a deep breath of recycled air, lowered my skin’s temperature a few degrees, and decreased humidity by ten percent. The skin status bar along the bottom of my HUD confirmed that the changes had been made. Following Pope’s lead, I lightened my own gravity, bringing myself to. 9968 of Earth standard. Exeter’s 1.0007 had never posed much of a problem, but my new setting would increase my endurance—

  And alert Pope, who now spoke via our direct tac links. “Mr. St. Andrew,” he called, his voice resonating directly from my own skin. “Gee setting is default for this exercise.”

  “Sir, yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “I catch anyone else trying to lighten up, and I’ll send you over this cliff myself,” Pope threatened on the open channel.

  Though I wanted to tell the sergeant that I hadn’t intended to cheat, I knew I’d be wasting my time. I moved to the line, fell in beside Halitov, then ordered my tac’s comm system to patch me into his private channel. “You all right?”

  “Shut up. And be ready.”

  Halitov’s skin had been set to night green like everyone else’s, but his glowed much paler, an indication that something severely taxed his life force and now weakened his defenses. Dina and Beauregard leaned back and stared down the line at Halitov’s skin. My mouth grew dry as I realized that Pvt. Rooslin Halitov, supposedly my new lifeline, might not be any help. “Mr. Halitov? What’s wrong?”

  He swung his head to face me, and at that proximity my tac filtered out the distortion so that I could see him as clearly as if we weren’t wearing skins. “Told you to shut up.”

  “All right, squad, here it is,” Pope began, poised in front of the line with Gorbatova at his side and Staff Sergeant Rodriguez down below in her tent. “On my mark you will set your pitons, clip in, and begin rappelling down this face. Remember, the hardest part’s at the beginning. Focus on smooth takeoffs. You get euphoric, and you’re bound to fuck up. And oh, yeah, you’ll be timed. Now, don’t get any bright ideas of just jumping off and resetting your gravity like a couple of first years from the Seventy-ninth did last night. They survived the fall and made the best time on the course. But they kept bouncing like a couple of basketballs. We found ’em nearly a klick away. Their skins weakened, and they broke a couple dozen bones apiece. We IDOed ’em before they regained consciousness. So like I say, no super-hero bullshit. Use your skin as a cloak and a safety net, nothing more.”

  “Scott,” Dina called, and I liked the way she used my first name. “Paul thinks they’re up to something. We’re not just rappelling. Watch yourself, okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  With my rope slung over one shoulder and my pack slung over the other, I watched as Pope shifted down the line, making his required last inspection before he sent us over the edge. As he neared me, I locked my gaze forward. The shadows of the gorge intersected in dozens of oily channels that tilted back toward the surrounding mesas. During my elementary education, I had stepped through a few holographs of Earth’s Grand Canyon, but northwestern Arizona’s terrain seemed diminutive when compared to Exeter’s great formations, some of which dropped off for three kilometers. Whore Face was one of the smallest formations, the “first year hill” of climbing, but it could kill you.

  “Something on your mind, Mr. Halitov?” Pope asked, as he broke through the line for a rear assault.

  “Sir, no, sir.”

  “Your skin’s down to eighty percent and falling.”

  “Sir, I don’t know why, sir.”

  “Well, you’ve got five seconds to figure it out.” The sergeant brushed by Halitov, their skins crackling and heaving white-hot webs that stitched over their shoulders. Pope reached the end of the line and shouted, “Are you ready?”

  “Sir, we’re ready, sir!” everyone but Halitov shouted.

  “Very well. Eighty-first Squad? Go! Go! Go!”

  4

  Sergeant Pope’s cries echoed off toward the mesas as I ran to Whore Face’s edge and found my climbing mark between the flashing cones. Trembling, I sloughed off the pack and rope, then dropped to my knees and dug out my hammer and one of the steel pitons. “Bring shield down to ten percent around my hands,” I ordered my tac’s AI, then dug my bare hand into a crevice, checking for stability. The crack would have to do. I dug the piton into the seam and began pounding the spike’s looped end with my hammer as nine other first years did likewise in a chaotic rhythm that reverberated madly through the night. Traditional rappelling dictated that you should never trust your life to just one bolt or piton, but the urgency of combat training and the protection of our skins ruled against that. We would survive a fall, but as Pope had indicated, the rebounding might turn us into rag dolls if we failed to properly gauge the first impact.

  Somewhere down the line, Narendra and Obote groaned and called the exercise a low-tech joke, but I knew otherwise. One of the wisest assumptions the Guard Corps brass had made involved the reliability of tech. We had already been taught to assume that for every new weapon you have, your enemy will either have or develop a device that renders your toy useless. Bayonets and standard-issue K-bars would never go out of fashion. And neither would old-fashioned climbing and rappelling.

  With my piton set, I found the end of the nylon rope to which I had attached a locking carabiner clip. I had knotted the rope’s other end to prevent rappelling off the end; unfortunately, I had learned that precaution from experience. Our ropes were only fifty meters long, and we would have to switch lines six times during our descent. Eventually, we would work with a single rope and temporary pitons equipped with small explosives. We would anchor in, descend to the end of our line, set a new anchor beside us, remote detonate the anchor above, then clip our rope to the new anchor. We would repeat the laborious process five times. For now, five other ropes had already been anchored into the strata, and we climbed in neat little lanes to prevent someone from accidentally clipping in to the wrong rope. Of course, my first time down I had inadvertently grabbed Halitov’s. And my second time down, well, someone had express-mailed me to the bottom.

  I slapped the carabiner clip around the piton’s looped end, stood, then tossed my rope over the edge. Dammit. Dina and Beauregard were already descending. I shook off the thought and concentrated on my own climb. “Skin to zero,” I ordered as I retrieved the sit-harness from my pack and strapped it on, wishing that we could have geared up before the clock had started. When Pope had said, “Gear up,” he had meant that you should have your rope and pack in hand. The first time he had given that order, all ten of us had stood on the summit with sit-harnesses buckled tight and ropes ready to be clipped in. Pope had gone down the line, removing each of our harnesses and screaming about how you didn’t rappel when everything was hunkydory and that you had to establish a self-belay with particle fire kicking dirt in your field of view. After that, he had piled up our harnesses, then had sent us on a mad search through the pile for our own. Pretty juvenile stuff, but we needed it.

  I clipped the rope to my sit-harness, then checked the lock-off of my traditional figure-eight belay, a solid piece of steel with two loops that would allow me to pay out the line smoothly and gradually. Equipment set, I stole a look at my squadmates. Only Obote, Narendra, Halitov, and myself remained up top, and Halitov still hadn’t clipped in to his line. “Hey, I’m supposed to be the second-fastest first year up here,” I told him.

  “I’ll be done in a second,” he snapped. “Just go.”

  Drawing a deep breath, I reactivated my skin and thinned it to twenty percent over my braking hand at the top of the line, thirty over the trailing hand. With my back to the gorge, I eased over the edge, hearing one of Pope’s lectures thunder up from the past: “Check your rappel setup before you head down. But don’t stand there for more than a few seconds doin’ that. If you’re not skinned, you need a glove on your braking hand, unless you got a fetish for rope burns. Bounding rappels shock-load your pitons and your rope. The greater the takeoff, the harder the brake.”

&n
bsp; Once my elbows had cleared the edge, I planted my boots on the face, feeling the dull, repelling force of my skin as it slipped into the cracks and helped me establish good purchase.

  “You gonna takeoff or take in the view, Mr. St. Andrew?”

  “Sir, I’m heading down, sir!” I pushed off hard and loosened my grip on the rope. Strata rolled up as I dropped two, four, six meters before my boots thudded once more on the rock. Smooth takeoff and brake. I can do this. Eight or nine more, and I’ll reach the first rope.

  Carabiner clips jingled, and I glanced up as Halitov swung out into his first takeoff. My jaw fell open. He had pushed off way too hard and now plummeted by me, descending some twelve meters before the impact of his boots knocked him into a spin. His right shoulder, bicep, and hip connected with the rock, and were it not for his skin, he might have broken his arm. Then again, I thought I had seen his skin flicker at the point of contact. He grunted as he struggled to return his boots to the face.

  “Mr. Halitov?”

  “Worry about yourself,” he said in a rapid fire that had me bracing for my next takeoff. “And don’t waste time clipping in to your next line. Just grab it with both hands up top, push off, and fall.”

  An airjeep whizzed by, its running lights flashing brightly enough to illuminate Pope, who sat in the passenger’s seat of the open compartment, with Corporal Gorbatova at the stick. He looked pissed off. “Mr. St. Andrew, your brother’s already on his third line. You’re still on your first.”

  “That’s right,” Jarrett said over the private channel. “But don’t worry, my brother will make it down—maybe sometime next week—but he’ll make it down.”

  “Scott?” Dina called from somewhere below. “Check your HUV. Here they come!”

  A line of twenty first years—the Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Squadrons, to be precise—charged up Whore Face’s back, boots rumbling, war cries overpowering even the triplets and shraxi.

  “Eighty-first?” Pope called to us. “Pursuit force in the zone. Their job is to prevent you from rappelling to the bottom. You fall, you’re out.”

  “Twenty-x mag on pursuit force,” I said, and the tac zoomed in on Carstaris, Fayvette, and a few others I knew from the Eightieth as they pulled big K-bars from their packs and dropped to their knees before our pitons. The image panned left to reveal Anson, Cotto, Enlia, and Xiao-pong from the Seventy-ninth doing likewise.

  “If you’re still on your first line, get off,” Beauregard hollered. “They’re cutting ’em! They’re cutting ’em!”

  I lost my breath as I took off, dropped another ten meters, then came crashing onto the face. Another push, and I bought five more meters.

  “Scott! Damn you! Come on!” Jarrett cried.

  The cliff top now bore an undulating halo as ropes to my left tumbled down toward Dina, Beauregard, Clarion, and Narendra. Our pursuers clipped into our anchors and began their descents.

  Tucking myself tightly into the cliff, I sprang into another takeoff—

  “They’re on your rope!” Halitov warned. “Here!”

  I gasped.

  The rope gave.

  I dropped.

  One, two, three seconds and the line crashed down and skittered across the skin protecting my head. I shuddered with the déjà vu of falling. Once again, I had failed them and myself.

  “Mr. Scott St. Andrew is off the course,” Pope announced.

  Halitov looked up at me, his face scrunched into a thick knot as I hurtled toward the canyon floor. I hadn’t realized it, but he had swung his first line into my lane, and only then did it brush against my shoulder. I reached for it—

  —missed—as he clung to his second line and pushed off horizontally to swing into my lane. Given my weight, momentum, and the fact that our skins would repel each other, I figured that if he had a plan, it sure didn’t involve catching me. I would blow him down to the end of his rope, which would then jerk so hard that it would probably break his back.

  No, he didn’t plan on catching me. He reached for my line, which had remained clipped to my sit-harness and tumbled ahead of me. His first attempt missed, but he followed with a second swipe, caught the rope, then coiled it three times around his hand as I sailed past him. The slack in my rope began whipping through the carabiner at my waist. In another few seconds, the knot would slam against the clip, the rope would snap taut as a bowstring, and Halitov’s arm would rip from the socket.

  Knowing that, he loosened his grip on his own rope and descended with me. My rope did snap taut, but with a much weaker jerk than if Halitov had remained stationary. I slapped both hands on the line and remembered to breathe.

  But we both kept plunging toward our appointment with Whore Face’s lap, me clinging for dear life, he bracing my line with one hand, trying to slow our descent with his other. I spotted another piton, my third maybe, with a rope dangling from it. We drifted closer to the face, and I seized the rope in one hand, applying as much pressure as I could to slow myself and ease Halitov’s burden.

  Another jerk sent us into the face, but I clung to that other line.

  “I’m out,” rasped Halitov. “And I can’t reach my next rope without letting you go.”

  “I got another one down here,” I said. “Give me a second I’ll clip in, then release.”

  Willing myself into being of pure muscle, I released the hand on my original line. With all of my weight on one arm, I shifted to clip in to the new line. I sighed as the carabiner slapped in place. I worked the rope into my belay, then slapped my free hand home. “I’m in!”

  “And I’m fucked.”

  Pvt. Val d’Or from the Eightieth swooped down in an inverted rappel and braked about two meters above Halitov. Like a scrawny blond diver from a Pacific island, Val d’Or removed the K-bar from his mouth and began sawing into Halitov’s line.

  Now that Halitov was free, he should be able to swing out and reach his next rope, which hung from a piton a few meters away and at shoulder height. But he didn’t. He released my rope, two-handed his own, and ascended toward Val d’Or.

  “What are you doing?”

  “This fucker’s going down the hard way,” he shouted, then reached Val d’Or and slapped a hand on the cadet’s cutting wrist. Skins flickered and crackled, but fortunately for both they had set their shields at five percent near their hands to increase sensitivity, otherwise both would have been repelled in a fierce rebound.

  But even with Halitov’s hand on his wrist, Val d’Or kept working his knife, and as Halitov reached up with his other hand to block the blade, his rope fell away. Now only his grip on Val d’Or’s wrist stood between him and the bottom.

  “This a circus act or what, Halitov?”

  Were I Halitov, I might not have answered Pope, considering that my boots dangled in midair and I clutched a cadet who wanted nothing more than to see me fall. But once again my guardian demon surprised me. “Sir, no, sir. I’ve just temporarily lost my line, sir.”

  A malicious grin carved Val d’Or’s youthful face, and suddenly I knew his plan. “Mr. Halitov! Let go!”

  Too late.

  “Skin up to one hundred,” Val d’Or cried. The shield around Val d’Or’s hand throbbed with light and blasted Halitov away as though he had just touched a billion-volt fence.

  As he whirred by me, I made a pathetic attempt to toss my line near him, not that he could have caught it. A somersaulting freefall tends to disorient you. Halitov vanished into a gaping maw of shadows far below.

  I shivered and waited for his scream, though I should have been paying attention to the AO above.

  Val d’Or sunk his blade into my rope and whooped. I had seen what a hand-to-hand confrontation would win me, so I threw myself away from the wall, letting the rope whip through my braking hand. I had damned near made it to my next piton and was about to congratulate myself when Val d’Or sang out, “Good-bye, Mr. St. Andrew.”

  Three ropes cut in a single day of training. Pope would later tell me that I had set a
new South Point record for incompetence. Nothing like being remembered.

  “You can all thank Mr. Rooslin Halitov for tonight’s exercise,” Pope said, sitting on the hood of his airjeep and framed by Whore Face and the other two squadrons being debriefed. He regarded Halitov, who stood in line next to me, and spat through the gap in his teeth. “Yeah, Mr. Halitov gave us the idea for tonight’s course. Did you like having your rope cut, mister?”

  “Sir, no, sir.”

  “So how many of you scumbags did Corporal Gorbatova have to save?”

  Every hand raised except for Beauregard’s.

  Pope hauled himself from the airjeep and targeted the colonel’s son. “You’re the only one?”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  “Why is that, Mr. Beauregard?”

  “Sir, I received a tip from someone in the Seventy-ninth, sir. That cadet would not tell me what they were planning but that we should watch out for them and the Eightieth, sir.”

  “Mr. Beauregard, do you believe it’s ethical for you to be privy to such information prior to an exercise? Or does it constitute cheating?”

  “Sir, it does not constitute cheating, sir.” For the first time since I’d known him, Beauregard’s voice cracked.