Brothers in Arms

by Ben Weaver

  “Tracers?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t know what they are.”

  “Could be conventional artillery.”

  “Nope. Wrong signature. I’m skinning for a better look.”

  As she reached for her tac, I reached for mine. We skinned up and focused our scans on the lights.

  And came smack against a wall of disruption that turned our HUVs to static.

  “Something’s going on,” Dina said, her voice echoing in a thin warble.

  Sergeant Pope had left his door open, and as we arrived at his office, he spun in his chair to face us, his eyes a little red. Two tablets sat on his desk, both on.

  “Sir? The privates request a word with you, sir.”

  “Come in. Speak.”

  “Sir, we were at the second lookout, sir,” said Dina. “We saw something out there—blue lights shooting upward, sir. We skinned to check them out, but something jammed us.”

  “You were at the second lookout?”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” I answered. “We took a break from studying and jogged out there.”

  He made a face. “You probably just beat the shraxi.”

  “Sir, do you know what those lights were?” Dina asked firmly.

  “Negative. Anything else?”

  I softened my voice. “Sir, are you all right, sir?”

  He rubbed the corners of his eyes. “Just been studying too much. And the dust’s getting to me again. Good evening. And dismissed.”

  We saluted and left. On the way back to the billet, Dina muttered anxiously to herself about the lights.

  “Don’t worry about them. Probably just some training exercise,” I said. “Jamming is just part of the event.”

  “I don’t think so. Before he left, Paul told me that the Guard Corps’s been mining more ruins with the help of the Wardens. Rumor has it they found something. Maybe those lights have something to do with it. Want to go out there? We have that two-day R&R coming up. We could pack some gear, hike out, see what we can see.”

  “That’s beyond the perimeter,” I said, unnerved by such talk. “Out near the Minsalo Caves. We’d be breaking the code. If we get caught—”

  “We won’t. And I’m thinking this might have something to do with all those rumors about the caves.”

  Apparently, several people on Roger Minsalo’s speleological team had gone into the caves with minor ailments like strained muscles and scratches. Team members reported emerging from the cave healed of those afflictions. If further studies had been made, we weren’t able to access them through our tablets, so no one really knew whether Minsalo’s people had actually been healed or the whole “miracle” was just a series of coincidences.

  I had to admit that I was probably as suspicious and curious as she was—but not enough to break the code. “Sorry, Dina. A hiking trip is not worth the risk. No way.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But it would be fun.”

  “Yeah, it would.”

  I wanted to spend more time with her, and I could—if I was willing to break the code. Why was there always a price?

  We reached our billet, and she paused before going inside. “Can I tell you something?”

  I gave a slight shrug.

  “There’s something about you. I don’t know what it is. I just get this feeling that I was meant to know you. And that mark on your face? I think it’s a blessing. You just don’t recognize it.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” Halitov cooed, coming through the door. “If you two are gonna…you know…you mind if I watch?”

  “You wouldn’t understand what you were seeing,” Dina said, then strutted past him and into the billet.

  “I’m telling Beauregard on you,” he cried after her, then faced me with his devilish grin. “I’m such a kidder. Hey, you hear about your brother?”

  “What?”

  “Jarrett’s gonna VDO.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “He’s in there now. He just said good-bye to all of us. He’s been waiting for you.”

  I snorted and hustled into the billet. Jarrett stood near Dina’s rack, speaking quickly to her. As I neared them, he broke off and raised his chin. “Let’s talk.”

  “You quitting?”

  “Let’s go talk.”

  “Is he quitting?” I asked Dina.

  She retreated to her locker.

  Jarrett gestured to the door, then ambled off. I followed in confusion. I knew he was growing more disillusioned, but I never thought he would actually want to quit. He led me outside and between billets, where we leaned against the wall and listened to the triplets for a few moments before I finally said, “So?”

  “I’ll tell Pope tomorrow,” he answered.

  “Why? You said your grades are good. You’re keeping up with PT and the rest of it. I mean, we’re just getting used to this life, right? If anyone should be VDOing—”

  “It should be me,” he finished. “You always wanted this, not me. It was your idea.”

  “It didn’t take much to convince you.”

  “I just wanted to get away. Being a soldier? What a joke. This whole Guard Corps is nothing more than a cheap copy of the Alliance Army.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Scott, you’re going to give them ten years of your life to wind up no better than you would be back home.”

  “I’ll never be an officer back home.”

  “You think becoming an officer will change anything?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He smiled bitterly. “Scott, you’ll always be a gennyboy. No matter what you do, they’ll talk behind your back. You’re kidding yourself. A commission won’t help you.”

  “I’ll make it help. Whatever it takes. I won’t go home.”

  “So you’ll get trained, get shipped out to some hole, and die. That’s how you’ll make it help. You’re a goddamned idiot. And I can’t believe I let you talk me into this bullshit.”

  “You agreed to come.”

  “And now I want out.”

  “Why don’t you just suck it up? Get the degree. You do the ten years, then you take it anywhere you want—even Earth. For God’s sake, they’re giving you a thirty-three-million-dollar education for free. You’re telling me that won’t change who you are?”

  “No, it won’t. And you were going to throw it all away, too.”

  “Yeah, I was—for you and the others. I know I’ve been holding you back. I wanted to make it easier.”

  “Okay, maybe you did. You’ve always bought into that honor crap. But I never have, and I won’t pretend anymore. I can see right through this whole academy. It’s a big scam. And we’re all suckers who believed their promises. Wake up, Scott. Look around. I thought this would make me better, too. But it won’t. They’re just using us. Cheap labor.” He snorted. “Courage? Honor? Duty? Loyalty? You won’t find ’em here.”

  I realized then that he had made up his mind, and knowing Jarrett, nothing I could say would sway him. I started to choke up. “You can’t leave me.”

  His voice broke, and I thought I heard real emotion. “I’m sorry. That’s the worst part of it, the hardest part. But I hate it here.”

  “Why didn’t we talk sooner? Maybe we—”

  “What? Could’ve figured this out? I’m all screwed up. That’s why I have to leave.”

  “No, it’s why you have to stay.”

  He just looked at me, shook his head, then turned his gaze to the barracks. “C’mon. Lights-out pretty soon.”

  We returned to our billet, and despite everything I had been through, nothing hurt or scared me more than knowing my brother was leaving. His presence had reminded me that I had never left home, that I had brought home with me, that as long as he was there, I would be safe.

  6

  The next morning, just after first call, I asked Jarrett if I could go with him to see Pope.

  “Why? You need to talk to him yourself?” my brother asked, freshly showered and zipping into his utilities.
>
  “No, I just want to hear you say it. Voluntary Dust Out.”

  “I’d like to go, too,” said Halitov, muscling up beside me and cocking a brow at Jarrett. “I have a stake in this. You leave your brother, and he gets all emotionally messed up, well, I IDO myself.”

  “Sorry,” Jarrett snapped. “It’s my show.” He unconsciously checked his uniform, then pounded off to tell our sergeant that he no longer wished to wear that uniform.

  Halitov grunted. “You two must have had problems when you were kids.”

  I turned my back, and with a consuming numbness, busied myself with my own utilities.

  A few minutes later we all marched out and formed on the line, shivering against the crisp air. Obote and Narendra closed in the gap where Jarrett would have stood. Corporal Gorbatova gave us her usual once-over, telling Haltiwanger that his uniform had light years to go before it would be ready for inspection. She had said those exact words the morning prior, though we all knew she would not punish him for his wrinkles since she was partly responsible for them. She queried me regarding my brother’s whereabouts, and I told her evenly that he had requested a meeting with the squad sergeant.

  “To VDO, right?” she asked.

  “Ma’am, I believe so, ma’am.”

  “And how does that make you feel, Private?”

  I wasn’t in the mood to have my already raw emotions poked and prodded. “Ma’am, this private doesn’t understand the question, ma’am.”

  “Don’t want to talk about it, huh?”

  “Ma’am, no, ma’am.”

  “Very well. Squad! Fall out to the exercise field.”

  Morning physical training lasted a grueling two hours, your basic stretching, running, jumping, rolling, and crawling with a little tai chi thrown in for good measure. As we completed the last of our exercises, Jarrett and Sergeant Pope jogged onto the field. Pope veered toward Gorbatova, and Jarrett approached me, wearing an expression that I couldn’t place. Shock? Annoyance? Fear? “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’re you doing here? Thought they’d put you up in admin until the next shuttle tawts in. You change your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Then what happened? You were with Pope for two hours.”

  “Nothing.”

  Gorbatova ordered us to fall in, and we marched back to the billet for second, third, and fourth year reveille. Every gaze trained on Jarrett as he joined us, acting, well, as if nothing had happened. Since he wouldn’t talk, I wanted to ask Pope what had transpired, but my next opportunity wouldn’t come until morning mess—that is, if Pope chose to eat with us, which, unfortunately, he did not. When I finally did get the chance to ask him, his reply was equally curt. All I knew was that Jarrett had not VDOed, and while my brother would not voice what had happened, you could not mistake the resentment in his tone.

  For three solid days I worked on Jarrett, trying to pry out the details of the meeting, but he only spoke with Clarion. She wouldn’t talk, either. What was he hiding? Had he asked for his VDO and been denied? That wasn’t possible. Our contracts explicitly stated that we had the option to Voluntary Dust Out at any time.

  On the third night, I tried to pull up my contract, but my tablet just flashed error messages. I asked Dina and Halitov to do likewise, and they met the same wall. In fact, no one in our squad could access personnel files. Some people shrugged it off as a temporary error, but I had feeling it was quite deliberate. I was right.

  At last, our hard-won R&R arrived, and I tried to forget about the mystery of my brother and the personnel files. As the last dregs of night seeped from the sky, I returned from the mess to find Jarrett, Dina, and Clarion packing their knapsacks. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Jarrett snapped.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  I crossed to Dina. “You’re not going out to—”

  “Yes, we are.”

  Jarrett glared at her.

  She glared back. “He should come with us.”

  “He won’t. Trust me.”

  “But Dina, we talked about this,” I said. “It’s not worth the risk. Those lights are probably nothing.”

  She lowered her voice. “They’re hiding something from us, and if I’m going to give them ten years of my life, I want to know what it is.”

  “And if we do find something, then I’m going to use it to blackmail my ass out of here,” Jarrett added. “So that’s the plan, little brother.”

  “You think they’ll let you leave after you discover classified information?”

  “If I learn something really terrible about this place, I’m thinking they’ll want me as far away as possible from the other cadets.”

  “Or they’ll just purge that memory from your mind.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “You think they’ll care?”

  He grew more flustered. “You know what? Even if we don’t find anything, I win because then I’ll do something so bad that they’ll have to kick me out. Since you know the code so well, maybe you can help me think of an act that’ll break as many articles as possible.”

  “You’re telling me they won’t let you VDO?”

  He zipped up his sack. “Wish I had more time to chat. But we have to go.”

  Dina took my hand. “Come with us. We’re not really breaking the code—just stretching it a little.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You need to”—she eyed my brother—“for him. Now c’mon. I’ll help you pack.”

  “No.”

  “Scott, if they’re lying to us, then how much is the code worth?”

  “But what if they’re not?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather know or just be a slave?”

  “Maybe this sounds corny, but I’d rather be a slave to honor.”

  “But you don’t know if it’s honor. And right now, you’re a slave to ignorance.”

  Under Dina’s constant urging, I finally surrendered. We slipped out of the barracks and made it all the way out to the perimeter. Had we skinned up, the fourth years on sentry duty would have spotted us in an instant via our tacs. Still reeling with regret, I asked Jarrett how we were supposed to get past the perimeter guards, but he refused to answer. When we reached their post, he activated his tac and transferred orders to their tablets. They let us pass.

  “Fake orders?” I asked. “You got us by with fake orders? Where’d you get ’em? How much did they cost? I don’t believe this. Do you know what they’re going to do to us when we get back?”

  “What? Kick us out?”

  “Not all of us want to leave!”

  “Scott, shuddup.”

  We headed out for the long, ten-hour hike to the Minsalo Caves. I knew why Jarrett and Dina wanted to go, but Clarion had just said that if Jarrett was going, she was. I thought that a rather poor excuse to risk her career. Maybe their sex had turned into love; I wasn’t sure. In any event, we kept out of the open and dared not skin.

  Meanwhile, cadets who obeyed the code were spending their two days at the Latitude, the only R&R facility on Exeter and located within admin. Equipped with three Olympic-size swimming pools amid a South American hydroponic jungle and encompassed by hotels, restaurants, bars, a shopping mall, an infirmary, and half a dozen other facilities, the place infected you with a temporary case of amnesia so that all those endless hours of studying had never happened. Holo and micro-G sports gyms were the most popular, followed closely by the Immersion Rooms, where virtual reality seemed anything but and you could easily spend your entire break in one of those chairs.

  All of which argued against we four traipsing out into the dry wasteland when we could be sipping drinks and living in some serious denial.

  Five hours into our hike, Virginis Canyon opened to nearly half a kilometer and dropped to just over twice that. Even the nearby table mountains seemed to cower from the great trench. We dodged from boulder to boulder along the canyon’s top,
never venturing closer than fifteen meters to the edge. Clarion kept an eye out for airjeeps whose pilots would depend upon infrared to distinguish us from that tremendous backdrop of varicolored dust and rock.

  I worked up a pretty good sweat, and the straps of my heavy pack dug grooves in my shoulders. We took several short breaks to dip into our canteens and chew on nutrient bars, otherwise Jarrett led us in a relentless pace. Soon our path descended at a ten-degree, twenty-degree, then thirty-degree angle, as though some massive being had set down its foot and we trekked across the print. According to my tac, we were just five hundred meters away from the Minsalo Caves’ huge, amphitheaterlike entrance. Virginis Canyon’s ancient river, entrenched in the steep-walled canyon, had eroded away a portion of the canyon wall against which the current was strongest. The river had excavated large quantities of limestone to form a complex network of hundreds of chambers and galleries. Then, as the riverbed had lowered, it had left the cave entrance high on the side of the canyon wall, some six hundred meters above the bed, meaning we would have to rappel down about four hundred meters to reach the entrance.

  As we drew closer to the site, the ground became much more uneven, with depressions, narrow sinkholes, and troughs increasing in number and indicating the collapse of the roofs of large caverns. Jarrett finally raised his hand, then crawled on his belly toward the cliff’s edge for a peek. “I can see it,” he yelled.

  My brother’s proximity to the edge left me breathless. You humbled yourself before a thousand-kilometer drop, especially when you couldn’t skin.

  Shielding her eyes from the glare, Dina studied the horizon. “There’s a whole lot of nothing out here. Lots of nothing. Nothing everywhere.”

  “Maybe your little light show originates down there,” said Jarrett. “Let’s gear out and get down.”

  Clarion gazed sympathetically at Jarrett, then approached and whispered something. He brightened as he dropped his pack, then broke out his climbing gear.

  Dina came over, looking tired, sweaty, and still squinting against the sun. “We’d better hurry. I’m sure the next patrol is on its way.”