Brothers in Arms

by Ben Weaver

  “Are we gonna get past this door or fuck around with magic tricks,” cried Halitov. “Get out the way!” He bolted forward, parting Clarion, Dina, Pope, and Beauregard with his arms. Then he jogged to the back of the stairwell, putting himself about five meters from the door. I blinked because I thought my eyes or my skin was playing one of Halitov’s aforementioned tricks. In a display of magnificent motion, the brawny cadet took four massive strides toward the door, pulled his arms into his chest, then coiled into a flying somersault, coming out of it with his boots perpendicular to and about a quarter meter from the door. When those boots hit to finish the dirc, one that would’ve made Yakata proud, the entire wall rippled with a force that blew all of us back onto the floor. Even as I sat up, the door snapped off its tracks and slapped with a heavy thud to the deck as Halitov coiled into a second somersault over it. The son of a bitch landed on his feet, turned back to us, and smirked. “Well, I sure as shit didn’t feel the door.” He started into the hall.

  We picked ourselves up and charged in behind him, drummed on by the continuing explosions and gunfire. I broke into a path parallel to the others and caught up with Halitov. “So what did you feel?” I asked him on his private channel.

  “Wish I knew. I started running at the door, and for some reason I got real calm. The rest? I don’t know. It’s weird. Just when I think I can compare it to something, it just doesn’t seem right.” He pointed to twin hatches ahead. “Armory.”

  “You want to try that again?” I challenged.

  But Pope hauled past us and let his finger glide over the keypad. The doors hissed aside to reveal a vast, librarylike chamber with row after row of weapons stored in locked, transparent cases that had been set into the numbered shelving system. The shelves rose over three meters and stretched to the far end of the armory—50.87 meters away, as reported by my HUV.

  As we stepped into the place, our aloneness gnawed at me. I couldn’t believe that Yakata was the only person who had had the bright idea of getting to a weapon as the attack began. Those already in admin should have come down and loaded up, and surely others would still be doing so.

  Then it all became clear as I neared the first shelf. All of those transparent cases sat empty. There was, in fact, not a single weapon to be found among a cache that had originally numbered ten thousand.

  “Well, this ruins my day,” yelled Halitov.

  “Somebody beat us here?” Pope asked, nonplussed.

  Beauregard glanced up to the ceiling, mumbled something to himself, swore, then swore again. “Bryant sided with the Seventeen, but our old friend Lieutenant Colonel Darien Butler went with the alliances. So you’ve got a regimental commander on one side, an XO on the other. You’re the XO, you make sure the academy can fall easily to an attack. He must’ve cleared out this place behind Bryant’s back. God, I wish Marxi was still here.”

  “I’m sorry, I just…I just can’t do this anymore,” Clarion said. Her skin darkened, winked out. She rubbed her eyes, then looked at me, and I got the feeling that she wanted something, I didn’t know what. She suddenly fled.

  Dina started after her.

  “Let her go,” Beauregard cried.

  “That’s right, Ms. Forrest,” Pope added. “She chooses. Not us.”

  “She can’t choose to die,” Dina argued, hesitating in the hallway.

  “If I’m an Alliance CO, I give the order to spare anyone running around with a shaved head,” retorted Beauregard. “Probably means that person was recently conditioned, and conditioned individuals are the ones I want to capture alive.”

  “What now?” Halitov asked, abruptly de-skinning and scratching his arms and legs as though he were crawling with insects.

  “Plan doesn’t change. We head out to Whore Face,” Beauregard said. “And to the caves. You, Mr. Halitov, are walking point.”

  “Put St. Andrew up there,” Halitov spat. “You heard what Yakata said about him.”

  Beauregard shifted toward me, his face growing distinct through the skin. I pretended that I didn’t see the worry in his eyes. “You want it?” he asked

  “I’m your point man.” I mouthed for him to switch to the private channel. “Let Halitov pull up the rear. He’s got a problem with skinning.”

  “I know. He’s got a lot of problems, but he knows how to take down a door, eh?” The colonel’s son spared a quick grin. “All right, Mr. St. Andrew. Lead on. Dina? You stay with me.”

  9

  As we neared the same door we had used to enter the administration building, two Marines dropped down through a gaping hole they had blown in the ceiling. They trained their particle rifles on the point man, which, at the moment, I wished were Halitov. I surrendered to the notion that in a bat of the lashes I’d be lying on the deck, spilling my bowels amid the flickering glow of my dying skin.

  “Halt! We won’t fire if you come peacefully,” said one of the Marines, a tall woman whose dark features came into focus as she weakened her skin. She seemed determined but nervous.

  “Are you people deaf?” asked the Marine’s partner, a husky Asian man with an indistinct tattoo on his neck.

  I raised my arm, signaling everyone to stop. We stood in the middle of the hall, squaring off with the Marines. I looked to Beauregard.

  “Yakata told me to follow you,” he whispered over the channel. “Give me a reason.”

  Without a nanosecond’s thought, I raced toward the Marines so quickly that I beat the shift in their expressions. Odd thing was, the sprint seemed no faster to me than my average run. Only their slow movements indicated that my body surfed the quantum bond between particles. I reached the woman, who still stared after my ghost, then finally reacted to me standing in front of her, but by then, of course, it was too late. I slapped my palms on her shoulders, and our skins rebounded, blasting her into her partner and blasting me back toward Beauregard.

  “That’s it,” Halitov shouted. “Everybody run! All we have to do is run like St. Andrew! They can’t catch us!” He charged past the group. “Look at me. See how fast?” As he stomped by, I noticed that he wasn’t running any faster than he had before the conditioning.

  Beauregard proffered a de-skinned hand, which I took. Back on my feet, I joined the others at the door, where beside us the guards were just sitting up to aim their rifles. Beauregard shoved Dina outside, and Pope slid out after her.

  My gaze traveled up to the hole in the ceiling, then down to meet Beauregard’s. He took the cue. “On three,” I said.

  “Don’t make me fire,” the woman gritted out.

  “One, two, three!”

  Despite being newly conditioned, we must have made an impressive sight, Beauregard impossibly scaling a vertical door frame, me mirroring the impossible next to him. I don’t remember if the Marines fired or not, but I’ve always assumed they were too stunned to take aim. The colonel’s son and I jogged onto the ceiling. He stepped inverted into the hole. I took my step, but dropped straight down from the ceiling like a spider on a faulty tether. I hit the floor, rebounded two meters, tried to roll upright, lost control, then rebounded off the wall and belly-flopped onto the floor. I rolled over, nauseous from the fall and shocked that for some reason the bond had been severed. Of course the Marines were on me. Of course I stared up the barrels of their particle rifles. I could try another run, but if the conditioning failed me, I knew the Marines would shoot, if only in retaliation for their bruised egos.

  I de-skinned to let them know I would come peacefully, and they waved me through the door and outside, where we trudged in cold shadows around the building. I looked for Dina, Pope, and Halitov, but they were gone.

  During our first week at the academy, they made us memorize the Articles of the Code of Conduct, part of the overall academy code, and I remember Pope telling us to recite them to ourselves if we were ever captured. Most of us had thought that was a pretty ridiculous thing to ask. At the moment of capture, most people will not think particularly rational thoughts. But, perhaps with
the help of my conditioning, some of the articles came to me, though a bit jumbled as my memory struggled to adjust: I will never surrender of my own volition. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the will and/or means to resist.

  “So the Seventeen’s conditioning gennyboys?” said the Asian Marine behind me. “They harness all this Racinian tech and waste it on genetically impure colos. Now you’re telling me they’re wasting it on the lowest of the low?”

  “These mining kids all think they can come here, slap on a uniform, and everybody’s gonna forget that they’re mining kids,” answered the woman. “The Seventeen’s become a joke. And this conditioning is just a little bandage. Looks like your alien magic isn’t so reliable, eh, gennyboy?”

  I want to say that I turned and ground those two Marines into pulp. Truth was that as they ridiculed me, I continually tried to feel the dusty soil, the smooth wall of a tower to our right, even the hillocks and hogbacks across the field. Nothing.

  Once we reached the front of the building, the Marines met up with their squad sergeant, a well-groomed young man in his late twenties who had de-skinned, shivered against the wind, and directed a half dozen other personnel, who shouted and ran off toward the growing chaos of invasion. Beyond us lay the six crab carriers, their powerful spotlights illuminating a full battalion of troops that had spread out to cordon off the area. To the east stood two ragged lines of cadets, three hundred maybe, none of them with shaved heads, all under the vigilance of the crab carriers’ gunners, who sat in their domed nests, triple-barreled particle cannons aimed at the lines. I assumed that Haltiwanger, Obote, Yat-sen, and the others of my squad who had rejected the Seventeen were among the group. The cadets were checked in by a trio of officers who passed pen scanners over their tacs, consulted tablets, then ordered them on toward the loading ramp of the nearest carrier.

  “Show me your tac,” said the squad sergeant, jolting my attention away from the spectacle.

  I held up my wrist. He waved his pen scanner over my band and cocked a brow as he read his tablet. “This one gets you two an extra day of R&R,” he told his troops. “Take him over to the conditioning line for final check-in and processing.” He turned a warning gaze on me. “I just deactivated your tac, so running is a really bad idea.”

  “Sir, I understand, sir.”

  “Don’t worry, gennyboy. I’m sure the alliances can tweak your loyalty and find a place for you. You’ll still get to fight for us.”

  I just eyed the sergeant, not bothering to temper my disgust.

  “Get him out of here.”

  Twin turbines boomed through the surrounding mesas as a C-129 Guard Corps Transport rose dangerously fast from the spaceport on the opposite end of the field. The silver boomerang wagged its wings in vertical takeoff, then banked sharply to the west as it gained altitude.

  A higher-pitched whine resounded behind me, grew louder, then materialized into a pair of atmoattack jets with T-shaped bows attached to bewinged spherical fuselages. The two fighters charged overhead and opened up with conventional guns on the fleeing transport.

  With nearly every gaze stolen by the sudden air battle, I dug the tip of my boot into the dirt, felt the dirt the way I had felt that classroom wall, and knew the time had come.

  Even the fighters seemed to rip through the air in a weird, water-slow ballet as I ran from the sergeant and his two Marines. I headed out, across the field, weaving between the crab carriers and spotting another line of cadets being loaded into a ship to the rear. I recognized Staff Sergeant Claudia Rodriguez among the dour-looking cadets. Her gaze lit on me. “St. Andrew?” she screamed, then wrenched herself from the line and came dashing toward me.

  Behind her, one of the Marines guarding the line brought his rifle to bear.

  Still running, I held out my palm, motioning her to go back, but she didn’t stop, and I guessed that she had changed her mind about abandoning the Seventeen and had found a way to act on that in me.

  The first salvo ripped into her shoulders, the second into her bowels as she screamed, doubled over, then dropped to her knees as a final salvo booted her onto her chest.

  As she died, my wrist itched in remembrance of her powerful grip on the day she had come between me and Halitov.

  With a shudder that reached my voice, I ran with everything I had away from there. The Marine fired again, but he either missed or I had outrun his rounds.

  In the meantime, the transport had taken a pummeling from the two atmoattack fighters, and, drawing a gray ribbon across the starry sky, plunged in a rough emergency landing behind a pair of mesas just south of Whore Face.

  I should have ignored that damned transport and just hauled my ass to the cave. My timing would have been much better, my life much simpler, had I done that. But guilt got the better of me. The people in that transport were obviously still loyal to the Seventeen, and if the mnemosyne didn’t bail out on me, I knew I was the only one who could get to them before troops arrived. Leaving the crab carriers’ lights behind, I headed off for the gloomy canyons.

  About a kilometer had stood between me and the crash site. As I ran, I imagined myself already there, felt the particles of the ship’s hull, and I realized with a chill that I was, in fact, standing in front of the smoldering ship, its bow sunk about eight meters into the ground at the base of a cliff wall about five hundred meters high. I fell onto my rump, shaking, overwhelmed. I touched my chest, my arms, then the ground. I had merely thought about reaching the ship. I would need to be very careful about what I imagined and where I projected myself.

  A belly hatch located near the ship’s stern abruptly blew open, and a woman in pilot’s jumpsuit fell two meters to the dust. I scrambled to her, rolled her onto her back. A dark stain had spread over the suit, extending from her collar and wrapping around her left side. I slid a hand behind her head, held her up, and right then and there she heaved a last breath and died on me, her tongue falling limp to one side in the Q pattern of lifelessness.

  “Is there anyone who can help?” came another woman’s voice from within the transport.

  I gently lowered the dead pilot’s head to the ground, then stood and pulled myself up into the ship, the deck tipped nearly forty-five degrees, forcing me to cling to the backs of jumpseats bolted to the floor. The C-129 was capable of transporting about one hundred troops, but even in the dim crimson of emergency lights marking the center aisle, I could see that nearly all of those seats were unoccupied. A shifting silhouette drew me to the front of the hold, and I came upon a woman who had sat in the front row and whose jumpseat had ripped from its bolts to fall forward, pinning her to the deck. I realized with a start the woman with the laceration across her forehead and blood splattered down her face was Ms. Brooks, the powerful chief of the Security Council and the woman who had charged us with making one of the most important decisions of our lives.

  “Ma’am? I’m Private Scott St. Andrew. And don’t worry. I’m loyal to the Seventeen.”

  “It’s too heavy,” she said, her palms on the deck. “I can’t push it up. My leg’s caught, and it’s killing me. I think it’s broken. Damn. I cut my arm, too.”

  I braced myself between the seat opposite hers, gripped the back of her chair, and drove it upright with a terrific groan.

  She panted, cursed, then unbuckled her straps and leaned down to massage her swelling left ankle. “Yeah, it’s broken,” she gasped. “Closed fracture. My brother’s a doctor. Wish he were here.”

  “Anyone else on board?” I asked.

  “Another pilot in the cockpit. We wanted to take more. Please believe me, we did. But there wasn’t time to get them across the field. And I have to get back to Columbia. You don’t understand. I have to get back.”

  I staggered my way through a narrow passage and found the second pilot slumped in her chair. Particle cannon fire had torn through the ship’s shield, through the canopy, and pierced the pilot where she sat. Three gaping holes had bee
n torn right through the back of her seat, and I didn’t dare cross in front of her to view the damage.

  Back in the hold, I yanked a small medical kit from the bulkhead, threw it outside, then helped Ms. Brooks out of her chair. I slung one of her arms over my shoulders and guided her gingerly toward the exit. There, I jumped down first, then she lowered herself to me and made the jump on one leg, with me bracing her fall.

  “What were you doing way out here?” she asked as we struggled away, her arm once again slung over my shoulders.

  “I saw you were about to crash, so I came out. I’m meeting up with some friends in the Minsalo Caves. I hope they make it. Ma’am, I’d like to take you there. There’s an entrance not far from here, and it’s not on the maps.”

  “Wait. You have to go back to the cockpit. There’s a nav chip in there, a transparent ROM card. There’s no way to navigate away from this moon without it. We’re too far out for conventional AIs to accurately calculate the distance. And like I said, I have to get back.”

  “I know what the chip is. Those chips were supposed to help keep this place a secret.”

  “Yeah, well, the alliances have obviously acquired some. If we don’t have one of our own, then we can only leave on one of their carriers.”

  A growing rumble from behind the cliff drove my legs into motion. “Sorry, ma’am. We’ll have to come back for it.”

  “They’ll take it.”

  “Then let ’em have it. There’s no time.”

  I forced her along the cliff’s base, plotting a course along a stand of boulders that might afford us decent cover. Once there, we paused a moment for me to apply disinfectant to her cuts and do a poor job of bandaging. She found some painkillers in the kit and popped four even though the warning label said to take no more than two within six hours. I felt naked without my tac and swore over my inability to pinpoint our location and plot the exact distance to the cave entrance. I could once more propel myself there via the bond, but what about Ms. Brooks? Could she come along for the ride? I wondered if there might be a field produced around my body that allowed matter within it to exploit the bond with me. After all, my utilities, boots, and tac had come along during every attempt. But what if I was wrong? Could I abandon Ms. Brooks? I could try, then come back for her, but at any time the mnemosyne could fail.