Brothers in Arms

by Ben Weaver

  “With your tac deactivated, so too is your locator, they can only track us through motion and infrared,” Ms. Brooks said.

  “Yeah, but we’re easy to spot against all this cold rock,” I pointed out.

  “Just keep moving.”

  And that’s exactly what we did. I found a rough trail that paralleled the cliff base and braced Ms. Brooks as the grade rose and eventually wandered into a pass between two fifty-meter-high outcroppings. We followed a ridgeline for about an hour, then worked our way down until the familiar wall of Whore Face appeared about a quarter kilometer away, with the bluff opposite it just a hundred meters ahead. The natural trail vanished around the headland, leading toward the cave entrance.

  “It’s right on the other side of that bluff,” I assured Ms. Brooks, my lips chapping, my voice ragged. I hazarded a look at her. She had been crying. “You all right?”

  “Yes,” she managed, her ankle so swollen now that it appeared as thick as her calf. “If we get out of this, I’ll be recommending you for several medals.”

  “I don’t want medals, ma’am. Just my hair back.”

  “It’ll grow.”

  We reached the natural trail, probably formed by an ancient tributary, and began our curving descent toward the bluff’s face. Fresh surges of adrenaline pushed me on, and I increased our pace until we drew within a few meters of the wide lip of rock shielding an arrowhead-shaped wedge of darkness: the cave entrance. I tossed a look back at the admin building, just a sprinkling of lights below a sky washed out by the crab carriers’ beams. Dozens of airjeeps buzzed over the area, assumedly carrying Western Alliance officers.

  “Scott? Is that you?”

  I jolted toward the familiar voice. Jane Clarion emerged from the cave entrance.

  “You came back….” I said, warming with relief and grinning broadly. “Who else made it?”

  “I did, Scott,” said Joey Haltiwanger, stepping out of the shadows.

  “But Joey, I thought you…”

  “Nothing’s changed, Scott. We can’t let you throw your life away.”

  “Look what they did to Jarrett,” Clarion said. “Don’t let that happen to you.”

  “What do you people want?” Brooks asked.

  “They want you to stand down,” said a skinned Marine as he edged out of the cave, his particle rifle fixed on Ms. Brooks. A second Marine jogged out behind the first and aimed at me.

  “Jane, what did you do?” I asked. “Where are the others?”

  “We couldn’t find them in the caves, so I guess they’re still coming,” she answered. “We’ll wait for them.”

  My mouth fell open. “Why?”

  “Don’t you get it? I’m doing this to help you, to help everybody. If we don’t turn ourselves in, we’ll die.”

  “She’s right,” said Haltiwanger. “Scott, I still want to serve with you. You’re the only friend I ever had here. You just picked the wrong side. Stand down. Forget about trying to escape. We’re so outnumbered. You have no idea. And remember, we swore our allegiance to this force. Remember the code.”

  “So all of that hiking to walk right into this,” Ms. Brooks snapped, glowering at me. “Your caring friends…”

  “I’m sorry.” I removed Ms. Brooks’s arm from my shoulder, then lowered her carefully to the ground. As I turned to face the nearest Marine, I felt his weapon.

  And abruptly stood in front of him with both hands wrapped around the barrel. I shoved the weapon hard to the right, driving him with it, then released the barrel. He and his rifle began the long descent toward the riverbed below.

  Even as I finished with him, I ran toward the lip of rock, scaled it to a height of four meters, as though I were back in Yakata’s classroom, then launched into the first part of an ai, the floating kick, counterkick. Elbows bent, hands balled into fists, one leg fully extended, the other pulled up toward my chest, I dropped down on the unsuspecting Marine. My boot penetrated his glowing skin as though it were not there, and I connected with his neck and came down, driving him facefirst toward the soil. His rifle went off, stitching a line about a finger’s width away from Haltiwanger’s boots.

  After rolling off the Marine, I tore the particle rifle out of his hands and flung it over the cliff.

  Two hands slapped on my back and dragged me up by my utilities. I cocked my head, caught a glimpse of Clarion, then realized that she had slid a leg over mine and intended to trip me to the ground.

  “Scott, don’t make me do this,” she warned.

  Though dazed, the Marine I had knocked down rose to his hands and knees. I figured that in a few seconds he would be up to assist Clarion. In the meantime, Haltiwanger stood near Ms. Brooks, wary that she, despite her ankle, might very well lunge to assist.

  I whirled, tearing one of Clarion’s hands off my utilities and reaching up to wrap my own fingers around her throat.

  She released her other hand and two-handed my wrist, fighting for breath and digging nails into my skin.

  “Jane, just look the other way. Let us go,” I said.

  “I…can’t.”

  And with that, she kneed me in the abdomen with a force that severed my grip on her throat and hurled me onto my butt. The dust settled to unveil the remaining Marine now up on his knees and flashing the business end of his QQ780 particle pistol. “Eye for an eye, motherfucker,” he said.

  Clarion, seeing that the Marine was about to pull the trigger, stepped into his line of fire, shouting for him to stop.

  The first round blew off Clarion’s right leg; the second round amputated her left in a fountain of blood and pulverized bone that splashed over me. Her body dropped to the stumps, and the Marine punched her with a final round to the heart—

  As I rolled left and kept rolling with a strong sense of the bonds between me and the cliff wall. Clarion’s body dropped, and the Marine fired into my memory. My roll gained me altitude, and by the time I came out of it I was floating about four meters in the air and about three meters away from the rock wall. I tilted upright and drove myself down in the shoru, feet locked together, elbows bent, arms locked to my sides. The slide and drop is meant to disorient an opponent. He sees you coming at him like a bullet whose course will not change. He does not realize that you will flip onto your stomach and drop suddenly to his knees. In standard low G, this is performed by a sudden thrust of the legs, but I only needed to consider the bonds I wished to exploit.

  A triplet of rounds exploded from the Marine’s gun. The scintillating orbs streaked over my legs and chest a nanosecond before I flipped onto my stomach for the drop. He fired again, but I wasn’t paying attention to the rounds. I thrust out my fists and smashed into him, the gun still going off, he trying to force me back with his free hand, me letting inertia bend him so far back that I heard the bones in his legs pop. He wailed in agony as I dropped fully on top of him, wrenched the pistol from his grip, tossed it over the cliff, then drew back a fist.

  “Hey! Watch out!” Ms. Brooks cried.

  When Joey Haltiwanger had retrieved the Marine’s K-bar I didn’t know, and exactly why he had resorted to such brutality is a question that still haunts me. Maybe after witnessing my conditioning, he figured I had the power to kill him and would. Maybe he was truly loyal to the alliances and that loyalty had dissolved our friendship.

  A sudden stinging coiled through my shoulder as Haltiwanger drove in the blade.

  The rest came reflexively. I reached back over my head with both hands, locked on to his head, and whipped him over me like a rag doll. Still wielding him by the head, I thrashed the Marine beneath me until I had broken Joey’s neck and back and had beaten the Marine into unconsciousness. The bonds of the universe had become my dark ally.

  “I can’t feel anything,” Haltiwanger said as I dumped him onto the ground. “Scott? What did you do me?”

  I crawled around to face him, his eyes shifting in and out of focus. I choked up and suddenly felt the blade in my shoulder. “Joey? I’m sorry.” I touc
hed his cheek. His head fell slack, his gaze absent. God help me, I had done my duty.

  “Hold your breath,” came a voice just behind me, a voice that took me a second to recognize as Ms. Brooks’s.

  A fresh bolt of pain shot across my shoulders and into my heart. I suddenly felt my pulse raging in one shoulder and cocked my head to see Ms. Brooks holding the blood-slick blade she had just pulled from my back.

  Given the mental anguish of killing a friend and seeing another one die and the physical torment of my shoulder, I was at first not much help to Ms. Brooks, who searched in vain for the medical kit, then shoved a balled-up piece of Clarion’s utilities under mine to serve as bandage and compress. She helped me to my feet. I found a small light in the unconscious Marine’s pack, then braced Ms. Brooks as we crossed to the cave entrance. We hobbled about fifty meters down the dark shaft, then sat to catch our breaths.

  After about five minutes, all of it came bubbling out. I cried like a five-year-old, and Ms. Brooks pulled my head into her shoulder.

  10

  After an hour’s travel through the tunnel, Ms. Brooks and I began to feel nauseous. We paused in a section where the tunnel widened to twenty meters.

  “It’s probably a posttraumatic reaction,” she said, grimacing through a swallow. “God, I have to get back.”

  “You’re pretty dedicated to your job.”

  “You could say that. You could also say my coming here wasn’t an accident. And my leaving is imperative.” She tapped her temple. “I came to exchange tawting codes. My people at Columbia need them. We could lose the war if I don’t get back.”

  “Why didn’t you just send a courier? I mean, you had to know this place was a prime target.”

  “It was a risk I was willing to take. There are at least two traitors in the Security Council. My mission here was part of a ploy to ferret them out and obtain the codes.”

  “Codes that could decide the war,” I said dubiously.

  “Tawting codes. The secret is where they’ll take us, and the secret stays with me until I get back to Columbia.”

  “All right. So if you ever get back you’ll upload those codes directly into a cerebro.”

  “Very good. It’s old tech, but it still works.”

  A tingle fanned across my back. Something was happening. “You feel that?”

  “I don’t know. I feel something.”

  “There’s a rumor about these caves. They’re supposed to have healing properties. My brother—” I broke off as an image of Jarrett lit so clearly in my mind. “Sorry. My brother cut his finger down here, and it healed the same day.”

  “Then maybe…” She never finished her sentence. An odd look came over her face. She swallowed again, shuddered, then her eyes rolled back, and she passed out.

  I leaned forward, wanting to get up and attend to her, but I felt warm and weightless, aware of no more than a speckled void whose current swept me away.

  “I’d like to know how he escaped.”

  “You still think Yakata was a liar? You saw it with your own eyes.”

  “So how did he wind up with her and make it to the tunnel?”

  “That part he’ll have to explain.”

  “Yeah, and the part where he killed Haltiwanger and Clarion. That’s what interests me the most.”

  Dina and Halitov were talking about me, but I still felt too weak to open my eyes and react. I knew I lay flat on my back on hard stone, and I felt the cave’s icy air sting my cheeks and numb the tip of my nose. Beauregard was there as well, along with Pope, who whispered a litany of the events that had occurred and the Western Alliance resources he had observed, his voice growing more intense with each repetition.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” I heard Dina ask.

  “I don’t know,” answered Ms. Brooks. “Oh…oh…I don’t believe it. It can’t…This is…”

  “What’s wrong, ma’am?” asked Beauregard.

  “My ankle was broken…. It’s…healed.”

  I forced open my eyes. Darkness. Shafts of light. Indistinct images. Sideways people. And the cave finally sharpened into the view. We were in the Great Hall, hours away from the academy. I had no idea how I had arrived there.

  “St. Andrew’s awake,” Halitov said, offering the barest of nods.

  Dina abruptly hovered over me. “Hey, there. Long sleep, huh? Didn’t even feel us carrying you?”

  “No.” I reached back to the wound in my shoulder.

  “I saw the tear in your utilities. By the time we found you, your back was already healed,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  “Still a little groggy. But all right, I guess.”

  She proffered her hand, which I took and sat up.

  Ms. Brooks stood across from me, and she broke away from her conversation with Beauregard. “Mr. St. Andrew, you were right about this place. I can’t understand why no one in our intelligence community ever reported this.”

  “It wasn’t reported because it’s so damned hard to believe,” said Halitov. “A cave with healing properties? It’s just nuts.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” Beauregard said, shaking a finger into his thought. “What if everything’s linked? The Racinian tech, this place, the quantum bond, everything. Maybe this isn’t a natural cave system at all—it was just meant to look like one. Maybe this is a place were bonds that have been broken can be restored. Original configurations of particles are returned. There’s a kind of symmetry going on here, and when the asymmetrical enters, it is addressed—or healed, if you will.”

  “I won’t,” retorted Halitov. “There’s a scientific explanation behind this. Period. It’s alien shit or something. No miracle.”

  Beauregard sighed. “I never said it was a miracle. I’m going for the science myself. Just trying to understand it.”

  “This is something too important to go unnoticed,” said Ms. Brooks. “This effect has obviously been a kept a secret from the Security Council and the congress, probably by traitors in the Seventeen who’ll turn over these caves to the alliances.”

  “And that turning-over process has already begun,” Halitov reminded her. “We can’t hide here indefinitely.”

  Ms. Brooks stepped up on a long raft of stone about knee high, pursed her lips, then said, “Well, people, I’m taking charge of this group. We’ll begin planning our next move—which should involve getting us off this moon.”

  “Ma’am, I mean no disrespect, but do you have any experience commanding a combat unit?” Pope asked. “Maybe right now we don’t look like one, but that’s what we are.”

  Her dark brows rose. “I may be a politician, but I have been out in the field, Mr.—”

  “Pope, ma’am. Judiah Pope. And like I said, I mean no disrespect. Just like to know where we stand.”

  “I accompanied an inspection force to Kapteyn Beta in ’ninety-nine. Those were combat-ready troops, guardsmen all the way. Five hundred under my jurisdiction. And we almost got into it on that ring. And I’ve been on over a dozen more similar missions. So stand easy, Mr. Pope. I’m not completely out of my element. The only problem I have is that I’m not conditioned. I’ll be holding you back. Nevertheless, it’s vital that I get off this moon. As I told Mr. St. Andrew, I’m carrying tawting codes that must be delivered to Columbia Colony.”

  “We’ll get you off, ma’am,” said Beauregard. “Whatever it takes. And I have a couple of ideas. I was with First Battalion, Comet Company on the other side of the moon. I led a training recon to establish covert locations for storing some of the academy’s ordnance, including a number of spacecraft. We moved a couple of C-one-twenties, four twenty-nines, and a couple of smaller non-tawt satellite deployers into some canyons we camouflaged with skins powered by solar batteries. If the alliances haven’t found them yet, I know we can get to one of the twenty-nines and launch via autopilot before they can get fighters out to us. The access codes to those ships were cerebroed into every one of us, so that’s not a problem. And I’m pret
ty sure they’ve all got nav chips to get us out of Seventy Virginis.”

  “You said those spacecraft are on the other side of the moon?” Pope asked. “Dumb question: How do we get there without being spotted?”

  “There’s a string of tunnels we can use as a shortcut. It’ll take us about two days. The last klick will be the most dangerous ’cause we’ll be out in the open. Once we’re under the skin, we’ll be all right. There’s a huge cache of food and water there as well. Seems to me that at least Commandant Marxi saw this coming.”

  “Which is why she got her ass off planet just before the attack,” said Halitov. “And if the ships are gone, I’m betting we can blame her.”

  “They’re calling us traitors right now,” Ms. Brooks pointed out. “And if I make it back to Rexi-Calhoon, I’ll go to Columbia Colony and question the commandant myself. So, Mr. Beauregard, do you know the way from here?”

  “I think so, ma’am. If you’re ready, we can move out now.”

  “I am. And given your insight, I’m placing you in command of this evacuation.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Beauregard faced me. “What about you? You ready?”

  Yes, I was ready to vent. Beauregard had nothing to do with exploring the caves, had not saved Ms. Brooks, and had now earned himself a command. I was jealous. And then, as every muscle tensed, I felt ashamed. Beauregard could help us escape. My duty was to consider the group over myself. “I’m ready. But if you want, I can save us some time and run a recon first.”

  “You kidding? We can’t wait for you.”

  “Maybe I’ll need a couple of hours. I won’t need the tunnels. You just need to point me in the right direction and give me a few landmarks. I won’t be spotted.”

  Beauregard snorted. “You’re serious.”