by Ben Weaver
With the first guard gripping his bloody stump, I whirled to face the second, a husky woman whose ruddy cheeks shone clearly through her skin. She was older than the average private, about thirty, and had probably joined up to support her kids or find better work outside her colony. In the instant that I looked at her, I gave her an entire life. I knew all of her secrets. She was as real as they came—not just a soldier but a person who didn’t deserve to die performing pathetic guard duty. It wasn’t her fault that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And who the hell was I to dictate her fate?
I didn’t know anything about war.
She opened fire, and the first accelerated round caught my skin even as the barrier activated. The next fourteen pounded my abdomen, sending horrific shudders through my bones and, for a moment, making me believe that I really was about to die. A few more rounds and the skin would give way.
Finding her bead in my mind, then coiling myself around the bonds between the particles that comprised it, I willed the incoming into a vertical line reaching up for the clouds. Before she could react to that impossibility, I slapped the rifle out of her grip, then went for her tac. Her wailing nearly made me stop, but I knew that much had to be done. She could easily get a new hand.
I should have killed her.
“Beauregard? Mark!”
As he, Dina, and Halitov came bounding down, leaping from cliff to cliff, I sprinted so quickly by the two guards posted near the transport’s stern that they reacted only to the breeze of my passage. They had left the loading ramp down, so I pounded up and into the transport. In the cockpit, I realized someone had shut down my preflight, so I reactivated. That would cost us a few minutes. I also took up Beauregard’s suggestion of trying to verbally trigger flying skills, but despite being in the cockpit, I sensed no tingle of new knowledge. If one of us didn’t have an epiphany, we might have to leave Pope and Ms. Brooks behind—unless we could “borrow” one of the crab carrier’s pilots. I considered the logistics of getting inside that ship and carrying off a pilot. I still didn’t know if I could touch someone and make that individual share the experience of the bond. Once again, it seemed way too risky. I pondered the whole reason why we needed a pilot in the first place: to hover over Ms. Brooks’s location. What if I could get her to the ship myself? I could run back up there, test my theory with the bond, and if she was able to drop into the gorge with me, then I could simply whisk her into the ship.
Of course, as I stood there, lost in my introspection, I failed to notice that the mnemosyne in my head had gone on strike. Not until I reached the back of the hold, drawn by a commotion outside, did I sense that the bond felt distant, unreachable.
Beauregard and Dina double-teamed one guard, bringing him down with a triplet of quitunutul moves that rendered their bodies jellylike and unnaturally flexible and the guard’s body flat and unmoving.
Contrarily, Halitov engaged in a much more brutal and old-fashioned hand-to-hand technique. He had seized the second Marine’s rifle and now swung it by the barrel, batting the soldier into unconsciousness with the stock. Incoming salvos tore up the gravel near his legs and sent him hightailing it up the ramp, along with Dina and Beauregard.
“Preflight’s in progress,” I called to Beauregard. “But I’m out. Conditioning’s not working.”
“You remember how to fly?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Let’s see if I do.” He shouldered past me, toward the cockpit, as Dina shut the ramp behind us.
“You see that guy’s head?” Halitov asked me.
“You’re a real hero,” I muttered, then hurried to join Beauregard up front.
“Faith, my father says, can be a powerful weapon. Never knew what that meant until now.” Beauregard grinned broadly as multiple Heads Up Displays curved around his pilot’s chair.
“You remember how to fly?” I asked excitedly.
“No, you?”
I exchanged a baffled look with Dina.
“What’re you smiling about, then?” she asked.
“The fact that I’m teaching myself right now. See that instruction manual flashing on the HUD? I take one look at the page, and I know it. Give me another thirty seconds. I’ll fly us out of here.”
Flicking my glance to the HUD, I realized that I, too, could glimpse a page and remember everything, despite the fact that I still could not tap into the bond. They had given us another skill, a different skill that harkened back to the old photographic memory. I remembered a word Yakata had used—eidetic, meaning an extraordinary and detailed recall of visual images. So we were supposed to vividly recall all that we had seen in our lives. While the process worked at the moment, I speculated that it, like the rest of our conditioning, would be subject to failure.
Beauregard gripped a narrow flight stick with several buttons set into its balled end. “Forrest? You’re co-pilot. Halitov? Up to the cannon. If you don’t remember how to operate it, learn. Now. St. Andrew? Get ready on the ramp. We’re lifting off.”
“Carrier’s bringing guns to bear,” Halitov said, pointing out past the canopy. “Guards are opening up.”
“So go answer them,” cried Beauregard.
Small arms fire pinged off the transport’s belly, and in a second the much more potent thunder of particle cannons would strike the transport’s protective energy skin, a shield much like our own skins, though less flexible because of its artificial energy source.
Halitov clambered up a ladder just behind the cockpit and squeezed into the gunner’s chair. “Data’s in my head. I can work this thing,” he shouted.
I stood by on the ramp release and clung to a rung set into the bulkhead as the transport’s big turbines bellowed to full power amid the boom and crackle of incoming cannon fire. The overhead rattled violently as Halitov cut loose a torrential bead of return fire accompanied by a string of hollered epithets to vent his fear.
The ship banked abruptly right, and through a boxy port-hole I watched the canyon scroll by.
“We’re almost there,” announced Beauregard. “Okay, St. Andrew, lower the ramp!”
A quick tap, and the belly hatch dropped open. The wind howled in and knocked me against the bulkhead as the ramp began to extend.
We flew over the low-lying wall of rocks, and there was Ms. Brooks, squinting against the thruster wash, a hand raised against the sun’s glare. Pope stood beside her, his worried gaze focused on something I could not see until I edged a meter down the ramp, one hand on another rung, and leaned out.
An airjeep rose vertically from the gorge. I didn’t recognize the pilot, though for a second he looked just like Jarrett. The woman in the co-pilot’s seat was the same Marine whose hand I had severed. She brandished her rifle in her good hand and kept the stump of the other buried in an armpit.
With just fifteen meters to go until our ramp reached Ms. Brooks, the Marine in that airjeep squeezed her trigger.
Pope, already skinned, threw himself into the line of fire in a remarkable barrel roll that kept him two meters off the ground and sent rounds ricocheting off his spinning body. He held that roll for several seconds, then broke out, landed on his feet, and fell back to once more shield Ms. Brooks.
The ramp slammed into the ground. I yelled for Beauregard to hold his position. Ms. Brooks darted up toward me, while behind her, Pope illustrated to those two Marines that chak is the art of the turn. He darted a meter to the left, pivoted ninety degrees away from them, bolted back another meter, pivoted another ninety degrees, then bolted again as the Marine’s incoming fire repeatedly tore through the air he had warmed.
I seized Ms. Brooks’s wrist and dragged her the remaining few steps inside. She collapsed into the nearest seat, wide-eyed and breathless, then craned her head back to watch Pope start up the ramp.
“Come on!” I shouted, more to address my own nerves than his failure to haul ass.
In fact, Pope ran up the ramp with everything he had, but the Marine caught him squarely in the si
de of his head with a bead that locked on and held. He looked blankly at me for a second before the rounds chewed through his skin and blew him off the ramp. More incoming stitched across the gangway and forced me back into the hold.
“St. Andrew?” Beauregard called.
“Go! Go! Go!” I hollered over the din, then punched the ramp control.
Ms. Brooks turned and rose. “What about Pope?”
I lost my breath and felt stinging in the corners of my eyes. I just shook my head and ran toward the cockpit, a mental voice echoing over my footfalls: I just knew that I wanted to be someone like him. Pope had done exactly what he wanted to do and had lived out the reason why he had come to the academy.
“St. Andrew? Make sure they’re strapped in back there and tell Pope to get on the other gun,” Beauregard ordered.
“I’m on that gun.”
He saw my expression. And knew. “Then just make sure Ms. Brooks is in tight. They’ve just scrambled four fighters. They’ll catch us in the exosphere. We need nine more minutes for the computer to lay in the decoys and resolve the tawt to Rexi-Calhoon. I’m counting on you and Halitov.”
With a terse nod, I turned and ran back into the hold, where Ms. Brooks had already buckled herself into her seat at the rear. I descended into the belly gunner’s gelatinous dome and plopped into a gelseat suspended from above. Like my old rack back at the billet, the seat slithered up around my body. I slid on the gunner’s glove, an alloy gauntlet that, according to my conditioning, turned your hand into a sensitive link between the targeting computer, the Heads Up Viewer, and the big particle cannon itself. The weapon’s big barrels jutted out from beneath my seat and could swivel and tilt to track any target breaking into my hemisphere. The viewer lit, feeding me sweeping scans of the darkening sky as we razored toward the void.
“Targets acquired,” reported Halitov.
The corner of my HUV lit with four red blips. I balled my hand into a fist, then quickly extended the fingers, as though my hand were wet and I wanted to spray someone. That movement ordered the HUV to zoom in on the bandits, four hammerhead sharks with iridescent bubbles for bodies. Although they had been designated “atmoattack” jets, the name was old and deceiving. The fighters could operate in nearly every environment, save for those worlds whose atmospheres were comprised of certain corrosive acids. An initial scan indicated that their pilots had yet to arm nukes. No doubt they had been ordered to disable us.
From the corner of my eye I watched Exeter shrink away and yield to the great bands of 70 Virginis b, one of the most massive gas giants in colonized space. The planetary system’s three inner moons, Triv, Azola, and Mylkic, shimmered faintly, their broken gray surfaces cooked and tortured by tidal forces and intense radiation.
Then, heralded by my proximity alarm, the fighters came in, grouped in a standard box formation and tearing a seam in that fantastic tableau. They streaked up behind us and peeled out of formation so precisely that I swore I was looking at the multiple reflections of a single craft. Two penetrated Halitov’s field of fire, while the other pair swooped down into mine. I pointed my index finger, an act that armed the system and activated a targeting reticle in my viewer. My finger fell over one of the fighters as the one below it opened fire. I flicked my thumb. A stream of ball lightning belched from my barrels and cut over the other fighter’s river of incoming. Dark blue veins of rappelled energy spidered over my dome and sapped away at skin strength.
“Gentlemen,” Beauregard yelled in our headsets. “They’re targeting the tawt. Still got three minutes on the resolve. Take…them…out!”
Beauregard had barely finished speaking when the fighter I had tracked burst into a fleeting conflagration.
A viewer to my left showed that Halitov had racked one up as well. But the remaining atmos employed their electronic countermeasures, and my HUV suddenly displayed multiple images of the fighter in my hemisphere, with no way to tell which was the real one—
Unless you had the ability to reach out into the void and search for the bonds between the particles of that fighter. Guided by instincts that had become strangely familiar, I began that search.
And failed.
Halitov’s voice came thick and enraged through my headset. “What are you doing, St. Andrew? Fire!”
I waved my index finger wildly over the HUV and thumbed off beads at all those incorporeal ships. While my salvos shot toward their targets, I flexed my middle, ring, and pinky fingers, throwing up clouds of superheated metallic fragments in a rather uninspired attempt to draw fire away from the tawt drive, whose spherical housing bulged from the top of our stern.
The rest I can only report as I heard it from Halitov. The fighter I had been tracking broke through my incoming and punched an appreciable hole in the skin protecting the gunner’s dome. The explosion activated the gelseat’s auto anesthetization and safety lift feature, which hauled my suddenly unconscious self up and into a blast compartment that sealed as the dome was sheared away. Beauregard rolled one hundred and eighty degrees, bringing the fighter I had missed into Halitov’s hemisphere. Then the cocky cadet “wove a web of fire so dense that no pilot could escape it.” Not only did he blast my fighter into a memory, but its detonation took out his. Halitov: three. St. Andrew: one.
I remained in a cold, numb, drug-induced sleep for about an hour, and when I woke, Dina told me that we had already tawted to her home, Epsilon Indi, an eight-planet star system with an orange K5 sun sitting roughly sixty-six light-years from Exeter. We presently established a geostationary orbit of the fifth planet, Rexi-Calhoon, an Earth-like globe with a breathable atmosphere (perhaps thanks to Racinian influence) and multiple biomes similar to the North American continent.
Shuddering off the grogginess, I sat up, looked at her, and remembered. “They got Pope.”
She glanced away. “I know.”
“Funny. I really hated that bastard.”
“Me, too.”
We grinned through our tears.
As the others waited for clearance to break orbit and approach Columbia Colony, I brooded over my failure with the fighters and went through a half dozen scenarios in which I managed to save Pope’s life. Halitov conveyed his heroics, then described the Seventeen System Guard Corps armada that hung in orbit around us: nine strike carriers, seven dreadnoughts, and thirteen destroyers sailing threateningly through space, guarding the new colonial government from Alliance strike forces that could, at any second, tawt in and attempt to seize the colonies. I’d had no idea that the corps had so many capital ships at its disposal. That would be only the first of many surprises promised by Beauregard and, later, by associates of his father.
Ms. Brooks, who still sat at the rear of the hold and had been speaking furiously via tablet to her aides in Columbia, called to me and Halitov. We headed back to her, and she told us to take seats. “I know both of you come from Gatewood-Callista,” she said gravely.
I lifted a hand. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Well, I do,” said Halitov.
“There’s an occupying force, but there are survivors. Believe me when I say we will respond. Communication with them is sporadic at best.”
“If they’re not dead yet, they will be,” I muttered. “I’m sure the alliances are ready to make another statement.”
“And we’ll make ours.”
“Ma’am, I think we’d both like to go home,” said Halitov.
She nodded. “I’ll send you there—with a regiment behind you.”
“You can do that?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“I’m chair of the Security Council, and if I want you there, you’ll be there.”
“Ms. Brooks?” Beauregard said from the front of the hold. “Tower’s just given us the go-ahead. All of you, buckle up for insertion.”
I thought my life had changed quite a bit in the last few days. Those changes were nothing.
In the weeks that followed, I would slowly begin to mourn the loss of Private Scott St
. Andrew, first year of Eighty-first Squad, gennyboy, and weakest link in the chain.
PART 3
The Fidelity of Dogs
12
The Exxo-Tally and Inte-Micro Corporations, largely responsible for most of the colonial expansion in the prior century, had settled the planet of Rexi-Calhoon as a joint venture, and their influence was inescapable in the primary colonies of Columbia, Indicity (Dina’s hometown), Tru Cali, Lincoln, Govina, and Rexi-city. About nine hundred million resided on the planet, with twenty percent living in Columbia, a vast metropolis encompassing thousands of kilometers of mountainous terrain.
We set down in CESP—the Columbia Extrasolar Spaceport, located in Fortune Valley. As we descended the ramp, the strange smells and brown haze tinting the sky had all of us wincing. Ms. Brooks told us we would get used to the smog. I shook my head over the irony of polluting real fresh air. I guess it took someone like me, a person who had never breathed unrecycled air until I had gone to Exeter, to truly appreciate the damage we were doing. But the economy depended upon the manufacturing plants, which were, Ms. Brooks explained, now contributing to the war effort.
An airjeep carrying a first sergeant and a private came out to meet us on the tarmac. The sergeant introduced himself to Ms. Brooks, gave me, Halitov, Beauregard, and Dina a slightly terrified look, then helped us all into the back. We flew north for about thirty minutes, skimming the treetops. I got my first look at a real lake, whose waters appeared more murky than I had imagined. We swooped over a stand of trees, then braked into the forest and landed beside a wide security hatch set into the ground. The sergeant coded open the door, and we climbed into a small, open vehicle seated on a repulsor track. We whirred straight into the mountain, passing through six, maybe seven, security checkpoints until we reached a great chasm, a hub with perhaps twenty tunnels stretching away. Dozens of small personnel carts swept through the tunnels, and twenty meters to my left, a full platoon of forty stood in rigid formation, their duffels sitting before them as they waited to ship out.