Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

by J. M. Kaukola

  Late evening was more PT, and Hill liked to drag him down to the boxing ring to pound him. The first few times he'd tried to escape, but someone always forced him back inside the ropes. It didn't matter if he had to work on protocols. It didn't matter if he could barely stand. Somewhere along the line, someone had decided that he should be a fighter. Every night, he would be thrown into the arena for Hill to pound into oblivion, and each time, he'd flail uselessly and wonder why the universe hated him. Some days, he wished he'd just chosen "Treason" and died in jail. It would have been faster.

  Still, after Hill put him into the mat, he'd pick himself up. He'd stand, lean on the ropes, and try his best to smile like he wasn't broken. He pretended to endure because of pride. He'd always been the best, the smartest guy in the room. He clung to that scrap of ego and let it fuel him. He had to win. He wouldn't let Donegan, the Agency, the specist professors, or the perverse cosmos win. He'd endure, and every night when he staggered to bed, he'd promise, "Today was the worst of it."

  He'd pass out before he hit the pillow. Dawn would be on him before he felt the mattress, and then he would start the hardest day of his life, all over again.

  Cohesion

  The punch crashed against Firenze's stomach like a freight train. He gasped as the air rammed from his lungs, and he fought the urge to buckle. Nearly blind from the blow, he yanked his arms up, closed his guard like Parvotti had taught him. Hill's next punch struck his forearm, drove his own fist into his face from the impact, but his block held. Firenze reacted by touch, twisted to snag Hill's arm and lock it. On reflex, he pulled the soldier into a dronetown cop-lock.

  Unlike a ganger caught in that arm-bar, though, Hill was unphased. The commando twisted, dropped his elbow, and Firenze's hold vanished. Firenze tried to recover. He whirled through the collapsing hold and drove his elbow towards the back of Hill's skull.

  Hill wasn't there. The soldier staggered forward, and the back of Firenze's elbow grazed over his shaven head.

  For a split second, Firenze had a chance to think. He'd almost formed a plan when Hill speared him.

  The lights swung overhead, and he slammed into the floor.

  Firenze scrambled to escape the pin, but Hill denied him, pressed him hard into the mat until the blue plastic stretched white around him. He choked on sweat and the stench of industrial cleaner, tried to curl up on instinct.

  An iron hand closed around his neck. Hill shifted back and locked Firenze's legs with his own, forced apart Firenze's defensive shell, and then started raining down blows. The hits weren't even hard enough to hurt. Hill's punches were just to remind him he'd been hit. 'Cherry taps', they'd called the taunting blows.

  It was one insult-beating too many. Firenze's plastic-choked desperation and anger blurred. He snapped with a howl, bucked, and slapped Hill's strangling hand away. In a rage, he kicked up, slammed his knee into Hill's groin. The soldier's eyes bulged, his mouth fell open. Firenze followed the shock, flipped the hold, and hurled his opponent to the ground.

  His cries now tinged with triumph, Firenze reared back and threw a punch. Another. A third!

  The lights spun, again, as Hill twisted free. Firenze crashed bounced from the plastic, the edge of the cold cement just past his nose. He tried to turn, to see what was coming-

  Hill struck him, hard. These blows came without an ounce of mockery. Firenze attempted to block them but found himself choked by gym-short fabric as a thigh slammed over his face, and a leg-lock pinned his shoulders to the mat.

  Firenze was trapped at the commando's mercy. Hill hopped from his hold, snatched up his victim's legs, and twisted them towards the sky. From the side, Firenze heard Sergeant Clausen call out, "Broken!"

  Hill let go of his legs, threw them down. Firenze felt the sting of the impact, despite the adrenaline. Clausen continued, "That's two busted legs and a dislocated shoulder. Princess! You're dead!"

  Hill's weight vanished, and Firenze managed to half-crunch into a sitting position. Hill had slumped to a seat by the near turnbuckle, shining with sweat and glaring hard towards Clausen. The sergeant stood in the opposite corner of the ring, his face frozen halfway between laughter and exasperation.

  Hill sucked his breath through pursed lips, tried to keep a wince from his face. Clausen scolded him, "Reaper, you won. There was no need to break his legs."

  Hill managed only a groan.

  Firenze lay on the mat, trying to make sense of the world as the post-combative rush faded. Someone pulled him to his feet, and he staggered towards an upright to lean on.

  Clausen's voice cut through his mental fog, "Everyone, pay attention! This is what happens when you flash your nasty bits at the enemy."

  From the corner, Hill's strained voice replied, "Sorry, Sarge. Didn't expect Princess to ring my bells." He groaned, and Firenze could almost picture him doubling over. Hill continued, "Hey, Princess? Can you warn me next time? Maybe, 'Hey, Reaper, just so you know, I'm the kind of little bitch who kicks someone in the dick.' Some fucking courtesy?" He followed with a pained laugh.

  Clausen said, "Nice job, kid. Hell of a fight. Point of note: that kind of low-blow only works if someone's not trying to kill you. When death is on the line, the other guy will finish you and then limp it off. If your goal is to leave a fond memory, sure, do it. Otherwise, forget using pain. Strike to disable or kill, every time."

  Firenze nodded, sweat pouring over his eyebrows. "Got it."

  Hill leaned against the ropes, face ashen as if he was fighting the urge to vomit. Kawalski stood beside him, looking like she'd choked half-to-death on a laugh. She said, "Quit your bitching, Reaper. It's not like you used those."

  Hill snapped back, "You come in here and let Princess cunt-punch you! Then tell me how funny it is!"

  All that earned was a guffaw.

  Hill turned to Firenze and dropped his glare. He admitted, "Nice shot."

  "Thanks?" Firenze tried to move his arm, work the soreness from his bones.

  "No problem." Hill winced.

  Clausen called the fight, "Final score: Reaper eight, Princess one. It's the start of a comeback!"

  Firenze didn't know how Clausen managed it. The sergeant was always so cool, so level, so confident. Every time he spoke, it was with unflappable calm and pure competence. It didn't matter what happened or how wrong something went, Clausen kept a laser-focus. Everything was 'this needs to happen', 'get it done', and 'adapt and overcome'. Firenze wished he could muster half that composure, just once.

  Instead, he was covered in sweat, from headgear to his shorts, drenched and stinking. His breath was ragged, his arms and legs shook, and every muscle burned. At least this time, he'd done something, even if it was just punching Hill in the cojones. Today, the ache wasn't shame, but accomplishment: he'd gotten a point on the board.

  Eight and one was better than nine and zero. He was getting better. Sometimes, he even survived the sims. He'd come kilometers from where he'd started.

  It just wasn't enough. He was going to fail and get everyone killed.

  He pushed that horrible, weak voice out of his head and snatched up his towel. There wasn't an option. No matter what the colonel said, he didn't have a choice. If he walked away, he was dead. The Agency would take him, scrag his box, and throw him down a deep, dark hole. There was no way out but forward, so he fought on.

  "Hey, Princess!" Hill called out. "You owe me a drink."

  Firenze dropped the towel and glanced up. Hill knelt across from him, a grin plastered on his face as he tucked the flaps of his shirt back under his belt. Firenze stared, confused, and tried to sort out what he'd heard.

  Hill explained, "Normally, I don't let people smack my balls around until they buy me a drink. I'll make an exception on the timeline, but not on the events. You owe me one." Behind him, Kawalski cackled.

  Firenze shook his head. "No, no, I really..."

  Kawalski cut him off and demanded, "You gonna leave him hanging like that?"

  Firenze tried to find
the door, but it was behind the two soldiers.

  Kawalski added, "What I'm trying to say is: tomorrow's a rest day, we're going to the bar, and we'll see you there."

  Firenze asked, "There's a bar in this shithole?"

  "Scooch won't leave home without it." Hill said. "It's just for rest days, but it's solid."

  "It'll get you drunk." Kawalski offered. "So it works."

  Firenze froze. He'd planned on tuning his counter-intrusion kit based on a couple of tweaks Lauren had suggested. He opened his mouth to demur, but Hill wouldn't allow it.

  "Don't bitch out, Princess." Hill said. "You can cuddle your box tomorrow."

  Kawalski snorted and said, "I bet you've got some real sick shit on there, don't you? You gonna share?"

  "That's not- I'm not-" Firenze tried to protest. He looked for another exit, but instead, he saw Clausen. The mountain of a man leaned against the doorframe, nonchalantly updating his tablet and completely blocking egress. The sergeant worked diligently, whistling as he flicked the touch screen to and fro. As if prodded, the sergeant glanced up and met Firenze's gaze, smiled, and went back to work. Firenze got the message.

  This was yet another place where he didn't have a choice in whether he got hosed, just in how he reacted. Fantastic.

  Firenze turned back to Hill, smiled broadly, and lied, "Sounds like fun."

  "Hell yeah!" Hill said. "But, clean up, first. We can't have you getting nerd-stink on everything. It might scare off the ladies." He wiggled his eyebrows at Kawalski in a grotesque pantomime of seduction. Her reply was to shove him off the mat.

  She ordered, "Twenty-one hundred, be there."

  That, as they say, was that.

  Half an hour later, Firenze found himself at the Kessinwey "bar": an industrial pit barely salvaged to a liveable condition. The bartop was a deactivated conveyor, the freezers were coolant units from a dead assembly line, the dartboards were hung from control panels, and the billiards were holoprojected on flipped-over drive baseboards. The tables were workbenches. The seats were scrounged from cockpits and cabins. Clausen called it 'workable', Hill called it 'classy', and Firenze was terrified of dying from accidentally drinking coolant. Rutman had brewed his beer inside god-knows-what, and when Firenze asked how he'd seen to sanitation, the man had just laughed and assured him, 'no one's gone blind, yet'.

  The beer was a bit strong, with an aftertaste that clung to the roof of his mouth. Rutman called it "Turbo Ale" but wouldn't give any more information. Still, the second drink went down smoother than the first, and the third was almost palatable. After a glass, he stopped worrying about running back to his room. After a couple, he was nearly sociable.

  Not that he did much talking. Most of the time was spent swapping stories, ones known so well that any of five people could tell it, with call-outs and in-jokes so dense he had to keep notes. He'd thought he'd had some good stories from dronetown and school. He'd planned on trying to tell one, but by the time Hill got to "-and when you see the mortar teams running, you don't ask questions." Firenze knew that he was horribly outgunned. That was fine, though, because he'd nearly fallen out of his chair laughing.

  For a few moments, he could almost forget that he was sitting in a desolate hole, preparing to die. Almost.

  Hill continued, his face flushed and hand-waves growing ever-less-precise, "-so there we were, trying to extract this sumbitch, and we've gotta bug a vertol ride. Now, we're tired, we're ragged, and this VIP is about a hundred kilos over the bird's weight limit. So we're standing inside, chucking gear out the hatches while the Path is shooting up the place, and the captain keeps asking me, 'Corporal! Is this bird underweight yet?' We're down two seats and the entire fire-suppression system before we're off the ground.

  "Now, we get a couple klicks out of the city, and zoom, a fuckin' hyvel smacks the left turbine. Boom. We're doing loop-de-loops over the jungle, and shit's flyin' out the doors like its a fire-sale. The damn thing breaks up, and the part I'm strapped to stays with the engine. The interesting thing, Princess, is that the V-30 keeps its fuel inside these nifty little sealing containers, and most of the systems run themselves. The damn bird can fly itself home without half its fuselage." Hill leaned forward, slurred his words as he motioned around. He'd been hitting the drinks a little harder than most.

  Devallo, one of the combat engineers, cut in, "What that means is, right now, Reaper and the VIP are strapped into a part of the plane that is flying itself. Except it's got no control, and it's doing a terminal ballet over the deep jungle."

  "Right!" Hill agreed. "And the damned Pathies won't stop shooting at us. We crash-land forty klicks from bumfuq, and have to march through the nastiest jungle on earth just to get back to the extraction point. Did I mention that the Path was still shooting at us?"

  Firenze agreed. "About four times."

  "Good, 'cause they were. Anyhow, we slam into this mud pit. I crawl over to the veep and discover this bastard went and caught a piece of shrapnel through his skull. He's dead as dirt, but my extraction orders don't care. So, I drag this enormous corpse through the jungle. Radio's dead, everything's cooked, I've got one banged up subgun, two mags, and half a day's rations. It's near boiling out, it's about a hundred klicks to the green zone, and I've got to drag Porky the Veep through a Path division on the way."

  Rutman jumped in, "So, there he is, out of contact, out of luck, and still stuck on the mission. What does his happy ass do?"

  "My happy ass marched itself to extraction, that's what it did!" Hill replied.

  "And how?" Rutman prodded. "Tell Princess how you did it…"

  "I went through a lot of shit! I had to adapt!" Hill excused. "There were Path patrols, snakes, mosquitoes, malaria-"

  Rutman said, "This dumbass catches malaria somewhere in the fucking swamp-jungle, still dragging this bloated corpse. Two weeks later, he staggers across the perimeter onto an airbase tarmac, and he's half-naked, armed with an empty Path pistol and a bowie knife, rolling this black and blue thing in front of him, wearing leaves like a crown. Completely cooked out of his head, like he'd been licking dart frogs."

  "I had malaria, Scooch! Malaria!" Hill protested.

  Rutman continued, "The lieutenant waltzes over, pissed as hell that this is happening during a base inspection, and demands, 'What in the seven hells are you rolling onto my tarmac'. Reaper salutes and says, 'VIP from Coreza, sir. Doubles as a flotation device, bunker, and downhill kinetic weapon, sir!' Well, the family was standing right there, and they're horrified, so the lieutenant tries to patch it up, and yells, 'God damn it, soldier, all we needed was his identicard!' And Hill turns, says, 'Well piss on that, sir' and belly-flops onto the blacktop, unconscious. I think the el-tee had a fucking stroke."

  Firenze tried not to choke. Around the table, others laughed, except for Hill, who just sat there in earnest silence, utterly unperturbed by the absurdity of the tale, but perhaps puzzled as to why it was so funny. Kawalski glanced at him, blurry-eyed, and said, "You think that was bad, Princess, you should have seen Tansana. Scooch, remember that fucking rook?"

  Rutman cackled and slapped Hill on the back so hard that the latter man nearly hit the table. Hill popped up, a confused look on his face, but Rutman demanded, "Reaper? Remember that kid?"

  "Donkey!? Of fucking course!" Hill declared. He whirled to Firenze, leaned forward as if to communicate some great secret, and whispered, "He's a hero of the Authority. True fucking steel."

  Despite himself, Firenze asked, "What-"

  Rutman jumped on the story. "Okay, so, we're moving across Tansana - Path has the city locked down tight, they're blasting vertols out of the sky, and they've bunched the AA in with civies, so the orbitals can't scrag 'em. We've gotta clear this quench gun-"

  Hill chimed in to explain, "Big fucking gun. Four centimeter bore, hopper fed. Sounds like a goddamn lightning storm when it shoots. Pathies got it tucked into a churchyard. Local legs tried to move in, went quiet, we get told to go poke it."

  Rut
man continued, "We got caught on a balcony. Big stone thing - dark age construction. I mean the whole deal: pillars, stained glass, fucking ceramic plant troughs. Architectural fucking wonder. A real treasure."

  "Path shoot it to shit." Hill added.

  Rutman said, "So, we're all lying prone beneath this half-meter stone wall. Beautiful red rock. And across the courtyard, there's this bell tower and some fucking asshole with a heavy k-gun. Anyone who stands up gets blown in half. Guy's a hell of a shot-"

  "Never let anyone talk you up a tree." Diaz advised from the end of the table. Of all the people on the team, the soft-spoken marksman was one of the most introverted. Firenze rarely heard him speak, but all the others stopped to listen when he did. Diaz glanced down at the stains on his nearly-empty glass and remarked, "It's a good rule."

  "Why's that?" Firenze asked.

  Kawalski answered, "Because if you take a rifle up a tree, you ain't climbing back down."

  Hill said, "Path ain't too bright. But they got guts for days."

  "And they can shoot." Rutman reiterated. "It's me, Reaper, Dag, and Nugget - we're all lying there, useless. Command is on the radio, keeps telling us that someone is going to flank the goddamned sniper, and we need to stand by. We can't crawl more than a goddamn meter, because that oh-so-pretty stone has gaping fucking holes, there's no hard cover unless you feel like sprinting ten meters through a kill zone, and, oh, yeah, we're still babysitting the fucking leg infantry who got trapped here, first."

  "This kid is green as you, Princess." Hill said. "His unit got cut up, and he's a fucking radio tech without a link. He's got about eight hundred feet of fiber on his back, no officer, no handset, and no TACNET. Useless as tits on body armor."

  Rutman continued, "But... he's small. He's got that outer-zone scrawny thing going on. Fucking stick arms, but thighs like a whole turkey. Kid probably has to run down rats to feed his fucking family. Reaper keeps looking at him, gets this real 'thinking' look on his face, and I swear, the kid's about to piss himself." Rutman had to stop, to regulate his breath, so he didn't trip over his own words. He punctuated with a drink and continued, "So I ask Reaper, 'what are you thinking?'. And he says, 'I armed the hyvel'."