Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

by J. M. Kaukola

  The data packed into Firenze's skull gave that phrase meaning. The hyvel - hypervelocity rocket - was a man-portable antitank/anti-fortification weapon. Disarmed, it was a tube just under seven-hundred millimeters long, stored on the infantryman's back. To arm the rocket, a soldier would give it a quarter twist, and then extend it to its full length of nine-hundred millimeters. This motion would start the firing sequence, and, once taken, the weapon had to be discharged.

  Hill explained, "Look, no one was gonna out-shoot that guy. I thought I'd just knock down his goddamn tower."

  Rutman said, "This is a predicament because Hill's gotta stand to shoot the hyvel. Which means someone has to distract the sniper-"

  "And that kid looks fast." Hill said.

  "You didn't!" Firenze protested. "That poor kid-"

  Rutman said, "Now, this kid is scared shitless. The only reason he believes us is because we're big-bad-ASOC, but even we think this is a stupid fucking plan, and he can tell, so I promise him, 'hey, you get out there and draw fire, I will buy you all the drinks'. He tells me to fuck off. Hill looks at him and says, 'hey, kid, I will get you laid like a goddamned hero'. He's still not buying it. So Dag tells him-"

  Kawalski said, "I told him that I've got leverage on the local cops, and I will bail him out of whatever bullshit these two get him into."

  Rutman nodded. "And this kid - probably doesn't even fucking know how to shave, he's starting to get into this. He's terrified, but he's gonna be the hero, so he starts taking off his fucking armor. Just pop, off comes the carapace. I'm staring at him, and he says to me, in this little-kid-angel-voice, 'it won't stop a k-gun, I need speed'. Motherfucker strips down to his fucking cartoon-donkey-covered underpants."

  Rutman turned right to Firenze, and said, "So he pops up, arms flailing, and sprints - I've never seen someone run so fucking fast - like he's last to the food line, and the first shot misses him - blows a goddamn pillar in half-"

  Hill continued, "I pop up, lob the hyvel, and drop the tower. Done."

  Rutman finished, "And this kid, this glorious, lunatic kid, he turns around, with this shit-eating grin, his fucking donkey-decal boxers, and the biggest terror-boner you've ever seen-"

  Slim interjected, "That's a medical improbability."

  Rutman pressed on, "So this kid asks, 'Am I a hero, yet?'. Mother fucking A."

  "What happened to him?" Firenze demanded.

  "He became a fucking legend!" Hill said as he raised his glass. "To Donkey! Hero of the fucking Authority!"

  Everyone toasted to that.

  Another round in and Firenze had to slip away from the table, pleading biology. His bladder had turned murderous beneath the tide of beers, but more to the point, he needed to escape the crowd. It wasn't that he wasn't enjoying himself. He was. But he had always been one for quiet corners and careful study, not for boisterous carousing. He could fake it, for a while - he'd trained hard at that - but it drained him.

  Besides, it's not like he was running away. He was going to stay. He'd just do it from the edge of the social storm, not within the eye.

  He took care of business and returned to the bar, tried to pour a drink as another peal of laughter burst from the center of the room. He smiled though he hadn't heard the joke - company by proxy was the very best kind of company. He'd nearly finished filling his cup when he felt Sergeant Clausen lean against the bar beside him.

  "You doing alright?" Clausen asked.

  "Yeah." he replied. "I think."

  Clausen snorted and tapped his knuckle to his brow, the fins of a dart poking into his hair, and said, "Good. You did a fine job today. Have some fun." He leaned forward, transferred a single dart to his right hand, and strode towards the dartboard with a weaving swagger. His hand came up with his stride, and his eyes narrowed. Without pause, he let fly the first missile - thock - and his opponent's score reset to zero.

  "Sorry, Bugtuck." Clausen stated as he pulled the next dart into his throwing hand. He took another step- thock! Clausen closed the game, still a half-meter behind the throwing-line. He stopped, took a drink, and then, with his off-hand, hurled the final dart into the powered-down bullseye. "Guess you're buying." He returned to Firenze and asked, "You want to play?"

  "Jesus, no!" Firenze exclaimed. "I only play when I can win!"

  "How are you gonna get better, then?" Clausen asked. "You've always got to start like shit and grow from there."

  "Right." Firenze acknowledged but did not agree.

  They leaned against the bar for a long minute, in silence.

  Firenze finally asked, "So… these stories…"

  Clausen smirked.

  "They're a bit… much." Firenze said.

  "You don't approve?" Clausen asked.

  Firenze could hear the bait. He didn't take it. "No, they're funny. It's just… that shit's pretty morbid when you think about it."

  "It's what we do." Clausen said. "You gotta find the funny part, or you'll go toast."

  "I guess." Firenze agreed. "I think a couple of your guys are already bonkers."

  "Hill?" Clausen asked.

  Firenze nodded. He took a drink for emphasis.

  "He's a piece of work, but a damn good soldier. You couldn't ask for a better battle-buddy." Clausen said. He glanced over, gave someone a quick nod, then added, "He'll keep you alive. You just stick on him."

  At the table, Rutman's voice rose, and Firenze could make out, "-largest fucking still you've ever seen. For being so hot on prohibition, this patriarch had the most monstrous 'shining operation I'd ever seen, and Reaper's shooting incendiary-"

  Clausen must have heard it, too, because he summarized, "I remember that one. Two-story flaming-dive into a water tank. Perfect form, too."

  "Really?" Firenze demanded.

  "Probably. Hard to get a good look. I was also on fire." Clausen replied. "Get back over there and throw in a story."

  "I don't have any."

  Clausen glanced at him, sideways. His steel eyes and hard-stubble shadow added extra weight to the aside glance.

  "I don't have anything to contribute to this-"

  "Bullshit." Clausen said. "That sounds dangerously close to 'poor me', Princess."

  "I'm just a grad student-"

  "You rang Reaper's bell."

  "I kicked him in the nuts when he wasn't looking." Firenze corrected.

  "You cleared the course three times under par. There was some nasty stuff in there, too."

  "Chief Donegan cleared it four times." Firenze objected. He'd checked. Obsessively. Losing stung more than the any of the combatives.

  "Yeah, he's an experienced EWO, with practical experience. You've done this in training only." Clausen said. He smirked, as some piece of a story washed over him, a reference too quick for Firenze to understand. Clausen asked, "You know something? Doggo never broke the Phalanx. You did. Twice." Clausen paused. "I pull scores, too. So does Donegan, and so does the Old Man. You think you're pissed at being upstaged? Doggo watched you clean that AI's clock and then had to write the report."

  Despite himself, Firenze smirked. He'd done something Donegan couldn't. For a moment, pride swelled, but then the little voice in his head sing-songed, 'you still died, and you took the team with you.'

  His smile vanished, and he glanced back at the table and the empty chair. He asked, "How do you guys do it?"

  "With style." Clausen replied.

  "No, I mean, why do you keep jumping into these messes? Joke all you want, but people died in those stories. People are going to die on the airship. We're marching into the fire."

  Clausen faced Firenze directly and said, "We're ASOC. That's what we do. If there's a fire, we're the idiots running the wrong way."

  "First to fight?" Firenze quoted.

  "Last to quit." Clausen agreed. "Look, you're a bright kid. I'm guessing you were top of your class. Not near the top - the top. You owned it, one of those kids with the four-point-plus, the clubs, the competitions, the whole package. You had to be the b
est. Does that sound accurate?"

  "Yeah." Firenze agreed, but then he countered, "I see where you're going with this, but, look, no one threw grenades at me in the robotics club."

  "Your loss." Clausen said. "The fact remains: ASOC is where you end up when you can't stop striving. We defy the impossible because it's there. We're the best of the best because the world needs us to be. We're the first in, last out, carving out a pocket until the army catches up. Behind lines, underwater, or up in orbitals, it does not matter, because we're on call. We're the light in the black and the tip of the spear. First to fight." Clausen slammed back a drink, then added, "You don't get here by being good. You get here by being the goddamn best."

  Firenze said, "Yeah, well, I like winning, same as anyone. I worked hard for it. But I never signed up to be shot at. I never wanted to be here."

  "And yet, here you are." Clausen raised his glass, held it out to Firenze in a toast.

  "Here I am." Firenze agreed with a rueful chuckle. He clanged his mug against Clausen's, took a drink, then said, "Faking it until I make it."

  Clausen lowered his glass and said, "Oh, no, no. That won't do."

  "Huh?"

  "You belong here. The colonel said so. You're on a team, so you'd better be on the team."

  "I'm here, right?" Firenze asked.

  "Not enough. We need cohesion. This kind of group needs absolute trust. You can dislike someone, you can even hate them, but you have to know that you will have their back when the shit gets hot."

  "Here we go," Firenze joked, "I'd been waiting for the old 'unit is family' talk. I've seen the holovids, too."

  Clausen thumped his hand on the bar, hard enough that the conversation in the room dropped from a roar to a buzz. Firenze nearly jumped from his chair at the impact, but the sergeant held him in place with a stare. Clausen said, "Don't mock that bond, because it will save your life. You have to trust everyone, beyond a doubt. You know their strengths, their weaknesses, and they know yours. When the pieces get moving, you trust them like left-hand trusts right. Lives depend on it. Yours, theirs, and everyone else."

  "Donegan can't stand me. How's that for cohesion?"

  "He can't stand that you're in his spot. Think of that. Some punk kid, some wizard, waltzes straight out of college and takes his place - a place that he worked for his whole life. That change puts his team at risk, so yeah, he's pissed. I'd be pissed. I think you'd be pissed, too!"

  Clausen paused, noted the dropped noise in the room, and threw a finger wave towards the main table. Conversation resumed, leaving the two of them for their talk.

  The sergeant continued, "Doggo's looking for a reason to trust you. He wants you to succeed. You might think he's an ass, but he'll have your back, straight through. He's ASOC, but he doesn't think you are. Prove him wrong."

  "I don't know if I can." Firenze admitted. He looked into the thin remains of his drink.

  "You will. I've got money on you." Clausen said as he walked back towards the dartboard.

  Firenze called after him, "Can I ask you something?"

  "Long as it ain't dating advice." Clausen replied.

  "How come I get called 'Princess', but Hill gets to be 'Reaper'?"

  Clausen's laugh was deep and booming. He answered with a question, "Can you put one hundred rounds, full-auto, into a man-sized target at one hundred paces?"

  "Uh, no?"

  "Princess." Clausen replied. He plucked his darts back out of the board and ordered, "Now get your royal ass back to that table."

  Firenze listened and obeyed. After all, today was the hardest day.

  Fearful Symmetry

  The worst part about Kessinwey was the smell.

  The stench chased Firenze down the halls. It lurked outside his bunk and haunted him in the shower. Every time he thought he'd slipped its grasp - pushed it away with sweat and gunsmoke or bleach-scoured it from the bathroom - it returned, stronger than ever.

  Kessinwey smelled of death, but not of rotting meat or heavy perfume on mortuary drapes. It stank of clogged oil, stilled engines, and creeping rust. This was the death of machines. Every centimeter, from the office towers to the dormitories, assembly lines to railway hub, reeked of stagnant fuel and faded solvent. Empty shops sat on silent corners, cars idled in rotted garages - all of them stank of metal, plastic, and rubber. Echoes carried from forgotten trials, told of starved and smothered fires.

  If a machine could know fear, then this place would surely be haunted. On reflex, Firenze let his hand brush the peeled wall, only to jerk it back, fingertips glossed in silver-flecked-amber. The residue clung to him like bearing grease, sticky and slippery at once. In vain, he tried to wipe his fingers clean, but only managed to streak the oil across his pants.

  That grease was the only thing more pervasive than the smell.

  The gunk stuck to everything. It lacquered open cups, clogged the vents of his computer, and made sanitizing his jack an absolute hell. Clausen mandated cleaning - weapons, kit, bunks - but no matter how deep Firenze scrubbed, the next morning, every exposed surface would lie coated in yellow slime.

  Worse was the dust clung to it, though Firenze doubted the accuracy of the word. 'Dust' was clumpy, uneven, and gritty - the dirt blown up through dronetown deep-pipes and coughed out of the loward regulators. Kessinwey's 'dust' was silver powder, thin as fog, that stuck to everything and coated the world in a dull-gray sheen. Like the oil, it was pernicious. No matter how often he scrubbed it clean, within an hour, speckles returned. Donegan mandated filters placed on every intake, and full scouring of every board and card, twice daily. Even with that, they'd lost two boxes from cook-off in a cleanroom. At this point, Firenze wouldn't boot before a blowout.

  Parvotti told him there was sand like this in Meso Hub, said he'd seen guys killed by it, from jammed guns and stuck rotors. Rutman said it wasn't dirt or sand at all. He said it was bits of metal from decades of milling, routing, and forging, trapped in the cyclers. He said it would take a full purge of the circulation system to get it cleaned out, and since that would give away their presence, they would have to deal with it. He'd told them to look on the bright side - at least they'd never get dry skin.

  Firenze picked up his sippy-cup and sucked at the nipple like a toddler. He tried to focus on the taste of coffee and ignore the taint of oil. Lids were a necessity, here. He'd tried to rig up a filter from cloth and paper, but the grease had bested him, so he'd 'borrowed' a child's safety cup from the old dormitories. It was covered in cartoons and made him look like an idiot, but it worked. He'd expected to get mocked for it, and he sort of did. A couple of people laughed at him and dubbed his creation the 'Princess Teacup', but then they'd also told him 'good thinking' and sent out a foraging team.

  He looked over the makeshift classroom and the assorted operators seated on gathered chairs and tables. Their teacups stood boldly atop stacks of white binders or clutched in weathered hands, cerulean blue and vibrant pink popping against the brown-tinted-green of Kessinwey's rot. Pride be damned, the cups kept out the grease.

  This had once been a conference room. The paint on the south wall, glistening under its Kessinwey clear-coat, faded in a patchwork where poster-boards once hung. The west wall had housed a bank of windows, now given over to grease-slicked boards and scrambler sheets. Firenze stood at the front, wedged between the eggshell card-table and newly-scrubbed whiteboards, desperately fighting the urge to fidget.

  This was a nervousness he understood, like standing before an academic board, arguing his thesis before the unblinking avatars of his professors. After weeks of dragging behind on every drill, exercise, and sim, this was his chance to be useful. Clausen had thrown the task his way almost casually, mentioned that it would be helpful for someone with an academic mindset to give a framer-course on the Bergman drives of the airship. It had been an offhanded comment, but Firenze had shown interest, only to learn afterward that such action was broadly understood as 'volunteering'.

  Now, here he was, i
n front of the most unlikely thesis board, trying to convince himself not to panic and run screaming out the door. He took another sip from his safety-cup and wondered if caffeine was really the best choice. He drank deeper.

  Through the cracks in the window-boards, he recognized the plaza monument, a dark-gray blur against the burnt brown grass and rusted benches. He knew what it was. He'd walked past it every day. The Enil. One of the mid-war airships. The old bronze-wrought destroyer looked little like the Plymouth. It was boxy and angular, where the Plymouth was smooth, composed of graceful curves and liquid spires. The delicate towers of the city-ship bore little resemblance to the angular k-gun batteries and directional launch tubes of the Enil, but these appearances masked a common heritage.

  Firenze turned from the window, faced the whiteboard, and cursed himself for ever telling Clausen that Bergman drives 'weren't difficult'. That's how the dreaded phrase 'subject expert' got slapped next to his name. He was a computer guy, not a lift engineer! Still, he knew enough to get the basics, and this let him stretch some intellectual legs. He just had to pretend that he was acting as Professor's Assistant for a particularly surly (and well-armed) bunch of undergrads, and not standing under their judgment. Easy, right?

  He pulled up one of the dry erase markers and tried to write on the whiteboard. The marker squeaked and slid across the grime, leaving only an off-white trail over a slightly-darker board. Firenze scowled, scrubbed the board clear with his sleeve, but it just spread, the grease built up on his cuff and weighing down the fabric. The marker, now sullied, refused to leave more than the ghost of blue.

  "Fuck this." Firenze whispered. He turned back to the room, and advised, "Sorry, guys, kill the lights, we're going with the holotable."

  That brought a groan, and Firenze couldn't blame them. Kessinwey's holotables were as old as the assembly-lines, and their containment was just as questionable. Everyone was about to get a nose-full of steam.