He doesn’t care if you live or die out there, Jan. Either way he’ll make you a hero.
Beautiful, golden-haired Ayliss, just one year his senior but a lifetime more mature. From his earliest memory she’d been able to predict their father’s every move. Her one flaw was that she didn’t see that this mystic understanding of the dreaded Senator Mortas came from the fact that she was almost exactly like him. In looks, brains, and temperament.
And she’d been wrong about the reason Mortas had signed up. She thought it was his way of finally gaining the parental attention that no number of nannies or coaches or mentors could replace, but that hadn’t been it. It was something else, far more personal, far more primitive. It was something he’d found on the lacrosse fields and in dormitory fights at boarding school: he liked competition, enjoyed testing himself, and simply wanted to know how it felt to go to war.
Mortas managed a weak smile of self-mockery at the notion of having actually wanted this. Lying there in the grass like an animal, it was crystal clear that he should have been able to figure this out without actually doing it. After all, now he knew. Now he knew what it felt like. He was ravenous, exhausted, and dirty. He was dreading the very sight of the enemy he was supposed to conquer. The only thing he knew for sure was that he’d mess his trousers at some point in the next few minutes if the guard showed up, if he didn’t show up, if he took too long showing up, or even if he showed up and presented the perfect, unsuspecting target that Cranther had described.
The only chance that he wouldn’t void himself rested with the high likelihood that there was nothing left in his system to soil his uniform.
The thought evaporated with the hollow metallic ringing of the Sim’s boots on the bridge plates. It had an electrical effect on him, like the throwing of a switch, but unfortunately this switch turned to the off position.
I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.
The notion of sneaking up behind the Sim and tearing his throat out with no provocation now solidified into something so ludicrous that Mortas marveled that he’d ever thought he’d be able to do it. The helmeted figure came into view, looking broad shouldered and enormous, and Mortas hunkered down lower in the grass. Cranther had sounded so matter-of-fact in his coaching that Mortas now questioned if this was something the scout had actually done before, or merely something he’d been taught. That idea reminded him of the others, waiting up on the hill for him to act, and his face reddened with shame.
If you’re not going to do it, what are you going to do? And what are the others supposed to do when they see the guard keeps reappearing?
The Sim reached the end of the bridge and stepped out onto the road. He was making a frustrated chirping noise under his breath, and Mortas was taken aback by the humanity of it: the Sim was so angry with his partner that he was talking to himself. The guard kicked a stone out of his path, still coming on, and Mortas slowly became certain that he’d been seen.
But that was nonsense. The Sim’s stubby weapon was slung across his chest and, even though he had one hand on it, he clearly wasn’t planning to use it. He kept moving closer, and Mortas was able to make out the straps of his combat harness just before he turned and started back.
Go. Go. Go. They’re counting on you.
Amazed by his own motion, Mortas came to his feet and took an uncertain step forward. The guard was already walking away, and the sight of his retreating back aroused an animal response in the human sneaking up on him.
Attack reflex. Just like they warned us when they talked about retreating. The sight of another animal’s back, in flight or not, caused predators to immediately give chase. Sign of weakness. Vulnerability. Bloodlust. Hunger. Rage.
Eyes. Eyes. EYES. No no no no EYES!
He couldn’t believe that the Sim had turned around. Looking absurdly human, the guard’s mouth opened wide in consternation. There were barely two strides between them, but to Mortas he seemed impossibly distant. They both looked down at the weapon in the Sim’s hands, and then they both moved.
The Sim reached across, dragging some kind of lever back, maybe loading the weapon, maybe taking the safety off. Mortas, fueled by that most primal terror, the fear of death, lunged forward with the knife held straight out.
It felt like he’d stabbed a tree. The blade stopped with a jolt, and pain shot through his elbow and into his shoulder. Mortas’s mouth opened in an O shape, and his eyes followed suit just after that. The knife had gone straight through the Sim’s throat, lodging in bone on the other side, and the enemy soldier merely stood there, a revolting vibration starting to pass through his entire body. His arms left the gun, sagging to his sides, but his body kept trembling. His feet began an angry stamping on the ground, and despite his horror Mortas tackled him to make it stop.
It was only after he’d taken the dead enemy to the ground, and after the ugly convulsions had finally ended, that he saw that his shirt front was covered in a warm, wet liquid that had to be blood.
He dragged the body across the road and into the grass, feeling like a child trying to hide the evidence of having broken a major rule. His hands were shaking when he went through the pouches on the guard’s combat harness, residual adrenaline pounding through him. His mouth had dried completely, and so he took the dead enemy’s canteen and sniffed at its contents. Sims drank water the same way humans did, but that was no guarantee that this was water. It had no odor, and so he drank from it hungrily.
After that he moved like a robot. He cleaned Cranther’s knife on the Sim’s uniform and returned it to its scabbard. Then he scrubbed at the already-drying blood on his blouse with handfuls of dirt, repelled by the cloying substance. With that done, he took the guard’s weapon and moved away from the corpse, telling himself he needed to be able to cover the bridge even though the gun’s range was far too short for that.
Mortas was disappointed not to see the others coming right away, but then reconsidered. They would wait a while to make sure the walking guard wasn’t coming back, and then make their move. Ruminating on that, he now saw what a flimsy plan they’d devised. How many times had the walking guard disappeared and then returned while he’d been crossing under the bridge? What if the Sim had decided to take a break of his own, on this side of the water and out of sight, before Mortas had gotten into position? Cranther might have been running down the length of the bridge toward the seated guard at its center just as the walking guard reappeared.
To make matters worse, Mortas now saw another wrinkle that they hadn’t addressed. If the mover came back in the next few minutes, what was he going to do? Fire at it with this unfamiliar weapon? Do nothing, and watch the others come hustling over the bridge right into the enemy’s arms? The ramifications were made all the more frightening by what he’d just seen and done, and Mortas shuddered at the very thought.
He looked down the road in the direction the mover had gone, but the darkness closed in only a short distance out. There was no way to tell if he’d be able to see the approaching headlights far off, or if they’d be right on top of him. The mover’s engine had been nearly silent from across the river, but hopefully it would make more noise at close range. He tried to listen, but only heard the rustling of the water and began to wish very strongly for the sound of three sets of boots crossing the bridge.
The adrenaline was wearing off, as was the shock of having killed for the first time, and a heavy lethargy began spreading across his limbs and his mind. He’d done what the others had needed him to do, the hard part for him was over, and if Cranther would just get a move on, they could get away from this cursed place. The image of the four of them walking up the next ridge seemed very peaceful, and he yawned as he considered it.
It would be so nice to be back out in the boondocks, away from everything. Away from here . . .
He came to rest in the room where he’d lived as an upperclassman at his pr
ep school. A top-floor round tower, bigger than the other rooms with curved windows looking out on an ancient chestnut tree and the rolling fields of the school. A worn rug in the center of the room, beds, bookcases, and desks, and even a blocked-up fireplace where he and his roommate had liked to hide various contraband items.
It was night outside, and Mortas recognized the scene even though somewhere in his subconscious he knew he was dreaming. It was the night they’d announced that his father had been elevated to Chairman of the Emergency Senate, and he’d left the dining hall early to avoid the well-wishers. A dark-haired boy, a recent transfer named Emile Dassa, had followed him even though they didn’t know each other. Mortas had feared it was yet another attempt to congratulate him, but he’d been wrong.
So far the dream was the same as the reality, or at least his sleeping brain said it was. Emile’s hair hung past his ears, unusual for the school, and his dark eyes had blazed with something close to fanaticism.
“Your dad finally made the leap to the very top. Only took murdering the president, his entire cabinet, and a few dozen Force officers, too . . . unless you count everybody who’s died in the war since then.”
He’d felt an urge to throw the smaller boy out, perhaps even toss him down the stairs, but an old curiosity had prevented him from doing that. “What would you know about it? I was ten when that happened, so what would you have been? Eight?”
“Did Daddy tell you what he told everybody else? That the president and his crowd had to die because they wanted to radiate all the Hab planets between us and the Sims?”
The story at the time of the coup was that the president had ordered the Human Defense Force to render a large number of Hab planets unlivable, creating a kind of astral firebreak that would divert the Sims from the human-occupied planets. It was hard to know what was true and what wasn’t because the plan’s alleged authors were all dead, but they’d reputedly dubbed it the “Head ’em Off” plan. His father and the new Emergency Senate had ridiculed it as the “Head in the Sand Plan” just before presenting their own “Head On” strategy to the public. Head On had committed all of mankind to battling the Sims for every Hab planet, no matter where they were found, until the Sim home world could be located and destroyed.
“He didn’t tell me anything. Like I said, I was ten.” Mortas had given that response so many times over the years that it came out as a reflex, even in his dream. The sad truth was that he’d gotten the same explanation as the rest of humanity, right from his father’s mouth, and that he distrusted the man so completely that he’d automatically dismissed the explanation. For a time, he’d believed he and his sister Ayliss were the only people outside the Emergency Senate who even suspected the story was a lie.
“And you never asked? Never wondered about those dirty rumors? You know, the ones about a whole bunch of generals and colonels dying in combat right around the time the president was getting the chop, even though half of them weren’t anywhere near the war zones?”
“Did you say rumor? There’s a rumor about your sister too, Dassa. Should I believe that as well?”
“I don’t have a sister. And I’m not going to get one, not now anyway. My dad was an aide to one of those generals, but he was on leave when the Purge happened. Somehow they missed him, but they remembered him a year ago.”
The dream shifted from reality at this point. In reality Mortas had jumped up, fearing the boy meant to attack him in some twisted act of revenge. He’d whipped Dassa soundly, beating him straight into the old rug before throwing him down the stairs. Emile Dassa had disappeared from the school infirmary that very night, and Mortas had never summoned the courage to ask what had happened to him. But here, in the dream, he stayed in his chair and kept on talking with the other boy, saying things he’d never said in real life.
“They killed those generals and colonels because they were going to carry out the president’s orders and wreck a hundred habitable worlds. Which means your dad was working for a fool. Any idiot could see that plan wasn’t going to hold off the Sims.”
“Still don’t get it, do you? There never was a ‘Head ’em Off’ plan. There was just a bunch of really frightened politicians who knew what we were actually up against out there, who were going to tell everyone that the Sims aren’t the real enemy. That they’re a front, just a great big clever smokescreen. That we don’t stand a chance against whatever’s backing them. And that would have ended the war.”
Emile dissolved into a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman in the uniform of the Veterans Auxiliary, the organization that handled everything from rehabilitation to retirement for the Forcemembers returned from the war. Mortas’s sleeping mind wondered how his sister Ayliss could be at the prep school of his teen years when she’d only recently joined the Auxiliary, but her character picked up the thread where Emile had left off.
“Some people see the war as a struggle for survival, but some others see it as a struggle for power. And I don’t mean power over the Sims. I mean power over humanity. That’s why Father and his friends killed the president and his cabinet and all those senior officers. It was so they could take charge and get everyone in line behind them.
“And it all seemed to work for a time, everybody bought the cover story, and the war zones are so far away that nobody can ever really know what’s going on out there. How the Sims keep developing these new tricks that should be beyond them. How no matter what we do, we can’t even analyze what makes up their food. Or understand why they die in captivity, or why they can’t reproduce.”
“Where are you getting all this?” His voice was exasperated, and he remembered the line from an argument they’d had when he’d announced his plan to accept a commission and go to the war. Very few of his privileged classmates were doing that, even the ones who’d trained for it right beside him, and it would have been the simplest thing for him to avoid. He was, after all, the son of Olech Mortas.
“Why do you think I let them put me in the Auxiliary?” The uniform switched to a dark business suit, and the dreaming Mortas remarked to his subconscious that this was more like it because Ayliss almost never wore the Auxiliary outfit. “It’s given me the run of the records database, and now I can talk to anyone I want. Even the veterans they committed to lockdown facilities because they wouldn’t keep quiet.”
“About what?”
“About the Purge. About the war. About the enemy. Even about Father.”
“You’re just like him, you know that? As much as you fight him, it’s not because you hate him. It’s because you want to play the game. His game. Sneak around in the shadows, find the weak spot, and squeeze. Well fuck that. When somebody’s my enemy, they know it. I go straight at them and whatever happens happens. That’s why I want to go.”
Ayliss had laughed, quietly, that maddening way she had of telling him he was being ignorant. “You must know that some of Command’s most senior officers murdered their superiors in the Purge, right? And that nobody in Command, whether they helped out in the Purge or not, trusts Father and his cronies at all? That’s who you’re going to be working for out there. Either the commanders who didn’t know what Father and his friends were up to, or the backstabbers who helped them. Nobody knows who they can trust out there, and you know what the vets tell me? That’s why we’re losing.”
The dream changed without explanation, shifting to a wide field of grass and sand. A mock-up of an enemy strongpoint stood in the center of the open space, with metal and wire obstacles arranged around it. Smoke was still in the air, and a disordered gang of lieutenants was seated in front of him. Their faces were streaked with sweat, and everything from their uniforms to their weapons was caked with sand. The sun was high and hot overhead, but he wasn’t paying attention to it.
A taller, older man in a camouflage uniform was standing in front of him, shouting. He was one of the veterans in the training cadre, an NCO who took his j
ob very seriously. The sergeant’s face was close to his own, and he was clearly disappointed with whatever had happened in the last exercise. In the dream Mortas knew that he’d been in charge of this iteration, but he couldn’t remember what he’d done wrong.
“You’re why we’re not winning this war, Lieutenant! You came out here with your head up your ass, unprepared and don’t care, and you couldn’t take out a lone enemy emplacement! What were you thinking, Lieutenant? You got half your platoon killed and the Sims are still in that bunker, eating that crap they call food and laughing at you! Are you hearing me, Lieutenant? Lieutenant? Lieutenant!”
“Lieutenant. Lieutenant.” The voice was quiet, but insistent. A woman’s voice. His eyes opened to Trent’s face just a few inches above him, almost a replay of their first meeting, but this time he smiled at her. She was kneeling next to him, holding his arms with both hands where she’d been shaking him awake.
“How long was I out?” He muttered, sitting up as if in a daze. Gorman knelt in the weeds nearby, looking at something with terrible concentration. It took another long moment for Mortas to realize it was the dead Sim.
“No idea. Felt like forever, waiting for that one guard to stop coming back, and even after that Cranther waited and waited.” The tension in the woman’s voice conveyed the strain the other must have felt.
“Not right.” Gorman spoke under his breath. “Not right.”
Mortas pushed himself up into a sitting position, seeing that Trent and Gorman were carrying all twelve of the group’s water tubes. He stood up slowly, becoming aware that the Sim’s weapon was gone. Wobbling on the uneven ground, he looked down at the spot where he’d dragged the dead enemy. Gorman was staring at Cranther as the scout methodically searched the dark corpse, still murmuring that something wasn’t right.
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