I wander in their general direction, feigning indifference, sitting on the edge of an impressive looking chunk of old stone. The headpiece long gone, snapped off in a crooked line down near the overgrown grass. I flick the safety on my ACR and take out some gedunk, a few bars of protein and nuts or something. Don’t know why I’ve got them, I don’t even eat them. As I’m unwrapping the food, the children emerge fully from their hiding, their eyes on the bar in my hand.
“Who threw the rock at me?” I ask of no-one in particular. No response; won’t snitch each other in. Especially not to the likes of me, I imagine: a bule riding roughshod over their land. I’m not stupid. I don’t have any disillusionment about the role I’m playing in this war. “You’ve got good aim.”
One of the little bastards almost smiles, but retains his scowl instead. He’s probably about seven years old. I don’t know. Hard to tell. I throw him the bar of gedunk, and he catches it with hungry precision, fending off several of other children as he devours his prize.
There must be about a dozen of the kids. They’re all filthy, wearing worn out clothes. Nothing but rags, really. I’m guessing they’re street kids. Orphans, maybe. Could be runaways. Who knows? The war here was going on a lot longer before PANPAC-NATO got involved. These kids could’ve been born on the streets, for all I could know.
“Got any more?” A girl, about ten maybe? Definitely older than my assailant.
“Sorry,” I put my hands up. “All out.”
“Liar,” she says, eyeing the bulging pockets of my cargos.
“Sorry, kid, you should’ve been the first with the rock.”
“We could roll you,” she says, firmly but without the threat to back it up.
I chuckle, and she slaps one of the other kids about the ear when he stumbles into her from fighting with the prize-winner, who has now completely downed the gedunk and is looking well satisfied with himself.
I’m not in the least surprised by their command of the English language. By now, you’d be hard-pressed to find any part of the world that hasn’t adopted it in some form or another. But the accents on these children are strong. Indo accents, maybe something else in there, too. These aren’t the orphaned children of the middle-classes.
“You kids live around here?” I ask.
“Here,” says a tiny one. I don’t know if the child is answering or parroting me. The older girl shushes the child and pushes it away.
“Here?” I ask, slightly surprised. “You mean you live in the cemetery?”
The girl’s eyes bristle with indignation. Her chest puffs out and her small chin sets itself resolutely against me.
“Hey,” I say, raising my hands in surrender. “Just asking. No harm in asking.”
“What your name?” asks another boy who is lean and looks like starvation has corralled him into death’s threshold. He only has to step through the door now. I hope its starvation, and not some airborne disease, like those ones cooked up in labs a couple of decades ago that wiped out the east coast of the States. Fucking disaster that was.
“Callan.”
The children roll my name around, sounding it out. It sounds alien when they pronounce it. They make it sound like it is being sung. I prefer it, actually.
I ask for their names in return. Idle chit-chat. It’s a good distraction from the job.
The older girl is Ardiyanti. She doesn’t know what it means, when I ask, but I guess it’s probably fire or something like that. It has to be. The origin of names is a long forgotten thing, especially for these children. Just another unaccommodated luxury.
The boy who threw the rock at me, the deft catcher of gedunk, is Cumi. He wears a frown like it’s the only expression he knows. There’s also Gerni and Citro (Cumi’s little brother) and the tiny one, Kepapaan. The rest I immediately forget.
I take out another protein bar and break it up for all to share, even Cumi the little rat. He takes his piece and goes and shares it with a small girl, and they begin pounding some old bones with a rock, reducing the frail things to powder in no time. Cumi helps her spread the powder over her arms and her face. It makes her look like a little ghost.
“Why don’t you kids move further on, away from the battle?” I say. “Away from us?”
But they won’t have it.
“We ready for anything,” says Ardiyanti.
She sounds convincing. Doesn’t look it, though, with her skinny arms and her big sad eyes that reveal a bruised soul.
As if to persuade me, Gerni has slipped in behind a tombstone, and re-emerges carrying a heavy-ass assault rifle in her skinny little arms. She struggles with it.
I raise my eyebrows and nod in appreciation.
Cumi chastises the girl for revealing their secret, but she glowers at him as though she’s considering using it on him.
“One gun a war won’t win,” I tell the children, and incongruously think of the old rhyme: this one's for fighting, this one's for fun. No, but one gun can certainly start them.
“I have one,” Kepapaan squeaks.
I push off my resting spot for a better look at their hidey hole.
Immediately their faces register alarm, but they offer no resistance.
Behind the tombstone from where Gerni produced her rifle lies a cache of weapons. Mostly old SS3’s, some standard adaptive combat rifles (much older than mine, which has an integrated Precision Effects system and MAPS kit) and an assortment of other, less impressive weapons. I ask them how they came by them, but I already know the answer.
“We trade,” says Cumi flatly. He’s eyeing my own weapon, but I’m giving him a look back that says forget it, kid. I can guess what these street kids trade in when they own nothing but the clothes on their backs, and I don’t want anything to do with it.
“May I?” I ask Ardiyanti, pointing at the stockpile. She nods. It’s obvious I wouldn’t steal from them with what I’ve got slung on me.
I check out their SS3’s. They’re in surprisingly good nick. I was expecting bits to be missing, the hard plastics brittle or worn down.
Ardiyanti looks at me sideways, her chin tilted and a smirk on her little cupid’s bow lips. “We don’t need no-one help,” she declares. “We going to kill them ourself.”
“An entire groundswell of terrorists, you mean?” I say. “You and these kids can handle that, eh? Then repair a pipeline?”
She springs up suddenly, leaping onto a crooked tombstone in front of me. She stands victoriously, her hands on her hips.
“And when we finished them, you lot are next! Even your kind!” she crows, and the other kids whoop and hooah in solidarity.
I can’t help but grin. I can almost imagine it: these skinny, undernourished little children that live in a cemetery taking back their own city from impossible forces. It’s a quaint dream.
“You gonna need this when we do,” Ardiyanti snorts, and throws a stick at me. It bounces off me and lands on my boot. I see that it’s not a stick, but an arrow. Hand hewn from a human femur bone.
“Did you make this?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “We use them before the gun. Still use, sometime.”
“Cute,” I say, pocketing the souvenir.
She rankles at my summary of her talents. Cute doesn’t cut it, apparently.
Cumi’s little brother tries to trip Ardiyanti off her perch with a quick hook of his foot, but she does a little jump and leaps at him, wrestling him to the ground and holding his face in the dirt. He’s laughing and the spittle is making mud around his mouth.
Whatever they might think of themselves, they’re still kids and prone to playfulness.
There’s a flash in the sky, the clouds lighting up from behind. They glow bright blue for a moment.
We’re all looking up, in silence. A couple of moments pass, and then we hear a low rumble.
Stellum Corps doing their thing, engaging hostiles just outside our atmos. It makes me jittery, thinking of those battles up there, so expansive compared to ours down here.
But I should never undermine what we do on the ground.
“I should get going,” I say to the children. “Got OP evolution. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
They’re scuffing their feet, swinging their arms, pulling random faces at me or at each other. Kid stuff, you know? Put a gun in their hand, they’ll act five times their age. Tell them you’re leaving, it’s all awkward child stuff. I like them. They look like such a scruffy bunch, so helpless, but they’re not. They must be looking out for each other to have survived out here this long.
They just want their city back, and they’re prepared to fight for it.
I’ll see what I can do to help speed that up for them.
* * *
I’m on OP4 and Westerling’s got two other squads ready for patrol. He’s sending them ahead for a mounted IED sweep and one back for a dismounted patrol. At first light, Meyer’s squad will go ahead and Westerling’s counterinsurgency platoon will flank our rear and deal with any problems that flare up.
I need to hit the head, and so I unclasp the front of my uniform and piss off my post, which is an old concrete pillar, some kind of relic for a monorail the Government never delivered. I take aim and get one of Westerling’s guys, a real Pretty Ricky. It splashes off his helmet, dark and greasy looking.
He’s going nuts, threatening to climb up here and throttle my biosensor-system from my head. My laughter is sending him insane.
“What the fuck is wrong him?” Pretty Ricky snarls at my squad. “Get him checked out before he goes haywire and kills us all!”
Walling grins, and Roisin shrugs.
Pretty Ricky’s squad tell him to leave it, adding that I’ll get mine soon enough.
What’s he whinging for? Most of us already smell of piss – our own or others’ – from having laid in it during battle. With this humidity he’ll sweat so much it’ll be like washing his uniform, anyway.
I see movement down behind me, and it’s the kids, those cheeky little monkeys. They’re covered in bone ash, practically naked but for their threadbare shorts, and they’ve crawled across the seared earth and are rummaging as quietly as they can through COIN platoon’s gear, ganking food and even some pistols and knives.
I grin. So much for being on the fucking ball, guys.
The kids steal away back into the cover of the palm trees at the cemetery’s entrance. I can almost hear their excited chatter over the stolen booty. The COIN are none the fucking wiser.
Suddenly, Westerling’s patrols drop and roll, firing into no-man’s land. There’s return fire, but the platoon pushes the small group of hostiles back towards our main objective. They’ve got them on the run, it seems. It never lasts long, not when it’s these small starter-cells. But insurgents are tenacious rats, and they’ll hold their ground again before long.
I can see the cemetery children, led by Ardiyanti, their impossibly small bodies loaded up with their vintage weapons, skirting the perimeters of no-man’s land. I hope they give those rebels hell.
“What’s the dope?” Walling calls out to me.
I check for a PID but I’ve got no info for him. It’s just a bank of smoke and dust that Westerling’s guys head into. I can’t see shit.
“Dilligaf,” I call back to him.
He rubs his scalp and stares across the wasteland. There’s nothing we can do, and he knows it. We could use thermal but it’s sketchy. Sit it out and see what happens. And just as well. Westerling’s guys come back, say that they pushed the cell back towards Kota Asli. One of them is carrying a dismembered arm from the enemy, and he curls its fingers and stretches out the thumb and holds the thing in the air to give us the thumbs up. Blood leaks out of the stump and down his uniform, but he doesn’t even notice.
We wait it out a bit longer and then it starts up again. Good old red on red action.
Our hostiles from earlier have evidently encountered the insurgent stronghold at the heart of Kota Asli. We can hear the tête-à-tête carry on for an hour or so until it peters out. The stronghold should be a little weaker now, for the effort. All the better for when we finally break through.
I climb down from my perch, am replaced by Karman, and grab a cloth to wipe the grime away from my forehead and neck. I kinda wish it would just pummel down rain, but there hasn’t been any rain in these parts for years. Probably not since before I was born, even.
Gunnar’s giving me the eye, staring hard. Fancies himself a Captain Jack. I’m not in the mood for this. What does that prick want?
Captain Westerling has taken the dismembered arm away from his men, and he’s got it piked and roasting over a flame. I’m not sure I’m seeing this right, and his men are crowded around him and a few are glaring at me as I pass by. There’s a bad vibe going on there, a dangerous mob mentality. Fuck it. Let them eat the bloody arm, if they’re that desperate for fresh meat.
Roisin’s fast asleep against the wheel of an APC, and I tuck in beside him and lower my bowler over my eyes, just enough to block out the light above the EIO but not enough that I can’t see Gunnar. He’s looking edgy, but I don’t why. Maybe it’s Westerling and his bloody carnivores? Maybe he’s yearning for that cooked flesh himself?
“Where the fuck is my gear?” It’s one of Westerling’s platoon. He’s noticed his missing rifle and grenade launcher. Now a couple more guys have taken up the same complaint. They’re looking at our squad, probably convinced it’s a practical joke. It’s going to be a long night.
Beyond the commotion of the missing weapons, I become aware of something else. I cock my head, and I’m looking at Gunnar, and he’s looking back at me, meaningfully, and he starts to nod. I look over to Westerling and his hounds, but they’re too engrossed in their clamour. The rest of my squad has noticed, though, and they’re all looking across no-man’s land towards the centre of Kota Asli.
Its dead quiet over there.
Gunnar stands up and casually saunters past the rest of the guys, going out and standing beyond the perimeter of camp. Just stands there, feet apart, his rifle ready, and watches the horizon. The buildings there are dark and silent. They look haunted, flanked as they are by chemical vapours and trails of smoke, their windows hollow and lifeless. There’s probably a dozen of them visible from here, receding into the smog and smoke. Its eerie thinking about how they were once occupied, brimming to capacity with life day and night, street vendors hawking all manner of goods and eats.
Some of Westerling’s guys have clocked us, and also noticed how quiet the metropolis has become. Unease is starting to spread throughout the COIN. They’re readying their weapons.
Walling turns to Corporal Meyer.
“Ready the rail?”
The Corporal just nods, and Walling kicks Roisin awake and tells him to help get it fired up.
“Can’t be more of them,” I say to the Corporal.
He’s not convinced, either. He looks at the sky, to the brooding clouds up there. They throb with a dull light, evidence of the battle beyond Earth’s borders.
“We haven’t seen anything come down,” I note.
“I know, right,” Meyer says. “And they’re Jellies up there, apparently. They’ve never entered our atmos without riding one of our own. It’s their way.”
“We have too much oxygen for a Jelly, anyway,” says Kernan, and I just look at her like she’s fucking stupid.
Roison says he’s got a cold sensation along his back, like frost he says. Weird feeling to have in this smothering heat.
Damn this heat. As our planet got closer to the sun, it got more likely for something like those bastards above to survive it. I had a mate say he reckons there’s intel that says those things have developed some kind of osmosis for core temperatures of planets. There’s nothing on Earth that can even do that!
Meyer sees my trepidation.
“Nothing got through,” he says. “Understand? We’d have seen it.”
Westerling’s goat-roping his men to scout the horizon, and he himself is checking the sky.
“CFB,” he says to Meyer.
It seems everyone would prefer if the gunfire returned to Kota Asli. The silence has got everyone spooked now.
Suddenly, our equipment starts acting up. Now everyone’s yelling. The EIO microgrid starts to struggle, our lights dimming. Scanners have frozen and our systems’ readings don’t add up.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” hisses Karman up on his post.
I hear the railgun generating. It gives me a cunt’s hair of comfort, but if it’s Jellies then it won’t matter much. I’ve heard they’re almost impervious to the electromagnetic pulse. Something about their anatomy, made up of polysilanes or something. We’re just not equipped on the ground to fight them.
“They can’t be down here,” Laessig is saying. “When the fuck did they come down?”
There’s a burst of fire in the sky, up behind those pregnant clouds, and an orange blaze crackles in their roiling depths, growing brighter. The boom of an explosion now, sounding hollow and faint, and then the clouds swell and burst and from them emerges the nose of a ship. One of Earth’s own. The fiery haze comes with it, engulfing all one side of the vessel. Now the sound of screaming metal and straining engines reaches us, and the din is enough to make the hairs on Meyer’s arms stand up.
I saw a video file once of an airship from a couple of centuries ago bursting into flames and crashing to the ground. The scene before me puts me in mind of it.
The sky lights up from the fire, exposing all, shadows stretching and falling as the calamity above races across the sky. It’s an unreal moment, seeing into the neighbourhoods between buildings where only a minute ago gloom and dust made it impossible to see much of anything. It’s not like the polaroid bursts of illumination from gunfire, punching holes in the darkness. This is a prolonged exposure, an aching revelation of the destruction all around us. Seeing it on this massive and damaged tableau is mildly terrifying. I want the gloom and impenetrable dust back.
The Cemetery Children Page 2