by Joel Dane
I’d grown taller and stronger, but she burned with intensity. Our blood painted the walls and our tears soaked the carpets. Our drugged laughter echoed in the stairwells. We took an entire floor of the tower before my world fell apart.
With a whimper, not a bang. All it took was an idle search of MYRAGE late one night.
Ionesca found me sitting in our bed, staring at nothing. When she cradled me in her arms, her gentleness surprised me. She’d grown harder over the years.
“It’s the kid,” I finally said.
She knew who I meant: Sergeant Najafi’s orphaned son, whose hairstyle I’d stolen as a child in the alleys of Vila Vela. She knew I checked on him every few months, monitoring his life from six thousand miles away. She thought I was punishing myself, but I didn’t see how that mattered. I deserved punishment.
“That ‘kid’ is five years older than you are,” Io reminded me.
“Five weeks ago he published his—” My throat tightened. “His public petition for end-of-life counseling.”
“He killed himself?”
“Yesterday. In the petition he said . . .” I took a breath. “The world kept making promises it couldn’t keep. Like his mother, saying she’d come back home.”
“I’m sorry, baby,” she murmured, rocking me slowly. “Shhh, shhh . . .”
Io knew my real name, my real history. She knew that part of me was still trapped in Vila Vela and that my debts weighed heavier on me every day I remained a civilian. I needed to honor the betrayed dead; I’d known that for years. There was no other future for me, no matter how much I cared for her. Yet for years I’d let the sun set on my hesitation. Until now, until this.
“If only I’d looked sooner, if only I’d known!” My tears turned to shuddering breaths. “I need to make this right.”
She touched my cheek. “You can’t, Maseo.”
“I know. Still, I need to try.” I took a deeper breath. “I’m going to enlist.”
“With your background? They won’t take you.”
I closed my eyes and rocked in her arms.
“Still,” she said. “You need to try.”
CHAPTER 42
The next morning, Sergeant Manager Li sends us to tech support for updated lenses. When we return, she walks us through a graduation ceremony. We’re officially finished with Anvil Month. During the long months of basic training, I’d envisioned a sloppy, drugged celebration, but this is as raucous as a sanitation run.
“What about our assignments?” Calil-Du asks.
“You’re assigned to JVLN,” Li says. “The entire squad.”
“Yeah, but I mean . . .” Cali shrugs. “After that? Once we trap a lamprey and send the eggheads a sample or whatever. Like if I want to join the marines?”
“Javelin will help.”
“Er . . .” Pico scratches his bull-like neck. “You said the entire squad, Sarge? Including you?”
“I’m here till the end.”
“More fodder for the lampreys,” Ridehorse says.
“Lampreys are not officially recognized by any corporation,” Li tells her. “And yes. Exactly.”
Her flat acceptance of the situation is calming, like she’s left cynicism behind and embraced fatalism. There’s nothing lazy about her fatalism, though. Our job is to kill things—maybe patriots, maybe remorts, maybe inscrutable slime-monsters—and she is lax about everything except that. We drill in paleo, postpulse environments, because lampreys interfere with signals. We’re assigned modified Boazes, loaded with cans containing bright green glowing rounds: brane cans.
Sergeant Manager Li breaks our squad into two fire teams of four and one of three, with Pico rotating among the teams as Project Assistant. She chooses Voorhivey and Ridehorse and Ting as team leaders, except Basdaq handles Ting’s entire portfolio other than the tech stuff.
And she interrupts my evening laps for a private conversation.
“Your squad is surprisingly well informed,” Li says, after I climb from the pool.
I stand there dripping, listening to the splash of water behind me.
“It’s a good group,” she continues. “Better than I’ve any right to expect. There’s only one person who concerns me.”
“Calil-Du’s not so bad,” I say.
Li frowns faintly. “Perhaps concerns is too strong. You’re from the gutter blocks, Private Kaytu. By way of Vila Vela and a refugee camp.”
“By way of a CAV,” I tell her.
She looks toward the pool. “I married young. One husband and one wife, and we’re still together after eighteen years and two kids.”
“Congratulations?”
“They’re halfway across the world right now.”
“I guess you miss them.”
“Like flavorant,” she says, with a faint smile. “But I’m here to do a job, even if that means tickling a lamprey with a shell-gun. How far would you go to save your squad?”
I run my fingers through my wet hair. “Far.”
“What you didn’t learn in the gutter, Kaytu, what nobody ever taught you, is the hardest lesson. The toughest thing in the world isn’t saving someone. It’s not saving them.”
She’s been reviewing my file, my failures to sacrifice the squad.
“You’re talking about my reprimands,” I say.
“There’s a note in your file that says we need to test you again. To check if you learned your lessons, if you’re able to put the mission first. Do I need to test you again?”
“Oh,” I say. “No. No.”
“Would you rather have the test or a second reprimand?”
Nothing scares me more than that test. I’m not confident I can pass. Still, I’m not such a fool that I’ll admit the truth, so I say, “The test, san.”
“That’s too bad,” she tells me, and another reprimand pops onto my lens. “I’m giving you a reprimand instead. I want you in this fight. I need you in this squad. I can’t lose you to some test. But Kaytu?”
I gulp, looking at the two reprimands. “Yes, Sarge?”
“There’s only one soldier who concerns me.”
Is she afraid that I wouldn’t sacrifice my squad to secure a lamprey? Does she think I’d betray everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve done? I don’t say anything, because I’m afraid she’s right. I’d throw myself off a roof to save my squad—but would I throw them off a roof to save an enclave? I don’t know.
She rests a hand on my forearm. “This is a battle worth fighting, Kaytu, and there’s only one question. Are you a patriot or are you a soldier?”
I don’t know. I’m not sure what I am. A patriot fights for family and home, for pride and revenge. A soldier fights for the corporation, for humanity, for the world. I know which is better. Sayti fought for her enclave and her family, and turned herself into a war criminal. She turned me into one, too. I want to be a soldier. That’s all I’ve wanted since I left the refugee camp. Not just in a hopeless attempt to repay Tokomak Squad for my betrayal, either. I want to fight for the future, to rebuild the planet and repair my past. Except what if I’m still a patriot in my bones?
I’m in a gloomy mood that evening in bed.
Kaytu, Maseo
The reprimands glimmer on my lens like my suspicion that I don’t belong here. That I’m nothing more than a street-corner insurgent with a grudge. Yet they still don’t bother me as much as Sergeant Manager Li’s doubts.
She knows me. She’s sharp, she’s fair, and she doesn’t trust me. She doesn’t know if—
“Hi!” Ting lenses me.
I glower at the ceiling. “What do you think it means, Ting, when I flag myself private?”
“That nobody should bother you except me! I don’t have a link with Rana yet, but I unlocked your messages! Enjoy!”
When I try the message, Rana’s recorded face appear
s. She doesn’t look shockingly beautiful to me anymore. She just looks like Rana, and that’s better than beauty.
“How’s Anvil treating you?” she asks, her toneless voice a balm. “Word is that the platoon saw action in Los Anod? You lucky splices. My fucking father . . .” She trails off. “There’s nothing here but classes, classes, and more classes.” She sounds solemn until the image widens to reveal that she’s floating weightless in a spherical chamber. Her sudden smile is blinding. “In micro-gravity! Vector plasma’s a pain in the ass, but check this out . . .”
She’s wearing Flenser gear and officer’s cuffs. She looks sleek and controlled and I’m struck by a surge of pride. It’s stupid, a cockroach taking pride in a falcon, but there it is, stuck in my eyes and my throat and my heart.
“I miss the sweat and the stink of you, though—of basic. Message me, Maseo. You and I . . .” Rana hesitates. “We’re not done.”
A stupid smile spreads on my face. Fuck reprimands. Fuck Sergeant Manager Li. Rana knows me too, and she trusts me.
“If I score high enough,” she says, “they’ll let me serve a tour with you groundhogs before I come back to the stars.”
“No way,” I tell the recording.
“Stay alive till I get there, Mase. Keep them alive.”
She fades slowly away. I enjoy the afterglow for a minute, then flick to Ionesca’s message. She appears, a big girl with a brutal streak, an inch shorter than me and almost as broad in the shoulders. Her hair is ropy blue and her skin is the mottled black, white, orange of a tortoiseshell cat.
“I miss you, soldierboy, more than I expected.” She pauses, and I wonder if fractal patterns are blooming behind her eyes. “My folks were wrong. We can’t just drop everything and walk into the New Growth. We need time to adapt. I’ve been working on that, and praying.”
“Praying to what?” I ask the recording. “The New Growth?”
“You left here, you left me, because you were looking for something. Well, there’s an old saying my moms liked. ‘If you find what you’re looking for, you didn’t look hard enough.’”
After Ionesca vanishes in a swirl of leaves, I tell the blank screen, “You told me that a thousand times, and I still don’t know what it means.”
The other messages are automatically generated from the military channel, in response to my performance during basic. Typical. One department sends you messages and another doesn’t let you read them.
“Thanks, Ting,” I say to my empty room, and I’m halfway surprised that she doesn’t answer.
CHAPTER 43
The barrel of my Vespr rests against the top of a trash pallet in the combat gallery. My mouth is full of rebreather. I squeeze off two disarmed needles before my lens flashes the deployment alert.
My second shot strikes a sensor on Shakrabarti’s armored hip and the trill of my increased score clashes with the klaxons.
“Deployment!” Elfano announces from inside a paleo-meka that looks like a spider-turtle. “That’s us! We’re on deck.”
Ridehorse upslings her rampart gun. “We’re dead.”
“Not today,” Voorhivey tells her, and I’m struck by how much he’s changed. Sure, he’s still too eager and offensively fresh-faced, but his twitchy anxiety is now a hair-trigger readiness. “Today we’re catching a lamprey.”
“Right in the ass.” Cali straightens from throttling Jag and looks around with an odd, hopeful expression. “We’re gonna drop on it like an anvil.”
“Forget it,” Pico tells her.
“What?” she asks.
“We’re not going to start saying ‘drop on it like an anvil.’”
“I never said we would! Asshole.” She yanks Jag to her feet. “It’s a cool idea, though, right? Because we’re Anvil Squad.”
I emerge from the trash pallet, shedding filth. “Very cool.”
“Oh, well,” Shakrabarti says, rubbing his hip. “If orca and the roach agree . . .”
Voorhivey suggests that a battlecry might increase morale, and we follow our lenses into the designated hangar.
I stop for a heartbeat and stare at the CAVs lurking beneath deployment hatches. Alloy ribbons sway around central pods. The motion is almost hypnotic, like seaweed floating in a current. A scrap of memory tugs at me, or the echo of a dream. An owl in a hurricane? CAVs pairing with anyone who pours a tsunami into a drinking glass—
Pico slaps my ass to get me moving.
I strip off my practice skin and spray the stink away. Calil-Du tells me I smell as sweet as a fund manager’s crack and hip-checks me toward the quartermaster cart. I pull light armor and a customized Boaz V. Lampreys burn through heavy armor, so why weigh yourself down? And the Boaz Vs fire brane cans . . . which may or may not work in the field.
A transport hisses and rumbles in front of us, a medium-range Antarmadesha. The confidence on squad channel is low, but the eagerness is palpable. I don’t understand the contradiction, even though I feel the same.
“We got lucky,” Sergeant Manager Li says, as the squad straps each other into armor. “This is only the third fishing trip. The third deployment with L-tech bait.”
“What happened to the first two?” Voorhivey asks.
“Nothing. There wasn’t a nibble. We’re packing new-generation bait, though. DivCom is expecting results.”
“So we’re fucked?” Ridehorse says.
“Collectively and individually,” Li agrees, lensing approval for ammo distribution. Brane ammo: glowing cylinders the size of my thumb. “We’re going into a block of Belo City under the cover of an FFW.”
“Why undercover?” Ting asks. “Won’t people notice a big ugly lamprey killing everyone?”
“Because orders,” Li tells her. “And there is call for an FFW.”
Jag smacks M’bari on the head, indicating that his helmet is secure. “Belo City is Class C, isn’t it?”
“This is a Freehold block on the border.” Li checks squad and transport readiness. “Calil-Du, remind Pico what FFW means.”
On the green, we trot inside the transport, and we’re settling into our webbing before Cali answers. “Um. Four Floor War. The idea is that there’s different missions on different floors of the same tower and I can’t fucking believe I remembered that.”
Pico punches her armored shoulder with his armored fist. “You’re a database.”
“I am,” Cali says, proudly. “I’m a database. Ask me something else.”
“What are the four floors?” Li asks.
“Oh,” Cali says. “Um.”
“Military action . . .” Pico whispers.
“Military action on one floor!” Cali says. “Like, putting down a riot. Resource protection on another floor, if there’s anything worth protecting? Cultural stuff or noncombatants or whatever. And the fourth is, um, humanitarian aid?”
“That’s three,” Basdaq says.
“It’s four.”
“Military action, resource protection, aid.”
“Four is fuck you.”
“Peacekeeping,” Voorhivey says. “The fourth is peacekeeping.”
“Someone explain to Cali what peace means,” Shakrabarti says.
“Our target is Tower Seven of building R-12,” Sergeant Manager Li says, and visuals appear of an apartment block, giving us rotating views from every angle. “Floors seven through nine.”
“Deep in the gutter,” Ridehorse says.
“It’s nice on the outside, though,” Ting says. “Looks more enclave than Freehold.”
“Looks like trash,” Cali says.
Li gestures them quiet. “We’re deploying horizontally through emergency doors on the east side. Bay Platoon is taking floor nine, Gimmel is eight. We’re Dee Platoon, on floor seven. Alfa is rooftop with launchers and warheads.”
“Which floor are we getting, Sarge?” Cali asks.
“Seven,” Li repeats.
“No, I mean, of the Four Floor War stuff. Are we doing military action or peacekeeping or humanita—”
“Oh, orca,” Jag murmurs.
Shakrabarti laughs. “We’re not here for that, Cali, we’re here for lampreys.”
“Listen up,” Li says, soft as a whisper. “We will request that residents return to their apartment. We will affix time locks. We will secure the western ledge of the tower. That is all.”
“Waiting for a lamprey,” Voorhivey says.
Li taps her brane ammo. “To drop an anvil on it.”
“See?” Cali elbows Pico. “See?”
“What’s the plan for extraction?” Jagzenka asks. “There’s a squad on call for that?”
“Right behind us,” Li tells her. “Some shit-hot engineering unit. We’ll splat the lamprey into place, they’ll extract a sample. Job done. Confirm.”
“Confirm!”
“You’re loaded with enough standard cans to look ugly,” Li continues. “But looks can’t kill. Understand?”
“No,” Cali says.
“We’re rocking brane cans,” Ridehorse tells her. “Because we’re hunting lampreys, not people. We’re not prepped for a firefight.”
The Sergeant Manager nods. “So do not pick a fight with the locals, confirm.”
“Confirm!” we say.
M’bari eyes Li. “You said there is cause for FFW?”
“The locals are antsy,” she tells him. “There’s history here.”
“We’re history,” Ridehorse murmurs.
“That’s why we’ll walk softly,” Li says, ignoring Ridehorse’s reflexive gloominess. “We take the west ledge and wait for our target. That’s the extent of our orders, as far as public disclosure requires.”