Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  Davis’ nose itched. The chandelier was trembling, just barely; whomever Carter had given those rockets to was making good use of them.

  This morning, the reports had all been casualties. A temple on the edge of the city had fallen—they weren’t sure yet if that was an accident or if someone was trying to send a message to Cirrus Prime. A neighborhood too near to HQ for anybody’s comfort had been knocked to rubble, and another half-dozen houses lost to fire; it would have been more except for the rain. It was funny, probably, to have been saved by the damp; to have a hostile place be so waterlogged that danger couldn’t even survive long enough to reach you.

  There had been some attacks in the streets during the fire, which the local constables had reported briskly as people taking advantage of the chaos to steal whatever they could. “Desperate times,” the sergeant had said with a shrug.

  They hadn’t told him that all of those little altercations took place well away from the rubble and the fire, and nobody had touched the fallen temple except his own people grabbing souvenirs. Someone had tried to break in to a house in the center of town during the fire. Davis had sat back and looked out at the cobblestones of dead carp across the top of the pond, and wondered which of the factions they were fighting had killed six hundred of their own people as cover to break into a colonist’s house.

  It was a failure where blame hung suspended between military and state waiting to see who made the first mistake. All three of them knew it, and no one was willing to say; they’d been fighting for three hours because no one was willing to say.

  Madison was pacing now. “Well, according to Davis, Carter has been making plenty of friends. He knows where they are. We can end half this problem right there.”

  Davis sighed. “Cirrus Prime isn’t packed into one tidy mountain west of the desert any more, Madison. You blew out their last options there. They’ve scattered into the swamps.”

  Madison turned a withering look on him. “The swamps.”

  “He’s right.” Verrastro sat back. “We have so much surveillance pointed on that desert it looks like we’re filming tourism ads. There’s nothing.”

  “I thought they were protecting the mines.” Madison sounded almost disappointed in them.

  Verrastro waved a hand. “No point. Until the sanctions are lifted nobody can sell any of the copper even if they could sneak it out from under us. They were fighting to keep us off the land, not from getting the profits from the mine. They always knew those were going to Glorious.”

  Madison frowned. “Well, the swamps are impossible to get any decent recon in.”

  “Well, fuck me, Madison, that must have been just what they thought.”

  Before anybody could get enough air for another round of useless bellowing (putting three Colonels in a room with a problem was always going to end in an argument), catering knocked and rolled in a cart with food and coffee.

  It took him longer than it should have to recognize the stocky Private who was serving him, and when he did he was too excited to be subtle—he grabbed her wrist. She stiffened, but when he let go she held still. Without the cap her face was broad and open, the eyes wide-set and dark; she was a local, then.

  “I didn’t realize we’d recruited so many of you that we have Privates left over to scoop pond scum.”

  She blinked. “Sir.”

  It was such a flat reply it was insubordinate, somehow, like she was trying to make him feel foolish. He looked her over, slowly, to make it clear he disapproved. “So when you’re not on carp duty, you’re making my food?”

  She glanced to Verrastro like she was embarrassed, but she said, “No, sir. Evans is the cook at HQ. I’m delivering.” That had stolen his joke, so he had to settle for, “Well that’s small comfort. Dismissed,” and she had to hastily set up the rest of the coffee things on the sideboard as she left. Madison noticed and rolled his eyes, which gave Davis some satisfaction.

  He had a bad habit of feeling for people, wishing he could reach out to them. It was good to be reminded sometimes that this was the only type of government in which everyone found their level honestly. The reasons he put Carter into the field with so much autonomy were the same reasons this private was loading fish onto a truck. The Glorious Forces were a machine of merit; everyone was just as they should be.

  VERRASTRO CAME INTO his office halfway through the carp soldier’s work and sat down.

  “We should dispatch some soldiers to the mine with the locals,” she said quickly, like if she got it out before he could think about it he might agree.

  He didn’t bother looking over; the carp soldier had moved on from skimming the dead fish off the top to trying helplessly to shovel them into the truck, and it was doing him no end of good. The movement was hypnotic, and her failure very satisfying. “You’re joking.”

  “Listen, we can’t just keep—” she stopped, perhaps realizing that it wasn’t wise to suggest his methods might be failing. “Treating these people like bystanders,” she finished.

  “If they want the mine back, Colonel Verrastro, all they have to do is turn in whomever among them is working with Cirrus Prime and the Glorious Forces will be happy to negotiate an end to the sanctions.”

  “They don’t care about the sanctions, Colonel Davis.”

  “Cirrus Prime cares.”

  “Cirrus Prime wants the land,” Verrastro said. She sounded very tired. “They know the mine is dry, Davis.”

  He forced his face to stay calm. He counted a dozen fish scoops before he turned from the window. “What?”

  She raised her eyebrows slowly, punctuating herself like a joke. “They never cared about the mine. They wanted the overburden—the lake water—before the chemicals could get into it. That was the fight.”

  There was a flicker of satisfaction that they’d lost; the water was tainted and their fight had availed them nothing. But it couldn’t last in the face of so much that the state had been keeping from him.

  Feeling stupid, he said, “But the Forces sent us here to protect the copper.”

  “The Forces sent us here to prove a point about what happens when you revolt against the Glorious, Davis.”

  He sat back in his chair. If she was right, that point had given them the Republic, and the militia, and Cirrus, and Cirrus Prime, and now a damp office and a peeling house across the city and cold sour coffee and a bunch of Colonels jockeying for General and so many desperate locals they were scraping ponds for the hope of three meals a day, and seven thousand dead since Davis had landed in the dust-choking desert you couldn’t believe was only a hundred miles from this swamp, and not an ounce of copper to show for it.

  Out on the lawn, the carp soldier was scraping slime off her shovel with her knife. Davis envied her. She knew what she was meant to be doing; at some point, her duties ended.

  THE TREMORS HAD come close enough to the city that he met Carter at one of the safe houses; whatever group of these wretched people was shelling the other, Carter couldn’t afford to be seen by some spy cutting across the gardens or through the kitchens to report.

  It was a hovel at the edge of town, mud bricks and elevated chairs and a clean sluice grate in the middle of the room, cozy enough that Carter must have bargained off one of his own people, even if Davis thought it got more depressing by the second.

  Davis had been coughing and picking dirt clods from the soles of his boots for nearly ten minutes by the time Carter arrived, hat pulled low over his eyes to make him blend in with the locals. (Maybe it did; everyone here was a foot shorter than Carter, but no one ever seemed to look at him twice.)

  “I’m sure that when I told Colonels Madison and Verrastro two days ago that the weapons shaking them awake in their beds were not rockets we had given anyone, I was correct,” Davis said.

  After a second, Carter nodded—just the once. “Understood.”

  “Understood, or yes?”

  Carter had taken up a position near the door, hunched to avoid the ceiling; he never sat if
he could help it, but Davis hadn’t realized the depth of the habit.

  “Yes,” Carter said, and licked his teeth.

  “Good. Because if you were giving out presents without my permission, that would be treason.”

  “Sedition, sir.”

  “Usually the commanding officer gets to decide the charge in a court martial, Carter.” He took a breath. “Are any of your people living in The Dawn of the Sun Across the Mountains?”

  Carter didn’t move.

  “I ask because during the fire, someone broke into a house there. If that house belongs to one of your assets, they handled themselves so poorly that someone killed six hundred people to find out what they knew.”

  “Or it’s a rich house that—”

  “And if that house doesn’t belong to one of your assets, then whoever you sent to look into the people who live there killed six hundred strangers to cover a little breaking and entering.”

  “I’m not involved with that,” Carter said.

  It felt like it was too slow in coming, though it was hard to tell. Davis had had a headache since he’d read the police report; his stomach was sour from the maintenance reports and the request for more money to hire locals to help scrape out bodies.

  “Six hundred people, Carter. Families, in the middle of the night, in the center of the city, when we’re trying to push the fighting back toward the desert. Do you know how that looks?”

  Carter nodded, said not unkindly, “Bad for you.”

  It took Davis a moment to summon the wherewithal to even look Carter in the eye. If there had been any doubts in his mind that Carter had been part of this, they had evaporated. This was what happened when you gave people a long lead.

  Davis considered handling it. If he stood up and murdered Carter, no one would find the body for days. Davis could blame it on whatever wretches Carter had been courting for resistance and pardon Cirrus Prime. Cirrus Prime would know who the traitors were, and by the time the dust settled Cirrus Prime would assume they had a deal with the Glorious Forces. It would be easy to pick them off after that. If Carter really was a soldier, he’d be happy to die to end this war in weeks.

  Carter was looking at him, though—looking at him like he had seen. Davis took a breath. Another. Another.

  “You’re wrong,” Carter said quietly, “and you’re a coward.”

  Davis sat where he was until sundown, for safety.

  THEY WERE NEARLY late for the performance and Catherine had promised she’d be ready, so he let the driver pull up and sat back to wait the inevitable three minutes it always took Catherine to decide she was fit to be seen.

  It took her four, this time, and when she came out Davis swallowed a stab of disappointment. Her dress was deep blue and long everywhere, hem and sleeves and neck; not so much as a glimpse of her collarbones. She looked like a lump of ore.

  Behind her was the carp soldier, carrying a bundle in her arms.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Davis asked before he could get hold of himself, and he felt the bottom drop out of his throat at the look Catherine gave him. Then a fit of coughing overtook him, which was convenient—he could look away to close the window without looking at her.

  “I met her at the benefit,” she said slowly, like Davis was a child who didn’t understand why he was being scolded. “She was one of the wait staff. Colonel Verrastro introduced us. Her brother was hurt last week in that awful fire, and I told her I would help her if I could.”

  He had an image of that squat little soldier racing through the upstairs gallery of their house, shoving the ivory carvings into the sack she’d brought, but he knew better than to even joke about it. “Food,” he guessed instead.

  “I didn’t think we’d miss a loaf of bread and some redfruit.” Then after a beat, like an accusation, “She kept saying how generous it was of you.”

  He kept his eyes on the road until he felt her shift her attention out the window; the loss of her regard was like lifting a stone off his chest, and he could catch his breath long enough to think.

  Their house was in The Two Faint Stars First Touch These Hills, and around them the houses spread out among lawns and vines that were still bright and healthy, a long green tongue lolling toward the city center.

  “You’re right,” he said finally. “It looks good for the Forces that you’re helping those in need. I was concerned that showing favoritism to one soldier would cause some unrest in the ranks, but I’m sure you told her not to mention it to anyone.”

  It was perfect—an apology, twisted just enough to remind her that the stakes were always going to be higher for him.

  She was still looking out the window, where the green had given way to pale grey sidewalks and spindly little trees kept carefully off the ground in stone planters. It was barely raining, and the place was crowded. When he’d first arrived here he’d thought of it as a good sign, that people were getting on with things. Now it just made him nervous, and he looked from one face to another all the way to the concert hall.

  The gala performance was meant to benefit the Glorious Forces, but there was plenty of color to break up the pale blue of dress uniforms. Davis realized that some of the benefit must have been to civilians in letting them come. Good idea, he supposed, except that he was so fucking sick of civilians.

  Madison and his fourth wife were seated next to them, of course, and Davis nodded politely and tried to remember her name; he turned to Catherine for help, but she’d breezed past him to say hello to some of the lesser officers and even one or two of the local families, draped in purple and green and red and yellow. He bit the inside of his mouth.

  “Glad you could make it,” said Madison, somehow still too loud even in a hall of a thousand people. “Can you believe what they’re performing?”

  Davis glanced down at his program, but Sylvia was at his shoulder with a question about when he wanted the car brought back (Master of the Sky bless Sylvia, the only person he could remotely count on to save him from small talk in the abandonment of his wife), and by the time that was finished Catherine was coming back and taking her seat like nothing was wrong, and the lamps were being dimmed.

  It was an opera about the founding of the city. When Davis realized it he laughed—just once, like Carter would have—and waited for Catherine to elbow him.

  But she didn’t. She loved music; leaving music behind was the only thing she’d ever complained about when he brought her on postings with him. He didn’t mind it, actually. It felt like a genteel complaint, the sort of complaint a General’s wife should have. He’d pictured her assembling string quartets someday, when he’d been promoted to a permanent post and didn’t have to always make do in other people’s houses.

  Now she sat perfectly still. It was dissonant to him—all the music on this planet sounded like he was hearing it from underwater—but she listened raptly while the chorus sang about the old times, and the lake between the mountains, and the helpful spirits that guided the weary to good soil and pitched the wicked over the far side of the mountain into the desert, and the satisfaction of working together to tame the land and make it bear fruit.

  Davis spent most of it hiding his coughs in his shoulder and looking from one face to another. Surely someone from the propaganda ministry would be concerned. But when he finally spotted a little knot of them, seated far enough behind him that they should have been insulted at the view, they were watching just as placidly as everyone else.

  They all looked young. That was the problem. No one had thought to send a veteran minister who knew better than to let the people you were fighting remind each other what they stood to gain.

  Catherine was crying by the end of it. She got herself under control before anyone could light the lamps again, which pulled them back from the brink of disaster. Still, she was a fool for falling prey to something so obvious, and as the car pulled away he clenched his fists, wondering where else his wife, his representative among his colleagues, had cried like a child f
acing their first disappointment. At the benefit that was full of potential enemies, standing next to Verrastro? At dinner parties with Madison’s fourth wife where she looked like a miserable hostage in the middle of everyone’s chat? In their own kitchen, where two girls from town did the cleaning and the cooking? How many times had she put them in danger by looking like someone mistreated, someone who could be turned?

  This can’t go on, he thought, all at once, like a relief.

  As he unzipped her he said, “I don’t want you going out in the evenings any more unless I’m with you.”

  She looked as if she’d been expecting it; the line of her shoulders never moved. He thought briefly about dragging corpses out of the pond, about a shovel and a heavy swing.

  “Of course,” she said. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  BY THE TIME they found Carter’s body, it had been in the swamps so long that someone had to bring Davis the pictures of his tattoos to the war room so the three of them could agree on identification. The rest of the corpse had gotten so waterlogged they couldn’t tell much, and of course the blows that killed him had knocked out his teeth.

  “It’s brutal,” Madison said, scraping a hand over his beard. “I don’t know what you had him doing, but somebody didn’t like what he found.”

  Davis passed back the pictures. “He was living among Cirrus Prime and recruiting their doubters and their enemies. No one would have liked what they found.”

  Carter had often made intelligence work sound like a magic trick; something that required careful preparation through arcane methods, a set of tools you kept to hand to distract suspicion, a sleight of empathy that could make you seem like a friend to anyone who wasn’t looking very hard.

  “So where does that leave us?” Verrastro glanced at Madison; she looked a little green.

  Madison nodded at her like he understood. “In need of a drink,” he said, and rang.