“Yes, I...I guess I was having a bad dream.” His head felt a little cobwebby. It did seem like some bad things had happened recently, but nothing specific came to mind.
“Your father tells me that you took another trip into the jungle a few days ago. You know I don’t like to see my boys going very far into that forest. But I have to admit, we wouldn’t have gotten your brother into Bohai University without it. I’m so proud of him.”
She leaned over the table. “So tell me, what did you see?”
Darius had to think about it. “Well...I remember that we were at some ruins. They didn’t have a lot of jungle growing around them, which was unusual. That allowed us to see the markings on the buildings pretty clearly—”
He thought he saw something go past the kitchen window to his right.
His mother didn’t seem to notice anything. He continued. “There was this one building, right in the middle, that was in really good condition. Dad says that’s an indicator that the structure was particularly important to the people who made it. When we went inside—”
He was interrupted by the sound of the back door opening and closing. But again, his mother didn’t seem to notice. Maybe just his imagination.
His mother got up, put some kuboos on a plate, and set the plate down in front of him. “Here you go, darling, I know you love them fresh out of the oven.” She sat back down. “You were saying?”
The smell of the bread seemed to strengthen his memory. “When we went inside,” he continued, “there was this big stone circle on the floor, made of marble with some metal inlays. There was a mural on the far wall, but it looked badly eroded.”
Darius looked down at the kuboos and picked one up. As he took a bite, he looked up and saw a little girl with blue and green skin standing in the doorway, behind his mother.
The girl’s eyes were voids of shadow.
✽✽✽
The interrogator was jacked into her holoscreen, which gave her access to the mindworm simulation. She flinched and broke the connection. “Did someone come through here just now? I could have sworn...”
“Sorry, Lieutenant, the device is throwing an error,” one of the Marines said nervously.
She leaned back in her chair. One of the device’s indicator lights pulsed red. She’d never seen that before. She looked across at Darius Bakari, whose eyes were flat and glassy. “Kapoor, is the prisoner still under?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the other Marine.
“All right then, what’s the error, Popowicz?”
“Ma’am, it just reads ‘Error C113-23.’”
The officer took a sip of her tea. “Kapoor, check the manual for the error code.”
She thought about the days, even weeks she’d spent poring over videos and mail to capture a likeness of Bakari’s mother. Between her performance and the mindworms, she had been assured that she would be above the minimum threshold. So that probably wasn’t it.
“Kapoor?” the Lieutenant inquired patiently.
“Yes, ma’am. According to the manual, C113-23 is for ‘Anomaly detected, program halted.’”
In all the years she’d been employing mindworms, the lieutenant had never seen a mindworm program break. She didn’t know it was possible. “I see. Kapoor, can the device be restarted?”
“Checking the manual now, ma’am.”
Bakari didn’t appear to have shown any resistance, so that probably wasn’t it either. And the scene had had full integrity, as far as she had been able to tell. So what was the source of the problem?
“Ma’am,” said Kapoor, “The device may be restarted. Would you like me to proceed?”
“Yes. How long will it take?”
“Just a few minutes, ma’am.”
“Very well. When it’s back online again, let’s graft to the most recently embedded memory. Maybe that will work as a bypass.”
✽✽✽
Darius was in the jungle with Nadira. They sat by a campfire at the edge of the ruins of Baloneth. Even with all the technology that mankind had diligently invented over the centuries to beat back the night, Darius thought that there was still nothing quite like the feeling of being gathered around a pile of burning logs while the stars twinkled and winked in the firmament. The scent of woodsmoke, and the firelight dancing across the faces of your friends and your kin, were elemental.
Rali’s grave was just at the edge of the gloom. Nadira looked at it for a time and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Darius.”
He rubbed his chin and gazed into the fire. “He fought bravely. Far more bravely than I expected. If he had been back up to full strength, he might have been able to dodge that blade. Just a hair too slow...”
“Yes, such a shame. At least he was able to make a difference, right?”
“Yeah,” said Darius, “the tea brought him back just enough. Without him, I don’t think we would have made it.”
“Yes,” Nadira mused. “The tea...”
Behind Nadira, something seemed to shift in the darkness by the tree where Rali had died. Darius decided it was probably a trick of the smoke. Still, he reached for his machete, in case it was something from the jungle looking for a snack.
Nadira asked him, “What do you think is the most important lesson that we’ve learned from these ruins?”
Darius thought she had taken on an odd manner of speech. Perhaps a side effect of their recent battle. “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Probably that some secrets are better left forgotten.”
Darius sensed a form taking shape in the tree above the grave, but it didn’t look like a forest creature. It had the profile of something that walked on two legs. His eyes narrowed.
“Darius,” said Nadira, “what if we wanted to take another look inside? Do you think it can be done?”
“Well, sure,” he said quizzically, “all we have to do is—”
The shape dropped silently out of the tree and into a crouch just behind Nadira. It rose slowly to its feet, and he beheld a woman with blue and green skin.
Her eyes were tunnels of darkness.
✽✽✽
The lieutenant practically jumped out of her chair. “What the shit—”
But there was no one behind her.
“Sorry, ma’am,” said Kapoor, glancing at her uncertainly. “We’re getting that error again.”
“You’re gods damned right there’s an error,” the lieutenant hissed, mostly to herself. “That unit needs to be fully checked from top to bottom, Kapoor. No one is using it again until then.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, pull him out, Popowicz.”
“Ma’am.”
The Marines went through the detachment procedure, and Darius was back in this world after a few minutes of readjustment.
“So,” said the lieutenant dryly. “The fruits of my labor have been minimal, Bakari. Do you know what that means for you?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“Two words: combat training.” She nodded to the Marines. “Take him away. He’s no longer my prisoner."
They took Darius out of the interrogation room, and the lieutenant stayed behind to file her report. But she didn't feel alone. A sense of presence lingered.
She decided that it was probably just a side effect of those malfunctioning mindworms. She filed a request for a medical scan per regulations, and she tried to ignore the feeling of being watched as she went down the hallway to her next interview.
-9-
Historically, turning a green recruit into a battle-ready trooper was something that would have taken several years. Discipline, collaborative adaptability, proper weapons handling, chain of command—things like these could only be learned so quickly. And without enough field experience, all of those elements could melt away in the trenches. You couldn’t teach people to handle night after night of pounding mortars, or the agonized screaming of their comrades trapped in a kill zone.
That is, un
less you had the mindworms. The mindworms could almost make it real.
Tricking prisoners into giving away intel wasn't the only thing those strange creatures were good for.
The penal military units got 60 days of training via the worms, which R&D calculated to be the equivalent of six months of real-world experience. The nerds in R&D had never seen a real battlefield, though, so who knew how much it was really worth. It wasn't as good as the 120 days that the regulars got, but PMUs tended to be a poor return on investment no matter how much you worked on them. Garbage in, garbage out, right?
The worms did the work on your headspace, and injections of a steroid analog called neppa took care of your physical fitness. Recruits spent nearly every hour of their day with the worms, pausing only to get some chow and to answer the call of nature.
Even as they slept, the worms trained them. And as they laid in their bunks, neppa did an entire gymnasium’s worth of muscle building. It was a derivative of the purple gel the emperor and his inner circle used, but focused on strength and speed enhancement instead of life extension. These were soldiers, after all.
On the 60th day of the program, they took the recruits to meet their personal sidearm, survival knife, rifle, and combat armor. The worms had taught them the feel and weight of these things, but it still wasn’t the same as touching and smelling it all for real.
The sidearm had multiple fire modes and rotating sights on the barrel. The knife sported a carbon nano-lattice blade, and it packed a number of familiar bushcraft items into its handle. The rifle and pistol could fire an entire magazine in one shot, but their barrels would take about a minute to cool down again. Or you could fire a stream of small projectiles. The combat armor was a set of light, overlapping plates. It was a non-reflective dark gray, and there were attachments for oxygen canisters and jets on the back.
The suit was a sealed environment and rated for extended exposure to vacuum, heat, cold, radiation, and certain types of toxic substances. The helmet section came with an integrated visor. His neck protection, even with a special blend of micro-plating, was a weak point, as were the insides of the elbows, the backs of the knees, and the insides of the wrists. Flexibility and durability rarely went together, even with Sar-Zin's money and resources.
A microphone was implanted in his neck, and they put a tiny speaker inside his ear.
Most grunts got a 120-day training program, ocular implants, partially powered armor, and particle rifles. But the PMUs weren’t cleared for that. They were cleared to make ends meet. And of course, the brass wanted to make him sweat—that they wanted him to feel the fear and come crying back to the blocking detachment. And as he stood there in the armory and examined his loadout, he had to admit that he wasn’t sure how long he was going to last. The mindworms were effective, but they still didn’t work as well on the mind as the neppa did on the body.
They probably weren’t going to just drop him into a trench. Not if they thought they could still get some useful intel out of him. Right?
They took Darius directly to the briefing room after he toured his gear. About a hundred other recruits from the same program filed in. By his count, about two-thirds of the group had washed out. The mindworms worked with incredible efficiency, but not everyone could handle them. And not everyone could be trained to the level that the army wanted, no matter what resources it had at its disposal.
It was a side effect of dealing with conscripts. Some people died in the simulations only a few times, while others could barely get through a single engagement. But everyone died at least once. It was effectively a rite of passage.
Darius tried not to think about what happened to the enemies of the empire who failed to qualify for this form of punishment. He imagined that more than a few of them made their way into the emperor's purple gel.
Those who remained became Zebra Company of the 201st Battalion; the last letter in the alphabet indicated their status in the pecking order. It was part of the 27th Dropship Division, or 27DD. Since the company had been fighting in simulations together, they were going to fight in the real world together as well—but all squad leaders in the real world would be regulars instead of PMU soldiers. His team had been attached to a Sergeant Velasquez. She’d been through the Kabarad campaign, and that was pretty much all he knew about her.
The briefing officer explained the company’s first assignment. They would be inserted in a support role behind a brigade combat team operating in the notorious Gemini theater. Zebra’s job was to deliver ammunition and other ordnance to the front lines of a planet named Kareeva, ferry the injured back to field hospitals, and to defend the space in the middle if the enemy broke through the lines.
It sounded almost too simple to believe.
This enemy was commonly known as the Shiza. They were a six-limbed reptilian people who towered over humans. Empire scientists speculated that a race like theirs could have been the destiny of the dinosaurs of Old Earth, if not for the meteors. And like dinosaurs, even an unarmed Shiza was a force to be reckoned with. They had powerful arms, long talons, and a bite force that rivaled a crocodile. Like most reptiles, they were weak long-distance travelers. But at close range, they could be frighteningly effective. Their colder blood also made them more difficult to pick up on infrared, especially in the trenches.
The worms had shown these recruits the power of the Shiza during training. But it remained difficult even for them to fully simulate another intelligent organism, and the recruits had no relevant memories that the worms could draw on. Darius expected the real Shiza to be measurably tougher and meaner than the sims indicated.
At any rate, Sar-Zin’s Third Fleet had broken the enemy’s orbital blockade, then the Marines had been sent down to the surface of Kareeva to retake various locations of strategic importance. Now it was the Army’s job to come in behind in a support and defense role.
Zebra was scheduled to embark on the heavy cruiser Artemis in 12 hours. They were free to move about the barracks and get some more chow, but they were expected to be suited up and ready for departure by no later than T-minus one hour.
The assignment looked suspiciously manageable to Darius. But in anticipation of it, the battalion trainers had put them through the scenario several times anyway.
His uncle Omar had also served in the imperial army, and the stories he could tell were not quite as encouraging. The old timer hadn’t earned his prosthetic leg in the jungles of Telamat.
It seemed like some operational information was being left out, but in his position, it would be impossible to find out what it might be.
As the hours wound down, only a few of Z Company went to the mess hall. No matter how much training and preparation you had, you were going to get pre-drop jitters. It was just human nature. There was always a little fear. There always had to be, because that would keep you alive. Too much, of course, would get your ticket punched pretty quickly. Survival was a matter of threading between the extremes. Sometimes you met someone who could fight with ice in their veins, but they were rare. And probably best avoided.
Darius spent most of his time with his kit. He practiced getting in and out of his armor, and he made a close examination of the bushcraft tools built into his survival knife. It was surprisingly high-quality stuff; fishing line, fish hooks, a length of cord, a flame striker, a few tabs of ansoline, and purification tablets made up the bulk of it. There was also an analog compass on the butt of the handle—not that it would be reliable on every planet that a grunt like him would get dropped on..
He lost track of time, so he was caught by surprise when the PA squawked. It was already time to suit up and board the shuttles that would take them to the Artemis.
✽✽✽
Regulars didn’t mix with PMUs as a rule, so Zebra was largely left to itself onboard the Artemis. The heavy cruiser had seen battle in multiple campaigns, but rarely direct combat. If you thought that combat infantry could be quick and brutal, that was nothing compared to what the navy had to d
eal with. Up here among the stars, spacecraft weapon platforms could scale to sizes that were difficult for the mind to grasp—and often impossible to counter.
The answer for humanity so far had been to stay light and mobile. Stick and move. This heavy cruiser was about as big as a navy ship got. The only exception was the capital ship that Sar-Zin called home, and he stayed well behind the front lines most of the time.
Darius sat in his bunk on the Artemis and tried not to think about how many dead sailors, soldiers, and Marines had lain there before him.
“My grandfather fought on the Kabarad front,” Private Rizzo was telling him. She was an oddly cheerful squad member from Avulon, a garden world settled just a century ago out in the Irshana belt. She had been sent to the PMU for assaulting an imperial officer, which she said had been in self-defense. “Right at the beginning. He saw some of the toughest fighting of the whole campaign. Never thought I’d be following in his footsteps.”
Darius nodded absently.
“Do you think we’ll see any synths on the ground?” she asked. “I’ve never seen one fighting in person. I mean, maybe in a sim or two, but that’s not the same thing.”
“Unlikely,” said Masasi. She was a tall, dark-skinned private who mostly kept to herself. Darius had pegged her as the type who just wanted to serve her time and get out. “The Citadel doesn’t like to send many of them into battle.”
Rizzo looked disappointed.
“Sorry, kiddo,” said Chandra, the team’s sniper.
Darius liked Private Chandra. He was one of those people who always seemed to know everyone and have all the latest gossip. He was in for smuggling dynocaine powder, and as rumor had it, he wasn’t entirely out of the game. Darius wondered if Chandra had spread that rumor himself.
Rizzo pouted. “They always look so cool on the vids.”
Chandra shrugged. “I know, Rizz, but the Citadel would rather send us meat into battle. We’re cheaper, more plentiful, and we’re constantly making more of ourselves.”
The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy) Page 14