He poured his own drink, as another peal of laughter burst from the center of the room. He smiled, though he hadn’t heard the joke - company by proxy was the very best kind. He’d nearly finished filling his drink, when he felt, more than saw, Sergeant Clausen lean against the bar beside him.
"You doing alright?" Clausen asked.
"Yeah." he replied. "I think."
Clausen snorted, and tapped his knuckle to his brow, the fins of a dart poking into his hair. He said, “Good. You did a fine job. Have some fun.” He leaned forward, took a single dart from the bunch in his left hand. He strode, towards the dart board, with a weaving swagger. His right hand came up, with his stride, and his eyes narrowed. Without breaking stride, he let fly the first dart- thock. His opponent’s score reset to zero.
“Sorry, Bugtuck.” Clausen stated, as he pulled the next dart into his throwing-hand. He took another step- thock! Clausen closed the game. He stopped, took a drink, and then, with his off-hand, hurled the final dart into the powered-down bullseye. “Guess you’re buying.” He returned to Firenze, and asked, “You want to play?”
“Jesus, no!” Firenze exclaimed. “I only play games I can win!”
"How are you gonna get better, then?" Clausen asked. "You've always to start like shit."
"Right." Firenze acknowledged, but did not agree.
They leaned against the bar for a long minute, in silence.
Firenze finally asked, “So… these stories…”
Clausen smirked.
“They’re a bit… much.” Firenze said.
“You don’t approve?” Clausen asked.
Firenze could hear the bait. He didn’t take it. “No, they’re funny. It’s just… shit’s pretty morbid, when you think about it.”
“It’s what we do.” Clausen said. “You gotta find the funny part, or you’ll go toast.”
“I guess.” Firenze agreed. “I think a couple of your guys are already bonkers.”
“Hill?” Clausen asked.
Firenze nodded, and drank to emphasize.
“He’s a piece of work, but a damn good soldier. You couldn’t ask for a better battle buddy.” Clausen said. He glanced over, gave someone a quick nod, and added, “He’ll keep you alive. You just stick on him.”
At the table, Rutman's voice rose, and Firenze could make out, "-largest fucking still you've ever seen. For being so big on prohibition, this patriarch had the most monstrous shining operation I'd ever seen, and Reaper's shooting incendiary-"
Clausen must have heard it, too, because he added, "I remember that one. Two story flaming dive into a water tank. Perfect form, too."
"Really?" Firenze demanded.
"Probably. I was on fire." Clausen replied. "Get back over there. Throw in a story."
"I don't have any."
Clausen glanced at him, sideways. His steel eyes and hard-stubble shadow added extra ‘really?’ to the aside glance.
"I don’t have anything to contribute to this-”
"Bullshit." Clausen said. "That sounds dangerously close to ‘poor me’, Princess…”
"Look, I'm just a grad student-"
"You rang Reaper's bell."
"I kicked him in the nuts when he wasn't looking." Firenze corrected.
"You cleared the course, three times under par. There was some nasty stuff in there, too."
"Lieutenant Donegan cleared it four times." Firenze objected. He'd checked. Obsessively. Losing stung worse than the beatings.
"Yeah, he's an experienced EWO, with practical experience. You've done this in training.” Clausen said. He smirked, as some piece of a story washed over him, a reference too quick for Firenze to understand. Clausen said, “You know something? Doggo never broke the Phalanx. You did. Twice.” Clausen paused. "I pull scores, too. So does Donegan. So does the Old Man. You think you’re pissed at being upstaged? Doggo watched you clean that AI’s clock, and then had to write the report.”
Despite himself, Firenze smirked. I did something he couldn't. The voice in his head sing-songed the refrain: You still died. You took the team with you. He glanced back at the table, the empty chair. "How do you guys do it?" He asked.
"With style." Clausen replied.
"No, I mean, jumping into this mess. Joke all you want, but, people died. People are going to die. We’re marching right into the fire."
Clausen faced Firenze, directly, and said, "We're ASOC. It's what we do. If there's a fire, we're the idiots who run the wrong way."
"First to fight?" Firenze quoted.
"Last to quit." Clausen agreed. "Look, you're a bright kid. I’m guessing you were top of your class. Not near the top. You owned it. One of those kids with the four-point-plus. The clubs, the competitions. You had to be the best. That sound right?"
"Yeah.” Firenze agreed, but then countered, “I see where you're going with this, but, look, no one threw grenades at me in the robotics club."
"Your loss." Clausen said. "Fact remains: what we do is for the alphas, only. The overachievers. We're the best, because the world needs us to be the best. We're the first in the fire. We carve out a pocket, until the army catches up. Behind the lines, under the water, up in atmo, we're on call. Our solutions are sudden, and permanent. We're the light in the black, the tip of the spear. First to fight. You don't get here by being good. You get here by being the goddamn best."
Firenze replied, "Yeah, well, I like winning, same as anyone. I like being the best. I worked hard at it. But I never signed up to be shot at. I never wanted to be here."
"And yet, here you are." Clausen raised his glass, held it out to Firenze.
"Here I am." Firenze agreed, with a rueful chuckle, and banged his glass against Clausen’s. He took a chug, and said, “Faking it until I make it.”
Clausen lowered his glass, and said, "Oh, no, no. That won't work."
"Huh?"
"You belong. Colonel said so. You're on the team, so you bet your ass, you'd better be on the team."
"I'm here, right?" Firenze asked.
"Not enough. We need cohesion. This kind of team, it needs absolute trust between every one of us. You can dislike someone, you can hate them, but you have to know that you will have their back absolutely when the shit gets hot."
"Here we go," Firenze said, "I’ve been waiting for the old 'unit is family' thing. I've seen the holovids, too."
Clausen thumped one massive hand on the bar, and Firenze nearly hopped from his chair. The sergeant stared at him, dead on, and said, "Don't mock that bond. It will save your life. You have to trust everyone. Not a single doubt. You know their strengths. You know their weaknesses. They know yours. You know their moves before they do. Lives depend on it. Yours, theirs, and a lot more around you."
"Donegan can't stand me. How's that for cohesion?"
"He can't stand that you're in his spot. Think of that. Some punk kid, some wizard, straight out of college, waltzes in and takes his place, a place that he worked for. That change puts his team at risk. He's pissed. I'd be pissed. I think you'd be pissed!" Clausen slapped the table, again, for emphasis. His palm slapped into a condensate puddle, and the moment flesh struck wood, the conversation stopped. All eyes turned to them. Clausen gave a quick nod, a finger wave, and the conversations returned. Only Firenze seemed to notice the hiccup. Clausen pressed his argument, "Doggo's looking for a reason to trust you. He wants you to mesh into the team. You might think he's an ass, but he'll have your back, straight through. He's ASOC. He just doesn't think you are. Prove him wrong."
"I don't know if I can, Sergeant." Firenze admitted. He glanced down, to the thin remains of his drink.
"You will. I've got money on you." Clausen said, and walked back towards the dart board.
Firenze called after him, “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Long as it ain’t dating advice.” Clausen said.
“How come I get called 'Princess', and Hill gets to be 'Reaper'?”
Clausen laughed, deep and booming. He turned away,
forced himself to stop, and answered with a question, “Well, can you put one hundred rounds, fully auto, into a man sized target, at one hundred paces?”
“Uh, no?”
“Princess.” Clausen replied. He plucked his darts back out of the board. “Now get your royal ass back to that table.”
Firenze listened, and obeyed. Today, after all, was the hardest day.
#
The worst part about Kessinwey was the smell.
It smelled of death. It chased Firenze down the halls. It lurked outside his bunk, and haunted him in the shower. Every time he thought he’d slipped it’s grasp - pushed it away with the stink of sweat and gunsmoke, or scoured it from the bathroom with liberal bleach, it returned, stronger than ever.
It wasn’t human death. It wasn’t the stink of rotted meat, or heavy perfume on velvet drapes. This was the death of machines. It was the stink of clogged oil, stilled engines, and creeping rust. Every centimeter of the place, from the office towers to the dormitories, from the assembly lines to the railway hub, reeked of fuel and solvent. Empty shops on silent corners, idled cars in rotted garages - all of them stank of metal, plastic, and rubber. Echoes carried, of forgotten trials, of starved and smothered fires.
If a machine could know fear, then this place would surely be haunted.
On reflex, he let his hand brush the peeled wall, only to jerk it back, fingertips glossed in silver-flecked-amber. It clung to his hand like bearing grease, sticky and slippery at once. In vain, he tried to wipe his fingers clean, but only streaked the oil across his pants.
The only thing more widespread than the stink was the grease.
It stuck to everything. It gave paper cups a wax coating. It made him scrub out his assist box twice a week. It made sanitizing his jack an absolute hell. Clausen mandated cleaning - weapons, kit, bunks - but no matter how deep he scrubbed, by the next morning, every exposed surface would be coated under the yellow slime.
Worse was the dust that clung to it.
Dust wasn't even the right term. Dust was clumpy, uneven, and gritty. This was silver powder, thin as fog, that stuck to the grease, and coated everything in a dull-gray sheen. Like the oil, it was pernicious. No matter how often you scrubbed it clean, within an hour, speckles returned. Donegan mandated filters placed on every intake, and full scouring of every board and card, twice daily. Even still, they’d lost two boxes from cook-off in a clean room. At this point, Firenze didn’t boot without a blowout.
Parvotti said there was sand like this, in Meso Hub. Said he’d seen guys get killed by it, from jammed guns and stuck rotors. Rutman said it wasn’t dirt, or sand. He said it was bits of metal, from decades of milling, routing, and forging, still stuck in the cyclers. He said it would take a full purge of the circulation system to get it cleaned out, and since that would give away their presence, they would have to deal with it.
At least they wouldn't get dry skin.
Firenze took a sip of coffee. He sucked at the nipple, tilted the bottle back, and tried to ignore the taste of oil. Lids were a necessity, unless you liked the taste of metal and lube. After a half day of trying to make a filter from cloth and paper, he’d given up to the grease, and ‘borrowed’ a child’s safety cup from the dormitories. It worked, even if it was covered in cartoons. He’d expected to get mocked for it. He sort of did. A couple people laughed, and dubbed them ‘Princess Teacups’. He hadn’t expected that they would tell him ‘good thinking’, and send out a foraging team.
He looked over the makeshift classroom. Even here, he could see the safety cups - cerulean or pink - clutched in weathered hands, or set on stacks of white binders. Any solution, it seemed, to keep out the damned dust and grease.
Once, this had been a conference room. The paint on the south wall, glistening under its Kessinwey clear-coat, faded in a patchwork, where poster-boards once hung. The west wall once held a bank of windows, now given over to grease-slicked boards and scrambler sheets. Firenze stood at the head of the room, wedged between the eggshell card-table and newly-scrubbed whiteboards, and desperately fought the urge to fidget.
Don’t screw this up. Don’t screw this up. The phrase bounced around his head, like every time he’d stood before an academic board. This was it. This was his chance, after weeks of dragging behind on every drill, exercise, and sim, to finally be good at something.
Breath deep. Breath slow. Don't panic. Don't run screaming out the door. He took another drink. Perhaps caffeine isn't the best choice. He drank deeper.
Through the cracks in the window-boards to his right, he could see the outline of monument in the plaza, a dark-gray blur against the burnt brown grass and rusted benches. He knew what it was. He’d walked past it every day. The Enil. One of the early-war airships. The old destroyer looked little like the Plymouth, even wrought in bronze. It was boxy, angular. The Plymouth was smooth, constructed of graceful curves and liquid spires. The delicate spires of the city-ship bore little resemblance to the k-gun batteries and directional launch tubes of the Enil, no matter their common heritage.
Firenze turned from the window, from the Enil, and faced the whiteboard. Clausen had asked him to step up. He’d made the mistake of telling the Sergeant that the Bergman drives ‘weren’t hard’ to understand. Next thing he knew, he was ‘subject expert’, and told to prep a briefing. At least this was something he could talk about. He was a computer guy, not a lift engineer, but he knew enough to get the basics, and could just pretend that he was acting as Professor’s Assistant for a particularly surly (and well-armed) bunch of undergrads.
He pulled up one of the dry erase markers, tried to to draw on the whiteboard. With a squeak, the marker slid over the grime, left only a bright-off-white trail over the slightly-darker-off-white board. He wiped at the board with his sleeve, but the grease built up on his cuff, weighed down the fabric. The marker, now sullied, refused to leave more than the ghost of blue on the board.
“Fuck this.” Firenze whispered to himself, and turned back to the room. “Sorry, guys, kill the lights, we're doing it with a holotable.”
Someone groaned. The lights went out, and Firenze flipped the switch. With a clank and hum, the mister fired, flooded the air with a rising plume of steam. A moment later, the projector synced to his mobile box, to his glasses, and transcribed the blueprints of the Plymouth from the laser-HUD on his eyes, into the air before him. Lasers danced in the fog, carved a three-dimensional projection. Firenze moved his hands. Sensors in his glasses and gloves translated the movement into a command. The view zoomed in on the Plymouth, broke it apart, and closed down onto the port lift drive. The massive ARC950, built of strung cylinders and spheres, rotated in the air, labels appearing and vanishing at Firenze’s whim.
“I'll try to keep this quick, so we don't all get a bath.” He said. For love of a dry projector. You'd think the government could afford one.
In the darkness, the faces of the crowd vanished, lit only by the flashes from the holotable, concealed in the fog. Firenze didn't boost the illumination on his glasses. The darkness helped with confidence. He spun his left hand, and the drive unit rotated. He closed his fist, and it froze. A quick flick of his index finger and thumb, and the top of the first Dirac Cycler popped free, internals exploded outwards into part-by-part views.
Clausen’s voice, deep and sure, cut through the fog. He asked, "Okay, Princess, how’s it work?”
A second voice - Rutman - added, “Mainly focus on how we can avoid blowing ourselves up.”
Firenze took a deep breath, and tried to tune out the world. He wanted to focus solely on the moment, and the task. Finally, he’d been given a challenge purely in thought-space. No running. No shooting. No goddamn concussion grenades. For the first time in months, he got to be the Smartest Guy in the Room, again. It felt good. Don't get carried away. The voice reminded him. You have to spar with these guys.
The briefing packs contained dense data, the worst kind of textbook: a wall of text and charts without context. All di
d their best to familiarize themselves, but most eyes went glossy on line two, when the first wall of equations appeared. Those that stuck with it found themselves drifting from archival pictures to meaningless diagrams, and struggled in vain to make sense of data that assumed a working understanding of matrix mechanics.
Because he’d opened his mouth at the wrong time, it fell to Firenze to translate.
"Okay, where should I start?" He asked. "Negative mass? The drive field?" He’d always liked to start a class with that kind of question. It let him gauge where the room was, so he didn’t waste time insulting people by covering known data.
"How about 'where not to stick the wrench'?" Clausen asked.
Firenze paused. He chewed on a thought , but also on the slightly-metallic edge of the safety cup. He answered, "Most anywhere, to be honest. Let’s start from the top."
Somewhere in the haze and darkness, someone made a quip, but Firenze ignored it.
He began, "These drives work on the Bergman principles. During the First War, Evran Bergman’s experiments proved, and then demonstrated, the existence of negative matter outside of pure math-"
Wasn’t that done before the Collapse?" Rutman asked.
"No. You’re thinking of antimatter. That’s a far more docile kind of matter, and easier to handle. That statement alone should say something." Firenze joked. The room was silent. "Okay, wrong crowd." He said. "Negative matter: it's weird. I was doing research on it in my spare time-” someone coughed, “-and the phrase I found that best describes it is 'stupidly, dangerously, impossibly useless'. Once it exists, it reacts inversely to normal matter. That means, it falls up, repelled by gravity. That's why we use it. But it also scatters away from normal matter, and from itself. Left to its own devices, it would break down into particles and chase itself to the edges of the universe.” He paused for a moment, then added, “It gets weirder.
"If you pushed it, it would fly back into you. If you pulled it, it would run away. It's attracted to like, repelled by opposites. You'd have to trick the damn stuff into doing anything useful. And it's dangerous. Inordinately so.”
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