Su-yin didn't feel the least bit glorious. But she refrained from saying so. She leaned lightly against Rico, cherishing his solidity, hoping the warmth of her body would provide him some small comfort. "Let's not talk about that. Tell me something else instead."
"Okay." After a brief silence, Rico said, "I grew up in Baltimore. People think that big cities are divorced from nature but that's not true. There are butterflies in the spring and in autumn the trees turn bright gold and red. Sometimes in the winter it snows so hard that all the traffic stops. The streets are covered in sheets of purest white and the silence... the silence is... I can't do this."
"What?"
"I can't do this to you. I'm sorry."
Rico stood and turned away from Su-yin, drawing her up in his wake. Carefully, she said, "What are you talking about?"
"The Devil came to see me today."
"Oh," Su-yin said.
"I'd never seen her before. But she walks in the door and you know who she is, don't you? She told me that if I could score with you tonight, she'd let me out of this place. You can't imagine how it felt, hearing that. She said that we'd leave the club and wind up here. That I should talk about my childhood, crap like that. That the words would just come to me. But this is not what I want. Well, I do want it. But not like this."
Rico looked so forlorn that Su-yin started to take him into her arms to comfort him. He was such a sweet boy, she thought, such an innocent. It came to her in that moment that she had a choice. She could free her father from Hell or she could free Rico. Either way, she'd feel guilty about leaving one of them behind. Either way, it would be an epic accomplishment. And if she were to choose Rico...
"You prick! You bastard!" Su-yin pushed Rico away from her and then punched him in the chest as hard as she could. "This is part of the script, isn't it?" All her emotions were in a jumble. She didn't know whether to laugh or to barf. "Well, you can just go—"
"Daughter."
Su-yin whirled, and there was the general, looming over her like a thunderhead. Her heart soared at the sight of him, even as she took an involuntary step back from his frown. She wanted to hug him, but even when he was alive that was an impertinence he would not allow in such a mood.
"Take a good long look at yourself, young lady. Out unescorted, at night, with this hooligan. Using bad language. Dressed like a prostitute. Living in... this place. Is this the life you imagine I had planned for you?"
"I—"
"I left you well provided for. Then I came here to be punished for doing things I should not have done. This is not only the way things are, it is the way they should be." The general wavered in Su-yin's sight like a candle flame, her eyes were so full of tears. "Do not speak! I am going to tell you what to do and you are to obey me without question. Do you understand?"
"I... yes."
"I have experience being in positions where there are no good choices. All you can do is negotiate the best deal you can. Have sex with this inappropriate young man. Then go home and never do anything shameful like that again. Many good women have such incidents in their past. Even your mother did things she later regretted."
The general turned to Rico. "You."
"Sir?"
"Give my daughter your hand."
He did so.
"Go into the nearest apartment building. The lobby will be clean and the doorman will give you the key to a decent room. There you will do what you must. There will be a condom on the nightstand—use it. Afterward, my daughter will lead you out of Hell. You can show your gratitude by never trying to see her again."
Rico nodded assent and turned to go.
But when he did, Su-yin did not follow. Pulling her hand free of his, she said to her father, "How do you know all this? About the room, the condom, the nightstand?"
"Don't ask foolish questions. Just do as you're told."
An icy rage surged up within Su-yin. "You're in league with the Devil, both of you. Maybe Rico doesn't know it, but you certainly do. Good cop, bad cop. One of you weak, the other harsh." When her father's face went hard as granite, he looked like a gaunt version of Frankenstein's monster. How could she not have seen this before? "After all I've gone through for you!"
Rico reached out pleadingly toward Su-yin. But the general shoved him aside. Then, unthinkably, he raised up a hand to slap her.
Su-yin screamed and flinched away. Before the slap could land, she kicked off her heels and ran. Barefoot, she sped down the street, away from the both of them, as fast as she could go.
Four moves ahead, she thought wildly. Don't let yourself be drawn off guard. The hell with Rico and, for that matter, the hell with her father too. She wasn't going to be fooled as easily as that.
Back at the penthouse, Leonid was waiting. "Well?" he said anxiously.
All the way up in the elevator, Su-yin had been a bundle of hysteria and misery, equally mixed. Now, however...
In trembling disbelief, she said, "I passed the test."
They broke out the Cristal and, laughing, drank down glass after glass. Leonid put on some music and they stumblingly danced the tango. Then they collided with the couch and tumbled down atop it and somehow they were kissing. Clothing got pushed this way and that way and then Leonid had his hands under her dress and she was fumbling with his zipper. It was wrong and she knew it, she'd never even thought of Leonid in that way, and yet somehow she couldn't seem to stop herself.
They did it right there on the couch.
It wasn't that great.
When they were done, Leonid gathered up his scattered clothes, dressed, and said, "It's almost midnight. I suggest you be out of Hell by morning."
Shocked, Su-yin said, "You... that was planned! All year you pretended to be my friend, when you knew from the start that you were going to... going to... do that."
"Believe it or not, I did you a huge favor," Leonid said. "The Devil would never have let you win. If you had held out against me, she would have arranged for you to be very brutally gang-raped. The only reason that didn't happen as soon as you cut a deal with her was that she wanted to teach you a lesson. Let's be honest here: You never had a chance. The Devil likes to play games. But all her games are rigged."
He adjusted his cravat, bowed, and left.
Su-yin had been told to leave Hell and she would. But she hadn't been told how to go about it. So she went to see Rico.
His face brightened when he saw her in the doorway of his sad little apartment, then dimmed again when she told him the reason she had come. "Any direction you take will lead you away from here," he said. There was a hurt look in the back of his eyes, but he said nothing of what he must have been thinking. "You could just walk out."
"Like heck I could. I lost the challenge. I lost my father. I lost a year of my life. I am not going to spend a single minute more than I have to in this place. I want to be out of here just as fast as I can manage."
"I lost all that too," Rico mumbled, "and more."
Su-yin pretended she hadn't heard him. "What did you say?"
"I said yeah, I can help you."
On a shadowy street just off the clubbing sector, Su-yin stopped in front of a Lincoln Continental. She liked how it looked. Also, she wanted something big. "This one," she said. It took Rico only seconds to break into the Lincoln and hot-wire the ignition. "How about that?" he said. "I guess the old skills never go away."
"Open up the trunk for me, would you? I have something I want to put in the back," Su-yin said. When he had done so, she bent briefly inside. "Oh, no!" she cried. "I dropped my brooch, the one my mother left me when she died, and I can't reach it. Rico, you're tall...."
Rico leaned far into the trunk, groping in its dark recesses. "I don't see anything."
"It's way in the back. It bounced there." Su-yin waited until Rico was stretched as far he could go and grabbed his ankles. With all her strength, she lifted him off the ground and toppled him over into the trunk. Then she slammed it shut.
A muffled vo
ice said, "Hey!"
Su-yin climbed into the front of the car. As she did, a black streak of fur leaped over her and into the passenger seat. "You're not leaving without me," Beelzebub said.
"Of course not." Su-yin put the car into gear and started slowly down the road, ignoring the hammering from the trunk. "When we get home, I'm going to wash you and brush you and take a flea comb to your fur, though. Then I'll buy you a pint of cream."
"Make it a quart of scotch and you got a deal."
Su-yin shifted gears into second and then third. She sideswiped a parked Volkswagen van and, tires screeching, accidentally ran a red light. Luckily, there wasn't much traffic hereabouts at this time of night.
"Whoah!" Beelzebub cried. "Has anybody ever told you that you're the absolute worst driver in the universe?"
"You're the first." They were coming to the city limits now. Beyond lay what Su-yin was pretty sure was the Meadowlands. As they crossed into New Jersey, she floored the accelerator, sending two oncoming cars veering off the road to avoid collision. Then she pulled the Lincoln back into its lane and they were barreling down the road, a full moon bouncing in the sky overhead, only slightly out of control. She noted with satisfaction that Rico was still shouting at her from the trunk. Apparently, hot-wiring the car had been just enough to bring his karma into the positive digits. "I'm not doing too badly, though. Considering."
She had lost her father and she didn't think the pain of that would ever go away, not totally. But at least she had a boyfriend now. She wasn't quite sure just what one did with one, other than going dancing and having sex. But she'd find out soon enough, she supposed.
Su-yin rolled down the window to let the wonderful stink of marshes and rotting garbage into the car, reveling in the hot summer night, the way the wind batted her hair about, and the neon lights of Hell fading slowly behind her in the rearview mirror.
* * *
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Matthew Johnson | 9114 words
Matthew Johnson tells us "Rules of Engagement" is his second story on a military topic for Asimov's ("The Coldest War," February 2009, was the first). He says, "My actual military experience is limited to working on the Canadian Ministry of National Defence's Y2K preparedness project 'Op Abacus'—a far cry from the high-tech on display in the current tale. A collection of my short stories, Irregular Verbs, will be out from ChiZine Press in May. It will include 'The Coldest War' and most of my other Asimov's stories."
A Reporter at Large
It was not much of a fight, as bar fights go: not even enough to get Kevin Bishop, Tony Cervantes, and Tom Hollis thrown out of the bar in which they had spent the afternoon and evening of July ninth. The three soldiers had been drinking at The Swiss Bar and Grill, a bar popular with college students on weeknights, but largely taken over by military on weekends when their implants relax the usual restrictions on alcohol. Bishop, Cervantes, and Hollis had served together in the 23rd Infantry Division of the 2nd Infantry Brigade (more often referred to as the 23-IN), mostly in Somalia and Yemen, and two of them were still on active duty. Fire team Chinook had survived the worst that the war and al-Shabaab could throw at them, but before long two would be in prison and one would be dead.
The immediate cause of the fight was money. Bishop, who had ordered the last two rounds, had revealed that he was unable to pay his share of the night's tab. The entire 23-IN had been flush with back pay when they had come home from deployment in Yemen, bringing a welcome stream of money into the city's bars; it was not unusual during that period for John Pratt, the Swiss's owner, to make two or more bank runs per night, each time with a duffel bag full of money. (Soldiers in the 23-IN pay for almost everything in cash, due to a widely held belief that their implants track direct payments.) Two months later the money was beginning to run out, and for Bishop—who was no longer receiving combat pay and was also making regular payments to the city's ghat dealers—it already had.
There are two common reasons why soldiers, especially regular infantry, enlist in the army. One is self-improvement: though some join with an eye on pursuing a military career, many more do so for the neural implant that, after their tour, opens doors to otherwise unattainable jobs. That was why Hollis had joined, and why he now had a job with the city that paid well enough for Bishop to expect him to pick up the tab. When Hollis stood up and dropped a twenty on the table, just enough to cover his share of the bill, Bishop punched him in the side of the head.
"Get away from me," Hollis said. Bishop leaned forward and started swinging wildly with both arms. Hollis held his forearms up to ward off Bishop's punches until the buzz in Bishop's head got loud enough to make him stop. Tony Cervantes took Bishop by the arm, led him back to his chair and poured him a beer from a neighboring table's pitcher.
"What do you want from me?" Hollis asked, shouting to be heard over the dance remix of Julee Cruz's "Hipper Than Me," that summer's inescapable hit, playing on the Swiss's speakers.
Bishop drank his beer in one long pull, until the buzz quieted enough for him to talk. "I want you to have my back for a fucking change," he said.
Bishop had joined the infantry for the other common reason, because he—and his parents—feared that it was either the army or jail. Though he had never had any major trouble with the law, when Bishop turned nineteen he was no nearer to finishing high school than he had been five years before, and his father had given him a choice: he could join the army or go on the street, but he could no longer live at home.
There is surprisingly little connection between the reason why a soldier joins the military and his performance there. Though Bishop found basic training difficult, once he had passed that and been fitted with his implant he thrived. There was an appealing simplicity to army life: if you followed orders and didn't make trouble, you were "squared away"; fail in any of those respects and you were a "shit bag"—the lowest of the low, and subject both to constant harassment from superiors and fellow soldiers and to buzz from your implant. Though he had occasional run-ins with superiors, when he was deployed in Yemen he found a way to make use of his natural rebelliousness as a "pit bull," someone willing to do things and take chances other soldiers wouldn't, and was promoted to Private First Class and recommended for an Army Achievement Medal. Now that he was back home, though, and unable to return to active duty until he had been declared medically fit, he was falling back into old habits: he would later say that it was only the fact that Cervantes, his team leader, was in the same situation that had kept him from getting into serious trouble.
If Bishop was fire team Chinook's "bad cop," Tony Cervantes was the good cop. He had not needed the army to provide either money or stability: his parents, Daniel and Anita, started an implant fund for him when he was in middle school. If he had wanted for anything, his father told me, it was focus. After his high-school football career failed to lead any further he had spent a year doing little but sleeping and playing video games before settling on the army.
"I was against it at first," Daniel Cervantes told me. He and Anita still live in the home where Tony was raised, in the solidly middle-class Albuquerque neighborhood of North Valley. "I served a tour in Iraq when I was his age, and I saw what it did to a lot of kids. But he told me that he needed something like this, something that would give him a purpose like football had, and once I saw what the idea of it did to him I changed my mind." Between enlistment and basic training Cervantes began to train on his own, lifting weights and hiking the Sandia mountains with a full backpack. His size and his attitude made him stand out during training and, once deployed, he was promoted to Sergeant and put in charge of a fire team that consisted of Kevin Bishop, Tom Hollis, and himself.
The incident that had left Bishop and Cervantes in medical limbo had taken place more than a year before. The 23-IN's base, FOB Gambit, is in Ta'izz, or "Brooklyn"— soldiers have nicknamed all of Yemen's cities after New York boroughs, due to the mud-brick high-rises that make them look like a sand-castle version of Manhatt
an. Their main duty in Yemen is counterinsurgency: as part of the mission to root the al-Shabaab out of Yemen and Somalia and make the Gulf of Aden safe for shipping again, Cervantes' team conducted daily "block parties" in which they would cordon off an area and go door-to-door, taking a census of the population and comparing it to intelligence. Mostly these would follow a schedule, moving in a grid around the city to keep tabs on as much of the population as possible, but at other times the mission would be a follow-up on some fresh intelligence. On that day fire team Chinook was one of three fire teams dispatched in a Stryker personnel carrier to a neighborhood centered around the Abu Walad stadium, following a tip from one of the interpreters or "terps" who worked for the Division that a high-value Shabaab figure was hiding out in a house there. (Though implants provide near-simultaneous translation, the army still relies on interpreters to provide a friendlier face and to catch subtle cues, such as a speaker's tone of voice or body language, that might be missed by a non-native speaker.) Now the terp, a Somali man in a black-and-white keffiyeh and a borrowed ballistic vest, was whispering directions to the driver as the Stryker crawled along the narrow road. Though there was no other traffic the vehicle moved in fits and starts, stopping periodically when one of its slaved drones detected signs of an EFP. Bishop began bouncing in his seat.
"Keep your shit together," Cervantes told him.
Bishop tucked a wad of ghat between his teeth and lower lip and began working it around his mouth. "Sorry," he said. "I'm just buzzing."
I first met Kevin Bishop in the visiting room at Washington State Penitentiary, where he is currently serving a death sentence and awaiting execution. His trial received some attention in the media, but the local papers had covered it as a straightforward crime story: I only became interested when I learned, through a friend in the military, about Bishop's experiences in Yemen, and found out just how remarkable it was that he was in prison at all.
Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Page 19