by eden Hudson
“So you’re not active?” I asked. I had known that knights could move between different branches whenever their enlistment with the branch they were currently in was up, but I hadn’t realized that someone who had left combat could answer the call for a combat-ready-personnel-only mission.
The candy knight winked. “I’m very active, just not on the front lines. The call team needed someone who can evaluate a crime scene, and you won’t find anybody better than me, so I cashed in my vacation days and volunteered.”
“Hell of a way to spend a vacation,” I said.
“You’ll just have to make it worth my while,” she said.
“That I can do.”
To my right, Carina was reaching out to the old guy.
“Sir Jha,” she said, shaking his hand. “I was hoping we’d have your expertise on this assignment.”
Jha nodded once. “Glad to have you back alive, Xiao.” He gestured to the candy knight. “You’ve met Iceni?”
“She and Beau were a few classes ahead of mine,” the candy knight said. She stepped forward and shook Carina’s hand. “It is such an honor, Bloodslinger. I have been following your files for…forever! Your paper on low-contact interrogation is still required reading for new investigators.”
“I’m glad to have you with us, too,” Carina said. “Your record with the Taern Enforcers is stellar.”
“This is Dean Kuchera,” Jha said, continuing the introductions by nodding at what looked to be a human-stick bug hybrid who was trying and failing to blend into the terminal wall.
It was one of those weird, gawky teenagers who manage to make everything look painfully awkward. The kid’s bumpy, acne-scarred skin was like a blinking neon warning that he was a mostly natural baby from an upgraded couple who wanted to see what their unmodified offspring would look like. Based on the results, they’d probably gone back to the genetic drawing board with their second child.
“Sir Xiao, er, Bloodslinger.” The kid’s hands twitched, and his head spasmed a little on his spindly neck. He looked like he wanted to bow to Carina or shake her hand, but he didn’t do either. Too scared of rejection or correction. Finally he stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. He licked his lips, disturbing the wispy mustache he’d probably been cultivating for the last couple years, and lamely mimicked the candy knight, “It’s an honor.”
“Not as much for you as it is for me,” Carina said. “You might not remember, but I was your first-year Combat teacher’s aide.”
“No, I—” Kuchera’s voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again, overkilling it on the deepness this time. “I definitely remember.”
Carina pretended not to notice that somebody had a crush on his teacher’s aide. “It’s great to see you’ve gotten your first assignment already. I was still going on actives and waiting for the call when I was your age.”
Kuchera beamed a mouthful of braces at her, and a little of the awkwardness drained out of his stance.
I held back the giggles. Carina hadn’t lied to the kid, but she had definitely handled him with the truth. Since Soam, I’d done plenty of research into Carina’s life and work. She went through the naming ceremony before she was seventeen, but by eighteen, she still hadn’t received a specified assignment or “the call”—what the Guild termed the volunteer missions that they felt God led them to accept. Instead, Carina had been busy kicking ass and taking names on every two- and three-month stint on the Eastern and Northern Fronts, as well as spending her non-active time taking classes and going through selection for every combat branch that the Guild offered. I got the impression that this Kuchera kid spent a lot of his non-active time playing VR games and eating junk food.
“Sir Jha, Sir Iceni, Sir Kuchera, this is Jubal Van Zandt,” Carina said. “He’ll be accompanying us on our fact-finding mission to the burned pagan village. Afterward, Sir Beausoleil and I will be accompanying him on a mission to the Dead Estuaries.”
Iceni, the candy knight, grinned and canted her head to the side. “What’s your specialty, Mr. Van Zandt?”
“The multiple full-body orgasm,” I said. “Patent pending.”
The elderly Sir Jha frowned, probably because, like the Guild, he disapproved of every kind of pleasure. Especially the carnal sort.
But Iceni batted a hand at my shoulder playfully. “You know what I meant.”
“Well, I am the best thief in the history of the Revived Earth, but that’s more of a job title than a specialty.”
“That sounds fascinating.” She stepped closer. “I’m going to have to ask you everything about it. I hope you won’t get too tired of me.”
“Don’t worry.” I flashed her my charming rogue smile, lips just a touch higher on the left side than the right. “I’ve got incredible stamina.”
“Oh, you!”
I wondered whether being around Iceni would drive Carina insane. It had to be hard to watch somebody younger and prettier get so close to me and do all the girly things she couldn’t, especially with her meathead fiancé watching.
When I looked, Carina’s face wasn’t giving anything away. Skin deep, she was a perfectly calm knight waiting to board her flight. Body deep, her stance wasn’t open to me or Nickie-boy.
***
The Guild’s little land-hopper plane was even worse than I had expected—cramped, worn, and stinking of stale blood and sweat. There were rows of seats off to each side of the wide middle aisle. Hooks and ratchets had been set into the floor to secure cargo during takeoff and landing. Muddy boot prints and dried blood decorated the floor.
Carina went straight to the front and tapped the e-manifest on the bulkhead near the cockpit while the rest of us jammed our baggage into the dented bank of lockers in the back. I had to bump my locker with my hip to get it shut, then snap the latch closed before the door could pop open again.
“Homey,” I said, scraping the toe of my sneaker across a smear of dried blood on the floor.
“This was a short-notice flight out,” Iceni said, heading up the aisle to find a seat. “Probably borrowed from bussing WIAs back to civilization. It’ll drop us up north, then bring back anyone else who needs a recoup. The ground crew will clean it somewhere in between.”
“Just how damn many wounded do you people send home a day? It’d be cheaper to shoot them and save the jet fuel.”
Everybody stopped and stared at me but Carina. She stood near the front, reading the e-manifest and pretending she wasn’t listening.
Iceni hurried to explain. “Only the life-longs and critical conditions get sent home. Usually there aren’t many of them. Most of the other stuff can be treated by Hospitalers at the front.”
I imagined pitching Iceni out of the plane when we got to cruising altitude and grinned.
“I was kidding, candy stripe.” I put a hand on my chest, noting the muscle tone in my pecs that hadn’t been as noticeable before. “I would cut costs by executing the terminally and irreparably wounded, but I know you bleeding hearts don’t think that way. One more lifelong cripple to you people is like one more ugly friend to an insecure chick. Completely useless, but they make you feel better about yourself, so you keep ’em alive.”
The old fart, Sir Jha, had already filed everything I had ever or would ever say under Not Worth Listening To and obviously wouldn’t be paying any further attention to me, but the Kuchera stick bug was staring at me open-mouthed. I shot the kid a wink and a finger gun.
The seatbelts sign turned on with an electronic pong.
“Grab a seat, everyone,” the pilot called back from the cockpit. Oh yeah. The plane was that small. “We take off in three.”
Nick settled into an aisle seat near the front, keeping the window seat open for his fiancée, who probably expected me to do the same thing in a pathetic bid for her attention.
Instead, I stepped up to Iceni’s row. “This seat taken?”
“Yeah, silly!” She slapped the empty seat cushion, sending up a little puff of dust. “You’re sitting t
here!”
“I thought so.” I sat down and wiggled my shoulders and butt until I was as close to comfortable as a person could get on this flying convalescent home.
Carina just barely flicked a glance my way before she closed out of the e-manifest and went to buckle up next to her meathead boy toy.
“So you’re an investigator in Taern?” I asked, leaning closer to the candy knight. I don’t mind eye-diabetes if it leads to sticking my dick in the sugar.
SIX
Two hours later, we landed at an airstrip on the Emden side of the Northern Front.
When you read about the fronts in the news blogs, or watch infograms about the fronts, you’re inundated with images of firefights, tents, and trenches, mostly because that’s what really sells knighthood. Guild knights are out there sacrificing for our country! Guild knights are enduring great hardship so you can be lazy and fat! Guild knights are protecting you from the threat of the pagans, and they don’t even care that they have to shit in a hole in the ground!
In actuality, the airstrip we landed at had a well-maintained tarmac, a rockcrete building that functioned as air traffic control, a helipad, hangars, a row of barracks, a medical shed marked with the twisting Hospitaler symbol, and an idyllic main street’s worth of camp-follower businesses turned legit. If you didn’t have any aspirations and you didn’t mind living on the edge of an active warzone, it might be the kind of place you’d want to settle down and start a family.
Iceni stuck close to me as we disembarked and packed our bags across the tarmac. Thanks to my roguish charm during the flight, she was busy pretending to make conversation with me while fantasizing about all the different ways I would screw her if she let me.
Of course, she’d already decided she would let me.
“Okay, then, so how accurate are the heist holos?” she said. “Give me the Behind the Scenes. How often do you have to use breaker bars to get into houses?”
“Breaker bars are for industrial-era fire exits.” I gestured with my free hand while I talked. Her eyes kept coming back to it. She liked my hands. “And I seriously doubt any private citizen has something interesting enough for me to smash in their window or whatever the last-class breakers are doing nowadays. I only hunt big game.”
Out ahead of us, Carina was talking with Jha while Nickie-boy hung off to the side. Her body language wanted me to believe that she wasn’t interested in my conversation.
“…with the recent pagan culture-shifts away from tech—” she was saying.
Jha was shaking his weathered head. “That’s what makes it such an appealing option to the younger generation—”
I pointed at Iceni. “You heard about Crangel’s sledgehammer?”
Even her smirks were sugar frosted. “You mean the sledgehammer she uses to rule the Hotel Ultimate Security Prison like her own personal island nation? The one the Guild has been trying to pry out of her rotting claws since she got ahold of it? The one they use in every beginning psychology class to teach intimidation rule? Is that the sledge you mean? No, I’ve never heard of it.”
“All right, all right,” I said, waving her off. Her eyes followed my hand’s motion. “I’ll handle the sarcasm, sister. You worry your pretty little head about gathering evidence and investigating dead pagans.”
Iceni stopped walking, brought her fists together at her stomach—her bag and armor clanked against each other—and bowed over them.
“It is my debt incurred,” she said in the salamander-wearers’ tongue. “Please continue instructing me, enlightened brother.”
I grinned. The candy knight was the first person I’d met besides myself who could breathe irony into a pagan language devoid of the concept.
“All of your debts to me are forgotten,” I answered her, then switched back to Anglish. There were too many words that didn’t translate from Anglish to modern salamander-wearer. “Anyway, I stole it last year.”
“What?!” Iceni shrieked in delight. “Crangel’s sledgehammer?!”
Carina couldn’t stand pretending not to hear me anymore. “Three years ago,” she said, throwing a glance over her shoulder at me. “Learn time.”
“I would rather be fisted by a rusty gauntlet,” I said.
Someone choked behind me and slightly to my left. The Kuchera kid. I’d forgotten about him. Most likely we all had. Then I realized that I’d heard that choking sound before.
“You laughed at the meeting,” I said, shooting him a finger gun. “You’re all right, kid.”
“Huh?” he said. “Uh…laugh?”
I nodded. “Although now I’m considering taking back my earlier declaration of ‘all right,’ but that’s just because you sound like a retard, and I don’t want retards laughing at my jokes. It’s bad for business.”
Even though it was just after three in the morning, the hangar was swimming with activity. Knights—both fully armored and in camo utilities—were walking and driving in and out, and stopping occasionally to chat with the mechanics who were working on the swamp and air vehicles stored inside.
In spite of the fact that the weather was right on the cusp of winter, the huge doors at both ends of the hangar had been left open. As soon as we stepped inside, the reason became clear. It was sweltering in there, like walking through some invisible heat membrane into the middle of a Soam summer. The cross-breeze wasn’t doing any good. Sweat trickled down the middle of my back into my ass crack. I took my jacket off and stuffed it into my bag.
Carina led the way to a small shack in the corner under a hanging OFFICE sign. She disappeared inside. Jha and Nickie-boy took up waiting positions leaning against the shack. Kuchera folded his stick bug arms and tried to copy them without looking as if he was copying them.
Iceni stacked her armor on her duffel, then took off her jacket, spread it out, and sat down on it.
“Better make yourself comfortable,” she told me. “At the front, even rush jobs require the proper paperwork. Always submit your emergency evac requests a minimum of forty-five minutes before you get pinned down under enemy fire.”
Jha and Kuchera both laughed at that. Even Nickie-boy almost smiled.
Guild jokes. Gotta love that inner circle jerk.
“You kids have it better than any generation that came before you by a pagan mile,” Jha said. “When I went on my first active, the option for evac wasn’t even there. If you wanted somebody to save your tail, it had to be you.”
“Take it easy, gramps,” Iceni said. “Swamp evac capability has only been there for—what?” She looked at Nick. “Five years now?”
“Just about,” Nick agreed.
“See? Beau and I’ve both been deep in the weeds with nobody to save us. And you know Xiao’s record.” Iceni pointed at the Kuchera kid, who was following the conversation with wide eyes. “His generation’s going to be the soft one.”
“Pfft!” Jha waved a hand at her. “When I was your age, this base wasn’t even here. This all used to be pagan land. My company got cut down—couldn’t have been more than a mile from here—by a group of the fishing people out in the swamps. It’s been drained since. You remember the drainage initiative? You were probably both still in diapers when it went into effect.”
Like good little knights, Nickie and Iceni both nodded.
“Well, back when I was active, this was all swampland, as far inland as Third Root. The pagans were familiar with the terrain and better able to move through it—they’d been doing it for centuries—and we didn’t have any guides or converts at the time to train us in swamp conditions. And we didn’t have these fancy poly-alloys back then. Armor weighed twice as much. All the fishing people had to do was wait for us to step in the muck before they attacked.”
I glanced around. None of the younger knights seemed to mind that this old timer’s story wasn’t going anywhere interesting. The stick bug looked damn near enthralled.
“So, my company’s out there pushing into enemy territory. Steph and Crash, they ride their horses ri
ght into a bog trap, and they’re going down under the weight of their own armor. Me, June, and Big Boy rope them and try to drag them out before they get sucked under, while Miguel and the twins are riding watch. Next thing we know, that whole damn clearing is under fire. I know June got dropped by a bullet because she was right next to me. One second she’s heaving on Crash’s rope, the next I’ve got her brains all over the side of my face. Little chip of skull even got into my eye—had to have it surgically removed when I got back. And Crash, he can’t do anything but flounder while his suit fills up with bog water and pulls him and June’s body down. I just barely dropped Steph’s rope and got my lancer up in time to take a load of scatter right in the chest plate. And of course I landed on my back right in that accursed bog.” Jha shook his head. “They would’ve executed the lot of us if Miguel hadn’t set off that FTE. Tore his own damn leg off, but it saved the rest of us.”
“Sucks to have somebody bleed out on you,” Iceni said in an uncharacteristically solemn voice. “Especially when the hostiles who caused it are already dead.”
Nickie-boy grunted in agreement. Even Kuchera, the wispy-mustached teenage phasmid, nodded. More inner circle jerking.
“Be it far from me to cast aspersions on stupid shit,” I said, “But none of that would’ve happened if the Guild wasn’t obsessed with taking over pagan land. There is literally no reason for this war. Are you people too dumb or too brainwashed to resent the fact that you’re throwing your lives away for nothing?”
Jha just rolled his eyes and added this to his Not Worth Listening To file.
The stick bug couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “God promised us that land!”
“Big deal,” I said. “The pagans’ gods gave them their land, too.”
“That’s a separate argument,” Iceni said. “You were talking about the war causing people to die in vain. I’ve been working with the Enforcers for eight years now—about as far away from the war as you can get—and I’ve almost been killed three times. And one of those when I slipped in the shower! That would’ve been for nothing. Miguel died saving Sir Jha and the rest of his company.” She hitched a thumb at the old knight. “And because of these old relics, innumerable former pagans have come to Christ, their villages have access to medical care, clean water—”