That’s what most battles are really about, when you get down to it—the source. Or the sources, depending on how many there are. The official term is “fontani,” which is the name the Prips made up for them, but a lot of the time it’s easier to just say “source.” Battles basically revolve around the fontani, which makes sense, because they’re how we get our thelemity. No source means no thelemity, and no thelemity means you’re pretty much dead. If the Valentines get your source, they can just pull back and pick you off like nothing. The Valentines have sources, too, though—the Type 0s, or just Zeros for short—and if we can get old Romeo’s sources, the Zeros, that is, like kill them or trap them or make them run away, then we’ve more or less won the battle. Most Valentine fighters actually self-destruct the minute they go dark. As milites, it’s our job to make up the main lines of battle, protecting our sources and pushing forward into a position where we can go after the Zeros. There’s a lot more to it, of course, but that’s the basic the idea.
For this exercise, there’s going to be a real source out there with us, and we’ll have to keep the V-spheres from getting anywhere close. Any squad that lets one past loses automatically. Old Sorril is about halfway through explaining the different formations we’ll be using when someone in the back starts to laugh. It’s one of the bivvies, the real scary one they call Thom. He had to shave his beard and cut his hair, but he’s just as scary as ever.
“Something you would like to add, Recruit Thom?” Sorril asks. She’s pretty annoyed about being interrupted, that’s obvious, but I’m a little surprised she asks Thom a question instead of just ordering him to leave. He doesn’t really speak Aux.
“Pawns,” Thom answers in his thick bivvie accent, a big smile on his scarred old face. “We are pawns.”
I’ve never heard that word before, “pawns,” but I guess the rest of the bivvies all have. They start laughing, too.
I figure Thom must have said something pretty rude, but Sorril doesn’t seem to care. “Thank you for your contribution, Recruit,” she says. “Please hold any further comments until the briefing has concluded.” The bivvies don’t say anything else, but they keep grinning the whole time.
At the end of the briefing, Sorril divides us all up into squads. Each squad is ten people, enough to fill one side of an assault platform. In the Legion, every squad of milites has a leader, the “Decurio,” who gives the orders and so forth. Decurios are usually more experienced milites who’ve been trained to lead, but for this exercise, they’ll just be recruits who’ve done particularly well in training.
I don’t get chosen for Decurio, of course, but Mersh and Spammers and Hexi all do. They’re real good recruits, it turns out. I actually end up in Mersh’s squad. Nobody’s really that happy about it. The other recruits think we’re like destined to lose with me there, and I’m not exactly pleased to be taking orders from Mersh. Mersh is pretty nice about me messing up his chances to win, though. “Just stay low and try not to do anything,” he says, giving me a little punch on the shoulder.
The exercise starts out pretty good, or not that bad, anyway. When the briefing’s over, we put on our D-87s and line up to load into the tetra fortress. It’s waiting for us in a field behind the barracks, this big dark gray ball with a few numbers in yellow along the side, floating about three meters off the ground.
We’ve got to use personal gravity to get inside. I try to think of the fortress as kind of its own planet, like Spammers said, which isn’t too hard, since it really is just a great big ball. It works. I hardly get queasy at all, even when I’m inside, and I have to jog along the curved floor to find my platform.
There are a lot of recruits in the exercise with us, like from other Limit Camps and whatnot, so it takes a while before everyone’s ready, but eventually this little voice in my helmet announces that our fortress is lifting off. Really, though, it doesn’t feel like we’re going anywhere. The walls and floor don’t rumble or anything like that. I probably wouldn’t know we’re moving at all if that little voice didn’t keep chiming in to say how far we are from our launch point. We’re all sitting in a line, my squad is, our backs against the side of the assault platform that’ll face the battle, and Mersh starts getting into the old strategy a bit, telling everyone to look for the biggest concentration of V-spheres and aim there.
I guess I drift off for a little about then, because the next thing I know, Mersh is yelling, “Ten seconds to launch!” and the little voice in my helmet is telling me the same thing, and suddenly the platforms around us start falling away, and we’re out in the middle of the sky.
It’s a sunny day, and clear, and we’re way, way up above the ground. I’d almost forgotten it was winter, but everything below is covered in snow. Over the edge of my platform, I can see a forest all like blanketed in white, the trees getting smaller and smaller every second. Other platforms float around us, with recruits loaded up on both sides, and I’m just glad I didn’t end up on the side facing the ground. As I’m looking around, I hear Mersh yelling for me to get into position. Everyone is already over by the platform’s forward wall, ready to shoot. I scoot in next to him and get my weapon ready just as the first V-spheres appear.
All the recruits are armed with lazels, just the way we would be if this were a real battle. They’re much easier to use than the rifles they gave us in the settlement militia. For one thing, you don’t have to worry as much about wind and distance and whatnot, since lazels shoot energy instead of bullets. I’m actually not too bad with the old lazel, at least when I’m shooting targets, and that’s all the V-spheres are, really.
The V-spheres come down at us like a sheet of rain, and our platform rotates to face them, Mersh shouting at us to open fire. Another good thing about the lazel is you can shoot forever, and it’ll never run out of ammunition as long as you’re someplace that has thelemity, so we just let loose as those V-spheres come charging in. Everywhere we land a shot, some sphere or other gets wiped away in a blue-white shadow, but we’ve hardly gotten started when they all swerve back, pulling away into the sky. Our platforms have no problem keeping up, so we just follow, spreading out to give everyone a clear shot. We’re moving pretty fast, but our suits keep us from feeling it, the same as they keep us from feeling the cold and wind, even though we’re getting real high off the ground—three or four kilometers, probably. Pretty soon we’re riding in and out of these big, thick clouds, with huge white slopes towering over us like mountains.
We’ve done a pretty good job thinning out the V-spheres by then. There are only a few left, whirling around and shooting at us. But just as we swing over this one very tall cloud, a whole new swarm of V-spheres rises, heading straight toward us. Mersh shouts for everyone to aim for the front edge, where the V-spheres are thickest, but even though that area lights up blue like crazy, the spheres keep coming. After only a few seconds, it’s obvious they’re going to crash into us. Even I can tell.
“Break ’em up!” Mersh yells.
Lazels do more than just shoot those little blue needles of light. They’re made for close combat, too. They’ve got something a bit like the bayonets we had back at old S-225. What you do is you split the lazel into two pieces, so you’re basically holding half in each hand, and when you do, each piece turns into a kind of weapon. There’s what we call the blade, which is basically a big knife, almost a meter long, and the buckler, which is more like a shield. They’re both made of that same blue-white energy the lazel shoots, only a lot stronger. The blade is like a hundred direct hits in one, and the buckler can fend off just about anything, even a blade.
“Break ’em up!” is Mersh’s order to draw our blades, so we all step back from the platform wall and pull on our lazels. In a flash, everyone has a blade in one hand and a buckler in the other. Just in time, too, because the V-spheres are coming down on us. A lot of Valentine fighters have blades like ours, but fortunately the V-spheres don’t. Instead, they have littl
e glowing spots they try to bump you with. If one touches you, your squad loses points. Also, it really knocks you over.
For a few seconds, our whole platform is crazy with V-spheres and blades hacking away. I get sort of scared one of us’ll accidentally hit another recruit, which would be just as bad as getting slashed by a Valentine, but pretty soon there are only a few V-spheres left, then none. We didn’t let a single one past. The whole squad is pretty happy, but me especially, because it looks like I made it through the exercise without completely screwing up. Maybe we didn’t get the most points, but at least it wasn’t my fault.
And then out of nowhere my helmet goes black, and when I can see again, the sounds and colors are different. For half a second I have no idea what’s going on, but then the platform starts to tilt, and I get it: We’ve gone dark. I don’t know how it happened, but my blade and buckler are gone, like I’m just holding two halves of a lazel, and I can see my reflection a little in the clear surface of my helmet. I start to wonder why my D-87s don’t feel heavy yet. Then I realize it’s because I’m falling.
This is bad. I mean, we’re totally screwed, me and all the other recruits. It’s not like we have parachutes or anything. We might as well be a bunch of rocks standing on bigger, flatter rocks, for all the flying we can do. Up above, other platforms have started tumbling like great big snowflakes, recruits spinning off, flailing in their heavy suits. I look around and see the recruits on my platform lifting off as we gather speed. Mersh is near the back, and he gives me this big surprised look as the platform drops out from under him.
All at once, I get this idea. I don’t know where it comes from, really, but for some reason I just feel like we’ve all got to stick together. I reach for one of the handles on the platform and pull myself down, then start making my way around, grabbing any recruit I can reach and motioning for them to hold on. It isn’t easy because the platform has started going end over end, and people are sort of floating away, but we’re all falling at about the same speed, so mostly everyone is within reach. But a few are way out there, like Mersh, and they can’t seem to get back. We’ve dropped through the clouds now, and those snowy trees are getting closer and closer. And even though it seems totally pointless, I get a few recruits to make a sort of chain, like one person holding on to the next person’s ankles, so I can swing out and grab Mersh and the rest.
The last recruit from our squad has just grabbed onto our platform when suddenly my helmet blinks again, and the platform starts to slow, then swoop upward. Our thelemity is back. We barely have time to feel relieved, though, before a new wave of V-spheres comes flying up out of the snowy trees. I just sort of gape at them, but Mersh yells for everyone to open fire. A few recruits managed to hold on to their lazels, but mine is long gone, so I run for one of the extras stored at the side of the platform, then start shooting away with the rest of my team. There aren’t many V-spheres this time, which is good because we’re the only platform doing any real shooting. Most of the others are almost empty, with recruits floating all around, trying to get back into position using PG. By the time they do, my squad’s already cleaned up pretty good.
It turns out us going dark was all part of the exercise, to like test how we react to being totally helpless. Since there was no way any of us would survive that kind of fall, we were supposed to just hang tight on our platforms and hope our thelemity came back before we ended up splattered all over the place. So what I did was exactly right, not that it was some brilliant strategic maneuver or anything. It just seemed like everyone should stay together. I didn’t even notice we were upside down half the time. But it meant my squad was the only one ready when that last wave of spheres came, so at the end, when they count up the points, we’ve got the most by far. For the first time since I got into this stupid Legion, I’m a big hero. After old Sorril reads off the scores, my whole squad gathers around, slapping me on the back. And then I puke in my helmet.
I don’t even mind the puke much, though. I’m already all sweaty under my D-87s, and anyway, I’m sort of used to puke by now. The recruits from my squad actually think it’s sort of funny. They give me a hard time, of course, but in like a friendly way. After Sorril dismisses everyone for supper, Spammers and Hexi come over, and Mersh tells the whole story, making me out to be some kind of tough guy. You can tell he’s not just saying it, either, because he sounds annoyed it wasn’t him saving the day and everything.
Just as Mersh is getting to the part where we all go dark, I see that bivvie girl, Naomi, over with some other recruits. It feels like a dream, sort of, because I can’t quite understand what she’s doing here. She looks real different from the last time I saw her. Her brown hair is all combed and tied up, and she’s dressed in black like a Prip. It makes me pretty sad, thinking about little Naomi being in the Legion. She doesn’t seem too upset, though. Actually, she looks quite happy. She’s talking to the other bivvies, and they’re all real excited about something. The bivvies were about the only other recruits to stay with their platform during the exercise, but I don’t think that’s what’s got them all worked up. Even that guy Thom looks happy. It’s hard to tell, because his face is so mean and everything, but I think he’s smiling.
Mersh is about finished with his story, and people start giving me a hard time about the puke again, telling me to go wash up or they won’t sit with me at supper, so I start heading for the barracks. I’m just about there when I hear someone behind me say, “Torro.”
It’s Naomi. I’m not quite sure how she got all the way over here. I didn’t see her coming or anything. But I say, “Hey, Naomi. Good to see you.”
She looks like she’s about to say something, but then she gets a good look at me and sort of pauses. “You are covered in vomit,” she says.
“Yeah, that was me,” I say. “I’m the vomiter. You know, like, gravity and everything.”
Naomi nods, like she’s not very surprised I’d puke on myself. “I was rude to you the last time we saw each other,” she says. “You tried to show me kindness, and I repaid you with scorn. I would like to apologize.”
It takes me a minute to remember what she’s talking about. It all seems like a long time ago. “Oh sure, whatever, no problem,” I say. “What are you doing here anyway, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“This exercise was for me as well. My instructor is teaching me to navigate in battle. He wants me to understand that a great deal will depend on me.”
I don’t quite know what she means, but then I get it. “You’re a source, you mean?”
“I am. Please forgive me for leaving you and your fellow soldiers. I was assured no harm would come to you.”
“It wasn’t so bad. No harm done and so forth.”
“I’m glad.”
She doesn’t say anything else, just sort of looks at me, so I say, “What were you guys talking about over there? You and your people, I mean?”
She smiles then, not at me, but like she’s remembering something. “I had good news for them. My sister, who we thought had died, was found alive and well. We sent a message to our mother today.”
“Hey, that’s great!” Suddenly I feel real happy. Like, I don’t even know this sister, but I’m still happy.
I guess Naomi’s the sort of person who doesn’t talk just to say things. I mean, it’s obvious she thinks it’s great her sister’s back, but I just said that, so she doesn’t need to say it again. All she says is “It was good to see you, Torro. I suggest you have a bath.”
She’s about to go, but then I blurt out, “Hey! Hey, Naomi!”
She turns around and looks at me. “Yes?”
I guess I am the sort of person who talks just to say things. I didn’t really have anything to tell her. I just wanted to talk to her a little more. Now I don’t know what to say. “Hey, what are pawns?” I ask, because it’s all I can think of.
“What do you mean?” she says. She looks pr
etty confused.
“I heard your people say it a while back. They said we’re pawns.”
Naomi thinks about that a minute, then she says, “It is from a game my people have, a game of strategy, called chess. There are several different pieces, each with its own role and abilities. The pawn is the most abundant piece, but also the weakest. Chess is a game of battle, and pawns make up the front line.”
“Yeah, right.” I feel a little sick all of a sudden. Those bivvies were right. Pawns. That’s exactly what we are.
“Pawns are small, but they are also very important,” Naomi says. She’s probably figured out what I’m thinking. She’s being pretty nice about it, too. “You and I can play a game of chess sometime, and I will show you. For now, I must go. My instructor is waiting.”
She tilts her head toward a sort of short, chubby guy standing off toward the barracks. I hadn’t seen him before, and I don’t know how Naomi did, since he’s behind her. I’m about to say something, but then the chubby guy sort of shimmers, like there’s a shadow passing over him. Some of the recruits heading off to supper call for me to come along, and I wave to them, to like let them know I’ll be along shortly. When I look back, though, Naomi and the chubby guy are both gone. It’s just me and the other pawns.
THIRTY
RAE
Ninth City Burning Page 23