by Adam Roberts
3
Let’s deal with the key. I must of course find the best way of dealing with this object. What I will do is put it in its context: the Battle of Basingstoke.
The first thing we saw when we went in at the front door was a child’s body lying in the entrance hall on its back.
Not to get ahead of myself.
There is a particular way that masonry gets sheared and snapped by war. You realize in such moments that houses are in essence structures built from dust that has been compacted to an extraordinary degree, such that they unpack into clouds the size of counties. Spent cartridges littered the ground like cigarette butts. They gleamed when the sun put its head through the clouds, like a kind of treasure. There had been a firefight, here, upon this spot, and not long since. The houses all around were covered in the new-drilled rivet holes of bullets.
The bombardment had stopped, and we three darted out from our cache and hurried down the street, through all the metal confetti and the stony litter. The warrior knows. Take this house, here: its front messed and fractured, but the whole still standing and solid. Chunks of brick and concrete like icing littering the path.
Three of us went into that house to assess its strategic capability - three storeys tall, with a good corner view down two long straight roads. A bomb had detonated out front of it, and this detonation had instantly milled the windows to glass powder and pushed the grindings into the front rooms. But the main door still stood, and the plaster was only a little fragmented.
We came into that house and checked the hall, and there we saw a child’s corpse lying on its back in the entrance hall. The child had a key embedded in its forehead. The key was an old-style piece of ironmongery: a metal ring and shaft at the end of which was fused an abbreviated row of metal tetris blocks. I suppose it had been in the keyhole, and that the blast outside had shot it out like a bullet straight into the head of that poor kid.
It was not pleasant to see that dead child.
The door, though, had held: a great windowless slab of black-painted wood, like the monolith in 2001, locked and steady on large nineteenth-century brass hinges.
We stepped through the empty window frames of the front room and came through to the hall that way. And there he was, that poor wee kid.
‘What’s he doing in the hall, on his lonesome?’ asked Simic.
‘He won’t be here by himself,’ I said. ‘His parents are still in. I’d say they all decided to dash out the front door until a detonation persuaded them otherwise.’
We went all the way through the ground floor, our rifles like dalek-eyes, room by room. The kitchen was at the back, and it was in a state. It’s easy enough to distinguish the sort of mess made by careless living - unwashed dishes, an open margarine container on the side, a pellet of milk souring at the bottom of a glass - from the mess made by people desperate to grab some provisions before fleeing. The fridge was open, humming to itself to pass the time. Pasta squirls littered the floor. Tins had been yanked from a cupboard and strewn. A bottle of wine lay Humpty-Dumptied upon the floor, contents on the lino in a red-mirror puddle.
The back doors were double glazed, the glass still intact although pierced at one place and marked as if by a spiderweb. A corresponding bullethole on the floor puckered lino into an ‘oo!’ The garden was a wedge of lawn that didn’t lead anywhere.
There was an annexe off the kitchen, and inside this a sumosquat washing machine had committed ritual suicide: its door open, its guts spilling out in sodden tangles of denim and cotton on to the floor.
I was first up the stairs, step by step, and came out onto a spacious landing. The carpet looked brand new. There was a fleur-de-lys pattern on the wallpaper. At the front was the master bedroom, the windows all powdered and scattered across the duvet and sown like seeds into the thick pile. Other rooms at the side and the back of the house were quiet and neat and untouched. At the back was a room with a piano in it. It was still turned on, its screen reading KRAFTWERK HARPSICHORD YES/NO? Had they really been right in the middle of playing the keyboard, and unloading the washing, as troops scurried and exchanged small-arms fire all around them? Had they only interrupted their routines when the bombardment began literally knocking at their door? Civilians do indeed act in unpredictable ways in the middle of battle.
‘They should have gotten out days ago,’ said Simic.
‘Hindsight’s easy,’ was Tucker’s laconic opinion.
That poor little kid. Death by key.
All around us, in that town, such civilians who had elected, for whatever reason, not to become refugees were lurking in cellars and under stairways and wherever they could lock a door and pile mattresses. Thousands of them, probably. And this family had been in the middle of tinkling on their electric piano.
A narrower spiral stair rose from the back of the first-floor landing, curling tightly up into the second, top floor. As I put my foot on the bottom step the bombardment began again outside. It was the usual sound: the big drums, trailing their beats through the muddy noise of echo and structural collapse. Whooomph and whoah. Grumble, tumble, rumble,
There was some rapid wifi. ‘[This one’s aerial],’ said Durcan, who was part of a squad down by the river. Three or four others duploed this assessment.
‘[They’re making passes from the east,]’ said a trooper called Patel whom I’d never met in person, although I knew him well enough. ‘[We’re on the library hill, and you can see them coming in, settling into attack flightpaths. They’re aiming at the ring road.]’
‘[They’ve got four cars coming in, down here,]’ interrupted Capa, on priority. Cars, meaning tanks. He had two dozen comrades with him, and every one of them duploed this. The consensus was that our cars were the targets.
‘[We’re moving them,]’ said Capa, the sounds of the detonations around him scuzzing his transmission.
‘[What were they in the fucking open for?]’ prioritized a trooper called Thirlwell. This was poor form. He was immediately blanked by twenty men for misusing priority: cut from the wiki for ten minutes: his contribution not being constructive, a ten-minute sinbinning was the usual sanction.
Four priorities jammed the wiki, and the system ranked them and rattled through them: three from soldiers in the west and one from Patel on library hill:
‘[They’re sending in shock troops,]
‘[Eighty runners, give or take, crossing the ring road now].’
‘Riders?’ Tucker put in.
‘[All runners no riders. Wait a mo.]’
‘[They are bringing up their own cars.]’
‘[Why yes they are.]’
‘[Helicopters, behind the planes.]’ This last from Patel.
‘[I propose we group in Mall plaza,]’ said Moffett. ‘[Good terrain for defensive combat.]’
‘[I counterpropose,]’ said a breathless sounding trooper whose tag flickered before resolving - presumably a symptom of electromagnetic interference attendant upon rapid arms fire near his position. Crowley, his tag said; and he was in the west. ‘[We divide by location, west to fight the western incursion, those near library hill counter the helicopter drop troops.]’
A trooper would have to have an outstandingly brilliant third notion, or to have had something pretty deadly urgent to report, to insert a third proposal at this point. It sometimes happened, but rarely. So we all voted. I was halfway up the second, winding stair when I keyed in my vote. It was pretty clear, on this occasion, which way to cast. Simic and Tucker were standing beside me, voting.
The decision went with Crowley’s counterprop. It was the better proposal, in the circumstances, after all.
We got on with it. The rest of the communication was all orientation chatter: updates on where the enemy was massing, or moving. The three of us got into the top floor. The rooms up here more poky, and more cluttered with everyday junk. And here we found the rest of the family: a mother holding another kid, no more than ten years old, clutching very tightly to her mam; a father doing the s
ame thing with a rucksack full of food. They had packed themselves neatly enough into the corner of the top room.
I kept a rifle on them as Simic went through the rucksack; but it was all food, no weapons.
‘Why didn’t you get out?’ he asked.
The man stared at him like he had a tonguedectomy; but the woman said, ‘We were going, but, but, but there was there a lot of sudden, a lot of sudden noise.’
‘Noise?’
‘Outside - it was all the sound of guns and it was other sounds. We got, we got spooked.’
‘Try to get unspooked, now,’ Tucker told them. ‘For your own benefit.’
I checked the windows. The ones in the front room gave excellent defilades down the two roads on which the house stood. Along the western one I could see all the way to the large glass corporate building positioned, I knew, on the ring road. Now that I had a vantage point there was a reason to googlemap the area. I checked what I could see against what the map told me, and annotated it hurriedly with a few salient details, uploading to my comrades on the battle’s wiki.
The man found his voice. ‘Don’t kill us,’ he said.
‘Hssh now,’ said Tucker, taking up a firing position at a side window and also updating his googlemap . He had seen my update, so he must have had something else to add.
‘Please don’t kill us.’
‘I tell you what, though,’ said Simic, prodding at a hatch in the ceiling with his rifle butt, and apparently in a more talkative mood than we other two. ‘The top floor’s not the best place to hide yourselves. You got a cellar? You should go down into the cellar.’
‘We couldn’t get into the garden, because there was shooting, somebody was shooting,’ said the woman, her voice high and warbly. ‘And when we went to the front door there was an explosion and somebody shot Pierce.’ At this the man began to cry like a child, ungainly gulping sobs. He clutched his rucksack close to his torso. The woman did not cry, though she looked stunned and unhappy.
The girl, holding spider-monkey tight to the torso of her parent, watched us with very large eyes.
It was really pretty upsetting. That is to say: I was aware it was going to be upsetting, at that point in the future when I would have time to think about it properly. It wasn’t upsetting there and then. I was too busy to be upset, there and then. You understand.
‘Hssh,’ said Tucker again, to the civvies. And then, to me: ‘That car?’
I could see all the way down the long perspective of the western road: a few parked civilian vehicles, a few vehicles smashed or overturned, a great spoor of debris all the way along. Worthy of a 1st January morning before the cleanup. Trash everywhere, the bins toppled and scattered. Water poured from a jag in the concrete where the main had been fractured, fountaining from stone like a magic source. One crazy civilian whizzed along the pavement on a pushbike. I checked the scene over a second time.
‘See it?’ Tucker prompted.
He was right. At the far end, the gun-limb of a small tank was visible poking out from a side street. His googlemap update had been spot-on.
I balanced my weapon, taking the best and most careful advantage of its aiming software, whilst Tucker pinged the whole troop’s attention to his map update. Then we waited, and listened to the sound of the sobbing man in the room with us, and the distant accompanying cacophony of battle to the west. Listened to the distant scraping sound of jets in the sky. From time to time there was a ping as one trooper or another added details to the collective understanding of the situation. Simic went through to the back, checking all the remaining top floor rooms. It doesn’t pay to be careless about that kind of thing.
But we didn’t have to wait long. Once we’d reported the car’s position, some comrades took it on themselves to flush it out. Far up along the street a shell’s impact turned the side of one building into fizzing popcorn. The ground shook. The car rushed forward and both Tucker and I fired at the sane time.
We drew, as if we were artists, perspective lines in smoke all the way from our building to the body of the car. Our projectiles hit its front turret and the whole component flew away, kicked clear from the chassis. The turret span whole in the air and clattered against the tarmac - it made, even at that distance, an audible clang. The recoil massaged my shoulder.
That moondust smell of gunpowder. The noise of our weapons-fire had shocked the sobbing man into silence.
Naturally I felt sorry for them, that civilian family. But by the same token, of course, that feeling sorry thing couldn’t happen in that time at that place. Fighting, for a solider, is all about emotional deferral. The ability to postpone those sorts of reactions, to take them and bundle them through the inward time portal into the future, is what separates the good soldier from the bad. That’s not as hard to do as you might think.
I switched over my rifle’s feed and directed thirty seconds of smallfire into the body of the car. There was a familiar and intense satisfaction in doing this. It was the sense of precision, I think, as much as the sense of power. The decapitated car lurched forward, turned, and whined with acceleration, speeding up the road directly towards us, its one remaining gun swivelling to orient a fix. Simic was at my window now, and followed my tracer line to aim his own punch-shell. The thing had covered half the distance when we stopped it properly, with a bloom of hard yellow flame and spreading anemone tentacles of smoke. It skidded and juddered, tipped up. It held for a moment, and then it went over on to its side. Nobody got out.
Ground troops were making doorway-to-doorway dashes in the distance. They were enemy soldiers. They didn’t look that different to our own people, and might easily have been mistaken for them, except that they hadn’t identified themselves on the wiki. I would have liked to take some shots at them, but Tucker pointed out one of the jets turning in the sky. ‘It’s locking,’ he said. He meant: let’s go.
The problem jets have in modern warfare is, ironically enough, precisely the reason feudal generals love them so much - their speed. But of course speed is not an unalloyed good. Good for dogfighting, clumsy for ground assault. It takes a pilot an age and an age to turn his machine around and acquire a new target, and it’s too obvious to ground troops what he’s doing as he does it. Cities are too compact for jets to fight in, except when it comes to long straights of preplanned strafing or bombing. And when you are facing an army that doesn’t bother to put its own planes in the sky, so that there’s nobody to dogfight, then your planes, your outrageously expensive and vulnerable planes, find themselves somewhat at a loss. They could drop a big bomb, of course, and wipe out the whole town. But let’s consider that possibility for a moment. It would kill large numbers of civilians, and a number of your own troops, as well as killing us, which probably isn’t what you want to do. And besides, given the nature of modern weaponry, it’s just as easy to do that nowadays with a €10,000 suitcase missile as with a billion euro plane. I don’t doubt that feudal generals sit in their regimental palaces just craving a good clean old-fashioned war - where the enemy waste their money and resources on their own jets, so as to provide dogfights, or at the very least where the enemy lurk in Torah Borah caves and can be pounded from the air. But no NMA would be so foolish as to condense all its forces in that way. Modern wars are fought in densely populated areas, and in the age of global media - news TV and the web - which makes it harder and harder for generals to order actions that will kill large numbers of civilians. So the old saw air superiority wins wars no longer obtains. Why else, if not a symptom of the sluggish inertia of hierarchical armed forces, have you not yet realized this?
Still, this particular jet was on its way to us.
‘Downstairs,’ yelled Simic, at the cowering civvies. ‘I strongly recommend.’
Tucker took hold of the woman’s arm and pulled her and her child along. Her complexion was white as summer clouds, and her eyes kept jittering left to right, but she held tight to her remaining child and stumbled down the stairs after Turner. I held my hand
out to the man, but he started wailing ‘don’t kill me, don’t kill me’ and quailed away. There was no time to loiter, so I left him. I told myself; these people aren’t my problem. Or perhaps I didn’t have time even to think that. I just left.
Their lad was on his back in the ground-floor hallway with a key embedded in the bone of his forehead. Nothing I could do about that.
And indeed as I thudded down the second set of stairs I heard the father coming after us, so presumably his fear was not so overwhelming as to prevent the thought perhaps I’d better move to intrude.
We clattered all the way downstairs and the three of us made it out into the back garden, as the plane lion-roared through the sky directly over our heads. Man, but that is a loud sound. The roof of the house exploded behind us. There was the whumph, and for a moment my shadow stood out against the lawn at bright noon. And then I was on my face in the grass and the soil and debris was clattering all around, and - it seemed - the jet was screaming in my ears right on the back of my head. But it passed. As the philosopher once said: everything passes. Wise, that. Death blew up the roof, and it knocked me down, and it yelled in my ear, but then it passed on. It was dragging its pterodactyl fingernails down a blackboard in hell. But it moved on quick enough.