by R. K. Syrus
FRONT
TOWARD ENEMY
They play music and recorded tank motor sounds in a bizarre harmony. A damn loud one.
“Turn that off. You’ll wake the dead.”
The twenty-five-year-old quadriplegic toggles a switch and quiets his ride.
“Now, colonel, would that be all and about such a terrible thing? As long as the undead follow orders and stick to an approved meal plan, we can use everyone in the fight.” Ennis grins. His facial scars twist into a strangely appropriate combination of chronicled pain and present mirth.
Caught between surprise and laughter, Sienna also feels duty bound to play a prank on her school mate. He cannot see it, but the service bot is still alive. The mechanoid looks up at Sienna with six eyes. Its tiny mechBrain probably recognizes Sienna as human. These bots do the endless hours of grunt-work in the vast complex. Driven by self-preservation software, it silently struggles to get through the robot flap to the safety of the service conduits. If Ennis notices, he’ll keep grinding on the wounded little fellow until it’s all nuts and bolts.
Ennis needs distracting. A hospital worker passes. Sienna clucks. “Man, I thought it was dress code for nurses to wear bras.”
Predictably, Ennis looks in the direction of healthcare cleavage. Sienna’s foot flicks off the stricken bot’s power. It plays dead.
“Another notch on your scabbard. You’ve killed it. What are you doing at Baker? This place is for soldiers who are badly hurt.”
“Harrr,” Ennis says with ruthless good humor. “That joke’s as funny as the first fifty times you told it.”
With the controller, he looks like Franklin Roosevelt puffing a cigarette holder. An FDR with a blond crew cut, one eyebrow, and a homicidal twinkle in his eyes. She and Ennis are both from the Carolinas, but time and travel have only made his accent more pronounced. Especially when he talks fancy.
“How the fates mock me. A year ago we were butterbars fresh out of Academy. Then you get a free trip to the South Pole, a full bird colonel field commission. And me? I get blown up by my own tank, issued a lousy wheelchair, and my deeds are etched in memory only by a snapshot on the Wall of Heroes stashed behind the children’s clothing section in Bonworthy’s discount department store in Charleston.”
Sienna thinks. “Don’t your folks own all the Bonworthy’s stores?”
“Indeed they do.” Ennis rolls his eyes. “My humiliation is complete. Bury me now!”
From the side of the chair, a bas-relief gold disc flashes. It’s the helm of Athena, goddess of wisdom and war strategy, patron of West Point, on the hilt of a sword.
“What? They let you keep that? In here?”
“I told the guard it was just a really long scalpel.”
“Man, they searched me for toothpicks. You handicappers get all the breaks and the best parking spots.”
Ennis’s sword had been present at nearly every West Point graduation ceremony since its founding. Sienna does not know how many lives had been ended by that weapon in its history; she only knows for sure it killed people during the Battle of Beast March.
She checks out the many features of her friend’s ride. It ain’t no Army-issue quad. “I’m surprised they noticed it, with all your new rig’s got goin’ on.”
From the back of the carbon-fiber body, a traffic safety flag whips around dangerously. It features the mascot of Ennis’s battalion, a monstrous Hellcat, ripping the heads off Nazi zombies. The pennant reads:
Treat ’Em Rough!
This is the last place she expected to see Ennis. “I heard you were in Charleston giving talks and all.” His drawl is infectious.
“I was, but then I heard my second-best chum on Earth had recovered sufficiently enough that the surgeons could mess him up again for his own good. Couldn’t miss that.” Ennis leans forward as conspiratorially as anyone in his position can. “I also wanted to get the low-down on what y’all brought back. Scuttle is they’re blueprinting weapons with it, includin’ a 120-ton MBT with a railgun—”
“Dammit, Reidt,” Sienna hisses at him. She looks around. Baker Medical is a secure facility, but there are some things you just can’t go flapping your gums about. Anywhere. “You know that’s all classified. We signed treaties with everyone saying we’d only use the Ansible for peaceful inventions. Even the commander-in-chief is on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ basis with the DARPA.”
“Sorry.” Ennis shrugs a shoulder apologetically. “But really, like they’d ever discover something new and not try to blow stuff up with it. Peace always seems to break out when we have the biggest guns.”
As well as being a jabber-mouth, Ennis perpetually needs to see other kids’ toys. “Hey, let me see it,” he says eagerly. “I know you got your ring. You’re jaybird naked without it.”
Her short fingernail finds the switch at the side of her class ring. A holograph of all her commendations appears. She flicks to the last one.
“Pretty, huh, Ennis?”
The Antarctica Service Medal, with its multicolored ribbon, floats a few inches over her hand. Skin graft scars and general paralysis notwithstanding, Ennis looks pretty darn jealous.
“Is that the Wintered Over bar clasp?”
“Sure is,” Sienna says. “Technically, we weren’t there long enough. But my warrant officer, T-Rex, wrote his congressman and said it was damned dark and damned cold down there and if that didn’t qualify as wintering over, he had no idea what would.” Sienna cuts power to the hologram. Mementos of her Army career since Junior ROTC flicker and vanish. “So they gave in,” Sienna says. “I suspect they wanted to keep the whole thing quiet.”
“Yeah,” Ennis guffaws. “Like everyone doesn’t know you took on a mechanized battalion of Russians. Just your squad and some jury-rigged air support. You were on the cover of Stars and Stripes, for Pete’s sake.”
“All they talked about was Beast, the hostage rescue years ago, and my hair.”
“True. Remind me, what was the headline?” Ennis pauses to rub it in. “Oh, right: ‘Youngest Army Colonel Since Civil War Redefines the Combat Coiffure.’ To be fair, they couldn’t say much about the beatin’ you put on those bushwhackers.”
Sienna watches Ennis’s eyes grow bright as he imagines the frozen carnage. It’s the type of fun he is now forced to miss out on. He jerks his head sideways, which Sienna interprets as halfway between a fist pound to her and the flashing of a middle finger in the general direction of Moscow.
“Boy, were those Russians tore up when you took that weird blob of whatever it is out from under their noses,” he says. “They thought they had you dead to rights. Using a big ol’ ice cyclone as cover for their heavy Arctic cyborg-warfare unit out of Bellingshausen.”
And don’t forget Roger getting hurt so bad he had to hand off command before he passed out.
“In the end it worked out okay,” Sienna allows. “Just not for the enemy.”
Just saying it makes her wonder who the real enemy was, or is.
10
Antarctica was a set-up. She should have known it going in. The mission was her “welcome to the Army, you uppity base-trash hillbilly” gift from the tubby men and brittle crones in the subbasements of the Pentagon. From the moment she graduated, they’d been pissed at her. They wanted their new Second Lieutenant McKnight, cadet brigade commander, winner of the Attucks Medal for Scholarship and Athletics, for their own. They wanted Sienna to become a walking recruitment ad for military gender and racial equality.
In an all-volunteer Army, Don Draper has replaced Sergeant York. PR is the fast track to the top. She was supposed to become their multi-cultural, photogenic-from-most-angles, safe-to-let-talk-in-front-of-cameras shill. The career path aggressively offered to her featured blue-ribbon recruitment drives, Lincoln Center lunches, and dinners at the White House.
OMFG! Like that was gonna happen.<
br />
Butterbars get to request their first duty assignments. In the olden days, after they let girls into West Point, folders were tabbed blue for boys and pink for girls. Now duty binders are unisex. But, like the fine print on the enlistment form says, for five years you are property of the US Army. Sienna was pleasantly surprised to get the billet that took her back home. She should have known there was a hook.
A year ago, Sarge Bryan and his squad were grounded. Declared inactive because no commanding officer of at least second lieutenant rank was willing to be responsible for them. The joy of being assigned to lead them was tempered right quick. Her brand-new command post was a decommissioned latrine. The message could not have been more clear had they texted her: mess with the Pentagon powers, and your career ends in the crapper.
They made the best out of what they got handed and ended up calling their unique CP Whiskey Charlie for water closet. The worst part was having to endure T-Rex’s toilet jokes. He kept coming up with new ones long past the point of funny. She should have known that hook would have a split shank to it. They hadn’t been there hardly a week when Antarctica was dropped on them.
Eleven months is a good long time to cogitate. The plan was obvious. After she led her team to shame and ruin, even the Army’s Air Defense Artillery would be too good for her. ADA had for years been a decent haven for women soldiers who just had to join men in combat roles.
Once Sienna failed, if she survived, then the bureaucrats would be free to relegate her to ever more obscure and ever more crushingly humiliating postings, the military equivalent of the typing pool. And there she would stay until she could legally quit.
Too bad for them, she and her team exceeded expectations.
“And,” Sienna continues to Ennis, “this is Roger’s last big surgery. None of the others got seriously hurt. Though Whitebread had to have some frostbite treatments on a part of his body I can’t discuss in polite mixed company.”
“You just watch yourself over in Europe, Sie. While you’re guarding the thing, and the Dogs are all together,” Ennis cautions. “When you rub the Ivans’ nose in it, like you did, and make them wear their tin asses as hats, like you did, they’ll come at you sideways. Without the vaguest pretext of honor.”
Sienna does not have time to explain. She’s used every ounce of influence and cashed in every favor to get out of going to Europe. At her feet, the damaged service bot plays possum. Its head dangles by some wires. Sometimes her own head feels like that. Ennis is the only one who knows her. The only one who’s seen what she can do if it takes over. They’ve never talked about that particular subject. Now is not the time. But Sienna needs something, some kind of reassurance that she’s doing right by Sarge Bryan and her team.
“Say, Ennis,” she starts, trying to figure how to ask something no one can tell her, “you remember in Tolkien, where the little hairy guy has to carry the evil ring to the volcano of doom?”
“Besides Twain and Faulkner, I’m really more of a Road Rage Cataclysm Online man.” His one eyebrow raises in casual mystification. “But I saw the movies.”
“Well…” Sienna feels stupid but keeps talking, “how did Frodo know it was him deciding to do things? And not the ring?”
Ennis’s eyebrow squirms. He cogitates. “Sie, in a case like that… well, as long as Frodo felt he was following orders and sticking to an approved meal plan, Middle Earth needed everyone in the fight.”
That’s enough. Thanks, Lt. Reidt.
Sienna points at the broken bot. “Speaking of enemy hostilities, what did this little fellow ever do to you?”
“That mechanized miscreant affronted me with untrammeled provocation that required a swift and violent response.” Ennis looks down at the presumed robocorpse gored by his wheelchair. “It was supposed to bring me my food tray after a pool rehab session. Instead, this little bugger brought me a bedpan.”
“Okay. That’s not so—”
“It wasn’t exactly empty,” Ennis huffs. He takes up his mouth stick and nudges his chair forward with the idea of further punishing his victim. The tines of the miniature mine plough shear off a section of the robot’s metal skin. It is no longer pinned. “And that’s as detailed as I can be about the episode in polite mixed company.”
“I think it has learned its lesson. You killed it good.” Sienna looks down the hallway. Sarge is supposed to meet her. “You didn’t see Bryan, did you?”
Those two always had a friendly but intense rivalry, which rarely came to blows. Though Ennis’s blood is up and Sarge would be advised to mind his manners or risk falling victim to possibly the deadliest mod of a Hawking chair ever.
“Now, mmm, let me think,” Ennis says. “Two-fifty, six-one, with glowing eyes that look like they fell out of a pinball machine and into his head?”
“That’s our man.”
“Ain’t seen him.” Ennis’s shoulder twitches like he wants to check his six. “Say, the rest of your people, they around? Nobu or T-Rex?”
“Nope, they’re all in NC. You’re thinking someone rigged the poopbot as a joke?”
“Now that you mention it…”
Sienna shakes her head. “If it was T-Rex, you’d be wearing what was in the bedpan,” Sienna says and grins in the easy way she can with Ennis and perhaps no one else. “You remember what he and Nobu did after that Navy commander refused to help Sarge during Ess Alüm? They hacked the central rations supply system and everyone got something extra in their meal packs.”
“Those swabbies are never going to forget that one.” A smile creases the shrapnel scars on his cheeks. “For weeks every ready-to-eat meal the sailors and Marines got had a big gummy candy treats in the shape… the shape of, uh…”
“Of a cock.”
“Sie!”
“What? We’re in a hospital, and I’m pretty sure that’s the medical term,” Sienna says as she sees Ennis’s face is actually getting flushed. “There’s nothing to be ashamed about, Ennis. Nearly half the population has one.”
“Sie!” His face is getting redder by the second.
They’ve made huge advances for people with spinal cord injuries. Ennis looks nearly as fit as he did at graduation. Robotic physio machines keep his muscles toned. His brain just can’t use those muscles. For anything. For someone as aggressively physical as Ennis had been all his life, the sudden change must be devastating. At least his vicious sense of humor hasn’t been paralyzed.
“And using robots in a prank, that kind of engineering’s more Whitebread’s field.”
Ennis’s cheeks puff in a silent whistle. “That is one scary mother—”
“Can’t be him, neither. He’s in stockade,” Sienna says. “That’s the other reason I’m here. The secretary of the Army wanted me to see him in person and promise if they let Whitebread out of the can I’d put him back in when the mission’s done.”
“That old politician just wanted your autograph.”
“Y’think? He did have me sign two glossy pictures. Said they were for his daughter.”
“Just accept it, Sie. You’re the most famous active soldier we’ve got and no one can actually talk about what you did.” Ennis considers the list of suspects. “If I had completely inadvertently done something to get Snakelips annoyed, she wouldn’t send a bot. She’d just shoot me.”
“Delicia’s not known for subtlety,” Sienna says. “She would probably peg you off from up top of the Washington Monument. It’s got a good view of every window here and most entrances.”
Sienna checks the time. She wants to ask how he has been. After he was wounded, Sienna tried to see him at the Reidt estate. His parents told her he was resting. For five days. Each morning, she sat on their broad, sunny porch. Maids came by with lemonade and all-butter pie. Ennis would not see her. Sienna understood. Still, on the last day, she left a note. With Jane Bowie, she carved a mild obscenity in the wood railing
of the porch where a person in a wheelchair was most likely to read it.
Asking how he is would just make him mad. And those tines on the front of his wheelchair look pretty sharp. Besides, what can she say? What can he say? They know each other. No one has to tell them to suck it up. No one has to urge them to endure. They know. They do.
“Good seeing you, Ennis,” she says simply. “Hooah?”
“Hooah, Sie,” he replies. “Always.”
She needs to go. And so does Ennis.
“Well, Lieutenant, when a retired southern gentleman like yourself can find the time, drop by the Base. That is, if you haven’t replaced this mine plow with a shuffleboard paddle.”
Sienna uses the R word on purpose, just to yank her friend’s chain.
“What? Retired? Because of this?” Ennis looks down at his inert body as though he’s just sprained his ankle. “This ain’t nothing. I’m a 22nd century warrior. I do physio every day and twice on Sundays. I have the body fat and muscle tone of a champion triathlete. I’m the star of the Walk Again program. I only use this chair after anaerobic physio. You wait until they hook me up with my milspec ATLAS suit. I’ll be back in a real tank and… hey!”
Sienna kicks the sleeping bot’s power on. It dashes off.
“Would you look at that,” Sienna says in her best surprised voice. “It ain’t all dead.”
Ennis is instantly incensed. “Out of the way. That miscreant bot has to pay!”
She blocks him. The jagged extension of the wheelchair threatens her ankles.
“Don’t think I won’t, Sie!” Ennis warns as he twists his mouth controller.
“Now, that’d be striking a superior officer, lieutenant. I’ll make sure they put you in with Whitebread,” Sienna taunts back. “I’m just giving the little guy a head start. It’s one of the principles this nation was founded on. Everyone deserves a fair chance.”
Scraping along the far wall, he gets past her with a roar of recorded tank noise.
Through teeth he says, “Sie, I’m damn sure the Founding Fathers did not include dumb excrement-bearing bots when framing mankind’s preeminent clarion blast of freedom and liberty.”