War Stories

by Andrew Liptak

  “I’m watching,” the general said in a voice that suggested that he had his doubts.

  She repeated the exercise. This time the puppet stumbled on two legs, not four, crouched and trembling.

  “I see,” the general said, and this time his voice said that he did.

  “So tell me,” the surgeon said, “is this acceptable?”

  The general smiled at her, then, and his smile was like the moon slivering black. “So tell me,” he said, only slightly mocking, “can you do this with other anomalies, or is your surgical expertise limited to puppets?”

  Within a scant few generations, nothing moved upon this world that was not a two.

  §

  The march to the battleground is long. I listen to the fliers’ rattling cries, to the wind skittering through the branches of the shroudtrees, to the intermittent splash and patter of the rain. Sometimes there are paths built upon the mire, tottering structures of ropy fibers braided together by hands now rotted nameless.

  The Warhosts have designations to us, and names among themselves: a subtle distinction. Mine is telling the team leader about the mountain it sees far in the distance, wrapped in swollen purple clouds. As we approach the mountain in the reverie, its peak grows to resemble a dragon’s head.

  One of the units murmurs a story of a six–legged dragon, terrible of mien, and the six corpse–riders it bore into battle against the twos. There is no mountain, dragon–headed or otherwise, in the real–world arena. Perhaps it is simply that we are not imaginative enough to see dragons in dragonless spaces.

  I am not sure which Warhost originated this nucleus of dragons. There are competing dragon–myths, including the common ones about hostile dragonmotes and the less common ones, older in origin, about benevolent dragon deities, spirits of rain and storm and ocean unchained. Maybe it has to do with the clouds, with the persistent, seething humidity. An incarnation of discomfort.

  Today the Warhosts seem neither to regard the dragon–manifestations as trophies to be slain nor as deities to be propitiated. Instead, the hosts are concerned with going unnoticed. I remember another engagement where they believed that they traveled across a slumbering dragon’s spine, and had to drill holes into it, drive spikes into the holes, to keep it from waking and rousing the earth with rocket thunder and mortar fire. That’s not what they’re doing this time.

  One of the regulators within this Warhost queries me directly about the reverie, attention I haven’t received in some time. Presumably whatever I say will be conveyed to the rest of the team, so I had better not waste its time. Unfortunately, I have no magic answers. All I can tell it is what I have told myself, recursive riddles, dragons within dragons. I do, however, offer to walk the reverie myself as a two, and it accepts this as distasteful but necessary.

  While I put together my reverie–puppet, the Warhost slaps at a whining sound. Its reflexes, already damaged by its current set of modifications, are not good enough. Whatever it tried to slap has escaped. A red welt rises on the back of its right arm. The welt itches, although at least the Warhost doesn’t scratch.

  I am bothered by this, even though the twos have a history of being irritable about pests, harmless or otherwise. But the regulators must think it of no consequence, and for my part, I have other matters to attend to.

  §

  We have reached the battleground. The Warhosts have been patrolling it in lonely, irregular arcs. It continues to rain in sizzling bursts, never for long, but the clinging moisture makes the host huddle in on itself in wordless misery.

  I hear the buzzing of insects. One of the regulators has induced the secretion of a waxy, foul–smelling chemical mixture to ward away the insects and soothe the welts. Some success on the second count, very little on the first. The insects are swift and elusive, night–fliers with a talent for stealth. I’m only surprised there aren’t more of them, given the environment.

  The Warhost continues to cringe from the specters of six–dragons. They are everywhere now: cloudshadows stamped waveringly across the dim waters, claw marks across the hunched trees. Dragon silhouettes rearing in the distance, their sibilant voices threading through the breath of evening. Drums to which dragons recite their prophecies in orderly hexameter.

  In the reverie, a new story emerges. Dragons eat the world’s subterranean foundations, chewing open rock and fire and root. The holes are small to the point of invisibility, yet they make the world porous, a sponge to absorb the poison influences that filter through the void from other worlds. Little by little, the world will become infused with coagulating radiation until it can no longer sustain life.

  The twos are good at numeration when they care to be, but they don’t seem to care that I have joined their number. I have built myself out of scraps of sinew, layering them over a perfect armature of unhollow bones, and covering that with rough brown skin. In form I am more like the Warhosts’ ancestors than they are themselves. This is deliberate: I wish to see as they see, not as we would have them see.

  Unfortunately, journeying through the reverie is not so simple as that. I know the movement–patterns of walking, of running, of stumbling through thick mud, but it is another to think as the Warhosts think, no matter how attentively I listen to their legend–weaving.

  There’s another problem, which I am faintly aware of as I wrestle with the difficulty of seeing dragons’ whiskered visages in hillsides and dragons’ lantern eyes in foxfire. The Warhosts, for their part, seem entirely unaware of the regulators’ dismay: in all this time we have seen no trace of the enemy.

  §

  You expect a third tale of twos. There is no third tale except, perhaps, to the extent that this embedding narrative is it.

  Beware the dragons, I tell the regulators. In the reverie, I have acclimated to my two–form. I march with rotting feet, use callused hands to shade my eyes from sunlight glaring from the black waters. I can hear the dragons gnawing punctures into our carefully planned contests.

  The regulators seek dragons outside the reverie. Sixes, they say. They have figured it out, but it’s too late for us, although perhaps not for the rest of the Purples.

  §

  It’s not that we weren’t warned. It’s that we didn’t understand the warning early enough.

  Ten days have passed, and another ten. That is almost certainly because the Reds have decided to change the terms of the fight. We’ve encountered the opposing team, but it took a form that we had not expected, because we assumed that tradition would take care of the details. If only we had understood how desperate the Reds are for this moon—but our comrades upon other worlds will have to compensate for our failure.

  The welts and their associated discomfort are no longer the issue. My Warhost has stopped walking. Earlier, the regulators forced it to seek higher ground, toward a shelf of rock away from the waters. Then, before its strength gave out entirely, it built itself a shelter of fabric and fallen shroudtree limbs. It lies there now, shivering, feverish, unresponsive even to our attempts to feed it.

  Our communications with the other members of the team, too, are slashed through with riddles of static, increasingly unsolvable.

  Five Red Warhosts descend, buzzing and droning their own hexameter riddle. They are sixes, with dark chitin, iridescent and veined with silica–pale patterns. They are much smaller than the twos—the largest is the size of a two’s hand, and the rest are not even that big—and they have wings and curling querulous antennae. They settle on my Warhost’s exposed, ulcerated skin. Their weight is almost imperceptible, a caress of tiny shuddering feet.

  The Warhost is already dying of the toxins generated by the sixes’ bites. Now the Reds with their new mounts are injecting motes of disease, some of which are able to disrupt our own functioning. Some of them have extended ovipositors heavy with eggs, whose young will no doubt chew the Warhost’s carcass into a blossoming of the sixes’ larvae. The regulators are attempting to build a chemical bridge of surrender so they can renegotiate t
he battle. But it’s too late for this host.

  We have lost this moon, although there will be other moons. I record the defeat as it takes place. As the sixes transfix me in the reverie, I wonder what folktale the history will be maimed into after I am gone.

  Suits

  James L. Sutter

  YOU’D THINK THAT THE MOST advanced ground weapons systems in service would be able to handle a little mold. Yet down inside each two–ton suit’s armored limbs, running through the reinforced joints and tucked behind hardened sensors and ammunition cradles, there were still some rubber gaskets, synthetic hoses, and casings that the spores could root in. Give it a few days, and the mold on Medupe Minor would eat the legs right out from under a combat suit.

  I stepped back out of the bay and triggered the rinse. From behind the clear plastic splash–shield, I watched as the acid shower poured down over the suit’s surface in blue–white rivulets, coursing around barrels and weapon blisters and infiltrating cracks where even a tech’s tools were too large to fit.

  A clang of metal on concrete rang out across the armory, followed by Tom’s cursing. I looked over to see him scrambling down a suit arm to retrieve a fallen wrench. The armor was flayed open to expose the drive system, yet his hands never touched an exposed wire or circuit. When he reached the three–fingered fist, he hooked a foot under one articulated digit and swung upside down, then grabbed the wrench off the raised lip of the repair and refueling bay.

  “All right, Tom?”

  Still upside down, the other tech grimaced, flushing as blood rushed into the white moon–circle of his bald head.

  “I’m just fine,” he said. “This thing, however, is a piece of shit.” He rapped the huge leg with the wrench.

  I winced. I hated it when Tom played rough with the suits, but of course he could never damage that plating with a simple wrench. The Lockheed Martin IGA Combat Exoskeleton was the best powered armor ever produced, and both of us knew it down to our bones. We’d been made for it.

  A timer chimed, and I switched the wash from acid to neutralizer. The drying fans had just kicked in when the armory’s rear door opened and Sergeant Billings stepped through. He moved toward me, mouth working, but the roar of the turbines filled my ears. I rushed to key them off, and the noise dropped away with a whine.

  “Sergeant?”

  “I said, ‘How’s she looking, Halfie?’ ”

  “Good, Sergeant. Her hoses are a little weak, but coolant pressure is still nominal.” My chest expanded slightly. Sergeant Billings had given me and Tom our nicknames years ago, but it still felt special.

  Billings moved over to the still–glistening suit and laid a palm against its leg. Next to the armor, he looked as small as a tech. His freckled and crew–cut head barely came up to the exoskeleton’s waist. Above him, the matte–black bulge of the suit’s chest housed the pilot’s couch and controls as well as the power cells and certain key weapons systems and ammunition cases. From behind the clear crystalline shell of the pilot’s canopy, the huge shoulders flared out into arms that hung down past the suit’s waist, lengthened by the long barrels of the chain–fed antipersonnel gun and recoilless rifle.

  Billings looked up at it with affection. The soldiers might not be born to the suits, but they understood the beauty of them. In that sense, they were no different than the techs.

  “Excellent,” he said. “We just got in orders from Command, and we’ll be taking them out at thirteen–hundred. Think they’ll be ready?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Good man, Halfie.” Billings was the only one of the soldiers who ever called us men. He stepped back over to where I stood by the splash shield, and my already brimming sense of pride doubled as he reached down and ruffled my hair. Most techs were bald by five, like Tom. I was almost seven.

  “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  Then he turned and walked away, and I pushed the diagnostic cart over to the next suit in line.

  §

  We were waiting in the repair bays when the big door rolled open. Even through the shimmer of the anti–spore field, I was almost blinded by the electric blue of the cloudless sky. Then the doorway filled with the silhouettes of returning soldiers.

  Four of the ten wore heavy suits, including Sergeant Billings. They stomped over to my side of the armory while the tactical suits went to Tom. I stepped aside as Sergeant Billings walked his suit into the nearest bay and powered down. The bay’s refueling grapnels engaged, and before he had even popped the canopy, I was circling the suit in the narrow, tech–sized space between it and the pit walls, taking stock.

  The suit looked fine, with the usual lacquer of dust and spores—until I reached the left hip. My stomach lurched as I saw the cluster of holes blasted through the armor plating.

  “EFP,” Billings explained. “The Liberation Front left us a few surprises.”

  I tentatively explored one of the punctures with my finger. While an explosively formed penetrator wasn’t as bad as a shaped charge, it was still capable of sending a shotgun blast of molten copper tearing through just about anything. The rebels made them out of copper plates and old sewer pipes, then hid them along the roads.

  I finished assessing the ticking, cooling suit’s wounds. The blast didn’t seem to have touched anything vital, but its location along the waistline seam concerned me. The suits were weakest at their joints. “How long do I have?”

  Billings levered himself up and out of the cockpit, dropping to the floor without bothering with the bay’s ladder. His fatigues were drenched with sweat, clinging to his skinny frame. He looked tired. “Depends on the captain, but I’d guess about sixteen hours. He’s going to want at least one more patrol before the shuttle lands.”

  That was hardly optimal. I nodded.

  “Spin ’em down!” Billings called out. “Debrief and chow in ten!”

  There came a ragged chorus of “Hooah!” as the nine other soldiers in the squad exited their suits. The sergeant turned to me.

  “You too, Halfie. And Tom. You could both probably use some dinner.”

  I smiled. Of course, he knew that there would be nothing for us to do for the next several hours anyway, as the automated bays took care of the basic repairs and maintenance. We’d do our individual checkups in the morning. Yet it was still nice of him to invite us.

  §

  The mess hall was a blank, white–walled box with long, cafeteria–style tables and an autokitchen off to one side. The place was big enough to seat perhaps fifty soldiers, but in my three years of residence there’d only ever been one squad on base. Ten suits were enough to handle anything.

  The soldiers stood lined up at parade rest in front of one wall. Tom and I stood in the corner, waiting.

  There was a click and hum from the overhanging projector, and suddenly the wall was replaced by the enormous image of a man’s face. The soldiers snapped to attention, but only Billings spoke. “Captain.”

  Captain Reyes was a big man—or at least he looked like a big man. Though the camera never showed him below the shoulders, there was something about his face that suggested he would tower over Sergeant Billings. He wasn’t fat, but neither did he have the youthful, healthy glow of the sergeant. His short hair was shot with gray, and his brow always seemed to be furrowed, as if he expected to be disappointed.

  “Report, Sergeant.”

  “Limited contact, sir,” said Billings. “The Liberation Front has been pressing closer to the western edge of the township, but so far they’ve stuck to mines and snipers. Nothing nearer than about ten klicks. One heavy suit took a hit from an EFP, but nothing we can’t repair. No casualties.”

  The captain grunted, but his expression didn’t change. “The next dropship is setting down in seventy–two hours, Sergeant, and if we lose any more cargo to those rebels, Medupe’s governor might just decide we aren’t pulling our weight. I want that area cleared out to a fifty–klick radius. Enough pattycake—you go in there and root them out. Understood
?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The captain’s image grew slightly smaller, as if he were leaning back in his chair, which offered a glimpse of a wood–paneled office with a window. “What’s the status on the suits?”

  “All still green, Captain. We’ve got an order in for resupply on the next ship, but so far Halfie and Tom have been—”

  “Halfie and Tom?”

  Sergeant Billings’s cheek twitched in an embarrassed smile. “Lockheed suit techs, sir. H series and T series.”

  Captain Reyes frowned.

  “It’s bad form to name a clone, son.”

  Sergeant Billings nodded. “Understood, sir.”

  The captain waved the issue aside. “Just make sure that the drop zone is clear by the time the ship lands. I don’t want any half–brained locals taking potshots at it. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Reyes out.” The wall went blank again.

  Billings gave the order to relax, and the soldiers cued up for the autokitchen, then took seats at the long tables. I got a bowl of the pale porridge the autokitchen prepared special for me and Tom, then sat at our shorter table in the corner.

  Tom didn’t follow. The soldiers were eating roast chicken, and he stood over near some of them, playing a game where they’d throw bits of chicken skin in the air and he’d catch them without using his hands, making them laugh. He knew that techs weren’t supposed to eat soldier food—something about carcinogens being hard on our digestion—but he never seemed to care. Maybe that was why I still had my hair and he didn’t. One of the soldiers held the final piece high, making Tom jump for it, and then at last Tom returned to our table, his cheeks flushed.