by Jay Allan
The multigun crashed too rapidly to separate the thunder of its shots. I clamped my hands over my ears, squeezing my eyes against the stinging vapor tumbling over the dirt wall. I choked, coughed, cried, rolling in the dirt. Baxter’s gun thundered like Zeus. Footsteps thumped past me, headed for the incoming OA soldiers. Something big and warm and unnaturally light tumbled onto my balled body. I rolled a corpse off me, eyes watering, and groped at its face. My nails tapped plastic. I pulled the mask off with a squick and tugged it over my mouth, gagging and gasping for untainted air.
A conscript sprawled beside me, waved at the gas-thick air, then bobbed up and fired down the tunnel. The multigun blatted on. Behind its awful thump, I heard Baxter laughing.
The gun spun down just as I caught my breath and poked up my head. The last of the gas slipped past me, shepherded by the breeze.
OA’s dead painted the walls. Their bodies were too ruined by multigun fire to count. Shredded green uniforms flapped in the warm wind. My mask couldn’t filter out the coppery stink of blood, the rotten blossom of insides turned out. I stripped my mask and vomited stringy fluid into the yellow dirt.
Going off the wagon’s thermal scanners, Jia thought we’d taken down about 25 of the enemy before they’d fallen back. Nearly ten percent of their total strength. We’d lost three of our own, another four injured. After treatment, two of those might be able to make it back to the line.
They’d tried to catch us napping. Without Baxter holding down the multigun while the rest of us struggled to breathe, we would have been overwhelmed in the very first skirmish.
“I wasn’t calling you a coward,” I told him once he hopped down and retook his place on the front line.
He eyed me. “Then who were you accusing? Your lungs?”
“Of course. They choked at the first sign of danger.”
More than a smile lit his eyes. Something holy, some discarded weight or expelled ghost.
“Why do you hate them so much?” I said.
“I told you,” he said. “They killed my friend.”
“I know that. I want to know how.”
“Oh. The sordid details.” He tapped his nails against the crosshatched black grip of his rifle. “Do you have any regrets, you old bastard?”
“A few,” I said. “They tend to disappear with the judicious application of alcohol.”
“Real regrets. The kind that are etched on your soul.”
I stared at the ceiling. “Just one.”
“Tell me that,” he said, tapping the grip, “and I’ll tell you about Arthur.”
“I see.”
“Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
I nodded. As if the motion had jarred the memory loose, at last I could see Demostrate’s face. It was a specific moment: she was in bed and I was headed there. Her eyes were bright semicircles, blue as the Aegean. Lips parted in a toothy grin that was half joke and half breathless anticipation. Bound hair squiggling across the straw mattress like a dark river. The delicate point of her chin.
It was the first time I’d remembered it in over a thousand years.
* * *
Three more shuttleloads made their way to the Sunspanner. Eighty colonists down, counting the twenty who’d died in the shuttle explosion. Not counting Thermopylae’s defenders, that left 491 on the ground. It would take 41 hours to transfer the last of them to the colony ship. The NightVision fleet would arrive in fifteen hours; HemiCo’s forces would be right on their heels.
Fay’s precision in delaying the under-construction NVR ships from leaving Earth orbit until the last possible minute was nothing short of dumbfounding. There had been over 900 million miles between Earth and Titan when the fleet launched. That number wasn’t static, either—it changed every instant as Earth and Saturn whipped through their discrete elliptical orbits. Yet Fay had nailed the arrival window as surely as a kid firing his BB gun at the neighbor’s house.
Baxter scowled and peeked over the ridge. “I am going to have someone’s head for this insult.”
Little legs clacked the walls, poked the dirt. A swarm of six-legged cat-sized bots advanced down every surface of the tunnel. A red eye blinked at their front. Below these gleamed the cold black snouts of gun barrels.
I laughed. Last century, I’d been a consultant for defense firms leaping into the field of “smart” warbots. Mostly, I’d earned my paychecks warning the designers the theory would sabotage them from the start. Design the bots with too many commands, and they would immediately respond in ways ranging from the useless (following ant trails until they broke down, say) to the ludicrously dangerous (spraying their programmers with bullets the moment their software was updated).
No matter how simply and elegantly they phrased the bots’ directives, there was too much collateral damage. Program them to shoot everyone in a green uniform, and kids got shot for wearing the wrong jersey. Even if you operated in a civilian-free zone, a bot like that could be thwarted by stripping off your shirt.
In the end, the bots turned out useful in two very limited situations: when you didn’t give a shit about collateral damage or civilian casualties, and when you were fighting armies of other bots.
I wondered which condition OA thought it was fighting under.
The multigun roared in deafening bursts. I swung up and peppered the nearest bot with fire, knocking out two of its bladelike legs. It fell off the wall and raised itself on its remaining four limbs. A bullet ripped past my face.
“These things,” Jia muttered from the wagon. “Aim for the bodies.”
“What the hell, Jia?” I fired again, reducing my target to a hail of silver. “Why don’t we just blow these things up?”
“The same reason they don’t just blow us up, numbnuts. Could crack the tunnel wide open.”
A trooper fell to my right, missing the back of his skull. Bullets thrummed back and forth. The multigun opened up again, splintering a whole line of bots before they closed past its effective range. Baxter leapt up and unloaded as fast as he could pull the trigger. I tried to cover him and was forced down by a trio of waddling bots converging fire at my head.
“If you’re saving them for me,” Baxter said, dropping beside me, “I graciously invite you to take as many as you’d like.”
Something gleamed from the ridge of our trench. I shot it away, cringing at the shrapnel. Another crested the ridge. My gun clicked, empty. I swung it like a bat, clubbing the bot straight into the ceiling. It bounced away with a sad whirr.
Three more scuttled along the ceiling. I rolled out of the trench and fell back, fumbling for a fresh clip. Baxter stood tall, screaming madly, emptying his rifle at the inexorable tide of creeping metal soldiers. A shot jarred his arm. He joined me behind an upturned table beside the wagon and we picked off a half dozen more before they forced us back again. I rushed up a ridge and dived headfirst behind it. Something slapped my left calf so hard it went numb.
Blood drooled from entry and exit wounds. I squeezed my calf with both hands, vision going gray. Men and women yelled, fought, died. I dragged myself toward Dome 27 and the med tent, flopping on my back, squeezing off shots through the coppery miasma of spilled blood, the sharp stink of scorched metal, the throbbing of my leg.
They tried to pull me off the lines. I told them to goo me through with Stikkit, dope me up, and fuck off. I limped into a tunnel littered with razor-thin legs, some still twitching. Men hauled out bodies, helped the wounded to the tent. Jia reported nine dead, as many more wounded. She didn’t count Baxter in that list. Small trails of artificial blood dried on his right arm, upper chest, and in a groove on his left cheek.
“Those assholes,” he snarled, cracking the scab on his cheek. “I’ll kill everyone who steps foot in this tunnel.”
I smiled. “It’s no big deal. I’ll live.”
“What? This isn’t about you being shot.” He knelt beside the pierced metal tube of a bot, pinched a loose wire, and shook it in my face. “How would you feel if
the residents of Hidey-Hole attacked you with a squad of chimps with pistols bolted to their paws?”
“Amused? Then sad?” I shook my head to try to knock loose the cobwebs. Between my injury and the painkillers, I wasn’t thinking too clearly. “Those things aren’t anything like you.”
Baxter brushed black strands from his forehead. “You’re right. They’re better. They do what they’re told.”
“Can we rotate off the front? I could use a breather.”
He gazed at my bandaged leg and his face softened. “Yes. Sure.”
The bots had opened plenty of holes along our lines. We plugged one midway back, behind the impenetrable bulk of the battlewagon. I sat down hard. The fight had taken another hour off the clock and a full quarter of our armed forces. My eyes stung. We weren’t going to last. The best we could hope for would be to get enough of the colonists on the Sunspanner to be able to tackle the task awaiting them at Centauri.
“My one regret,” I said. “Want to hear about it?”
“It sounds utterly humiliating,” I said. “Of course I want to hear it.”
I launched into my story. It was easy enough to tell him about the battle of Artemisium, the melee atop the ships and my plunge into the waters. Simple enough, too, to discuss my wartime imprisonment and subsequent sale into slavery. Baxter frowned when I stumbled around Naro and Tarsha, though I couldn’t say whether his expression was prompted by empathy, confusion over the family dynamic, or my poor storytelling.
I stopped to ask for water. Nestled against my pillow of dirt, I fell asleep.
“Wake up, Sleeping Druggy.” Someone shook my shoulder. I squinted. Baxter slapped my cheek. “We’re expecting another attack soon.”
I sat up, blinking dry eyes. “How long was I out?”
“Five hours. It’s been quiet.”
“Five—? What have they been up to? Hey Fay, how’s everything going up there?”
“No new surprises, which is nice,” it replied. “I hear you got shot!”
“I’ll be suing NVR for all it’s worth. I’ll get Shelby to represent me.”
“You thug!”
Heavy squeaks shrieked down the tunnel. Baxter straightened. “Fay, we have to go. Talk to you soon.”
Rifles puffed from the frontlines. Bullets scraped the walls. Adrenaline burned the fog of sleep from my brain. Past the wagon, blurry green shapes moved behind a glassy field. The multigun banged out a burst which impacted with a deafening clack.
Baxter’s brow knitted. “I’ll be right back.”
He threaded past the wagon. Small arms exchanged fire, shouts wafting over their airy reports. Pained screams leapt from our people. OA soldiers shuffled behind the transparent wall, popping up to hose our front lines with bullets.
I took what few shots I had. “What’s happening up there?”
“They fashioned a mobile plass wall,” Baxter said after a sudden firefight flared down and a woman finished yelling for a medic. “The multigun barely dented it.”
The battle dragged on, OA secure behind their shield, our guys protected by the ancient combo of trenches and walls. Medics and fresh troops cycled past the wagon. I held my position. I’d spent plenty of time on the front, and whatever OA was up to, this felt more like an exploratory skirmish than an all-out assault.
After another twenty minutes of sporadic fire, my instincts proved right. The greensuits squeaked their shield back out the tunnel. A few troops had dropped on both sides, but there’d been nothing like the kind of violence to explain why Baxter returned with his left hand missing below the wrist.
“I thought you were okay up there!” I shouted. “What happened to your hand?”
“I lost it,” he said. “Good thing my brain wasn’t in there.”
I leaned in, boggling. For a stump, it wasn’t bleeding very much. “That looks like real bone.”
Baxter waved his abbreviated arm, splashing a few red drops on my shirt. “It is, more or less. We learned our lesson about going skin deep pretty early in the game.” He tapped the sharded bone with his remaining palm. “Maybe I should leave it like this. It’s like a bayonet.”
“You think anyone’s going to fight beside you when your ulna’s sticking from your arm? What’s wrong with you?”
He snorted. “This isn’t my real body. It’s a tailored suit. Just for public appearances.”
“Go get it looked at, you freak.”
He rolled his eyes and crunched up the tunnel. “If I miss all the good killing, I’ll defile what’s left of your body.”
The shuttles kept on shuttling. Olympian Atomics’ troops stayed put. I talked tactics with Jia, opining their last attack had been a test run of the plass and we should be thinking about ways to halt it, smash it, or fire around it.
Four hours later, Baxter returned from the clinic with a bandage around his interrupted arm which did little to soften the blow when he banged its bony point against my sternum. “Is this better, you wimp?”
I rubbed my chest. “Significantly.”
He glanced down the blood- and steel-strewn tunnel. “So did you ever find her?”
I cocked my head, puzzled, then flushed. “A long time later.”
“I shudder to think what you consider ‘long.’“
“Too long to set things right.”
He nudged me with his stump. “Go on.”
I stared at the yellow ground. I’d been rehearsing while he was gone, excavating the story from the soil of my memory, but now that it was ready to be aired out for the first time I clutched it to myself, terrified.
Baxter crossed his arms, eyes distant. “I’m not even human. What do you care what I think?”
I laughed hoarsely. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Everyone involved died long, long ago. Except me. And if I survive this war, I’ll survive telling you the truth, too.”
So I told him about the letter that prompted me to abandon the Babylonian children and chase Demostrate down to Sicily. How I’d just missed her but found Seria, who explained the terms of our mutual jilting. With confessional relief, I explained how we’d consoled ourselves with sex and I’d fled, guilt-racked, the next morning.
Baxter snorted. “You let yourself feel guilty for that? After she’d run out on you?”
“Feeling guilty isn’t something you have much choice over. Besides, she hadn’t actually run out on me.”
His brow wrinkled. “You are terrible at this.”
Urged by his confusion, I told him how I’d lit east, as much to lose myself in a foreign land as for whatever oriental wisdom I might find there. For the next year, I bribed my way across the king’s roads in Persia, eventually crossing into the barbarian-ridden wilds of India. I’d stolen a spear and a sword first chance I got, and, feeling violent, quickly found employment as a multilingual battle-hardened mercenary protecting the caravans shuttling spice between India and Persia. Simple wooden things, the wagons, but the smell of cinnamon and cardamom attracted highwaymen for miles.
I was careless with my life for a while. First to charge the bandits and last to give up the chase. I killed because it was the only thing that made sense. I was wounded repeatedly, and on several occasions infected, hot red lines tracing my veins, but my body shrugged these things off as easily as I’d left my lovely Greece.
The other guards grew wary of me, uncertain whether I was a favorite (or even aspect of) the gods, or the offspring of a demon. Here, my enthusiasm saved me; no doubt the soldiers were tempted to test where my deific loyalties lay with sharp iron, but after witnessing me cut down four raiders and run after three others, insulting them all the way, a well-traveled trader named Shyam took me as a personal bodyguard, shading me under the umbrella of his wealth.
We all need meaning to our lives, so I made mine protecting him. He was good enough to notice. Once I’d learned Shyam’s language, he made me his interpreter whenever we dealt with westerners. I soon became his cultural advisor. Somewhere along the way, he made me his friend, t
oo. Emboldened by my knowledge of the land, we struck further and further west, landing fatter profits the more middlemen we eluded. Pasargadae. Susa. Babylon. Eventually, the shores of Ionia along the Aegean.
I still remembered Demostrate, monthly if no longer daily, but it seemed as if, wherever she was, we lived in separate worlds no spice road could bridge. As the years counted up and her death grew increasingly likely, my curiosity mounted. Hiding my identity—if she was out there with Seria’s husband, I didn’t want her to know I still thought about her all these years later, let alone that I was alive—I sent letters to Athens, left word with the traders, and went on with my life.
We sold our spices, returned east with pottery and wine, and turned around with cinnamon and turmeric and ginger. In Miletus, a letter waited for me. She was alive, and had returned to Athens.
I asked Shyam for a leave, suggesting I’d catch up with him along the road back to India. His eyes scrunched up like I’d poked them. “In sixteen years you’ve never asked for as much as a piss break. I’ll take you there myself.”
I had plenty of time to think as we crossed the wine-dark Aegean. It had been twenty years since I’d seen her. She’d be in her mid-fifties now. I’d grown a beard to hide my agelessness from Shyam, but it would be apparent to her I was much younger than I should be. Besides, I was rich now, but that was all I had to show for myself. She’d remarried. By now her kids could be knocking on the doors of adulthood.
And so, it occurred to me, could mine. I shaved my beard. Trimmed my hair boyishly short. Between my heavy tan, a few facial scars I’d earned in fights, and my Indian garb, I thought it would be enough to disguise the immortality of my face and my feelings.
As the ship swung around the Peloponnesus, I wrote two letters: one from me, Andronikos, and one from my “son,” Theophanes, scribed painstakingly with my left hand. My missive explained I had died some years ago, but that I’d told Theophanes about Demostrate, and he’d been looking for her ever since, questing to deliver the letter I’d spent my final days writing. On debarking at the port to Athens’ south, I took on the name of Theophanes and mailed his introductory letter to her home in the city.