Outland Exile

by W. Clark Boutwell

  “Fall migration,” said Sophie.

  Then came the Rampart.6 The Rampart itself was no longer made of anything so crude as concrete. It showed on the horizon as a single line from the skimmer’s altitude. It loomed closer, unbroken and resolute. The pulse-cannon muzzles along a kilometer curve of the Rampart detected the approaching craft, moving in unison. Even at this distance, Malila saw the bottomless black stare of the weapons. She licked her lips.

  “This is Charlie-Alpha-Tango-one-niner-niner. Requesting passage, two skimmers, Station one-one-Dog-Zulu-Bravo,” Jayden said.

  Malila heard a distant and imprecise buzzing in her earpiece.

  “Whiskey-one, Quebec-November-three, Yankee-one-seven,” Jayden said. There was another buzzing before Jayden finished with “One-niner-niner … out.”

  Only when Malila saw the pulse-cannon muzzles drop away from the skimmer did she realize she had stopped breathing. She tried to cloak her too-rapid intake of air.

  “Yep, it has that effect on most people the first time,” Jayden’s amused voice whistled through her headphones.

  “You can’t tell, but this section is the Western Gate. Try passing anywhere else except at gates, and it doesn’t matter if you have all the codes in the world! Ka-phizzzzt!” he said before laughing.

  Most pilots were ThiZed out most of the time, Malila knew; Sofie giggled.

  The skimmers floated over the furrows of sundered earth and into the outlands. Something grew out of the debris to rim the destruction with venomous green-and-purple tumors.

  The skimmers’ rate of climb was shallow, despite its ability to carry prodigious loads. Jayden took a circuitous route, following small waterless valleys, as they climbed and narrowed. Rank after rank of buildings, their black windows blown out, looking like gigantic stacks of dice in some unknown game of chance, passed underneath. Tall hollow towers, broken into thirds and lying amid the rubble of a mill, looked like ancient ruins. Despite all the simulations, the immediacy of the devastation troubled her. She fancied she could smell the stench of cold, wet embers and decay.

  The skimmers reached the last curve of a valley and started a spiraling climb to pass over a series of ridges. Dark shadows of pines and hardwoods replaced the sere slopes and their relics. Before the Commendable Victory, when the People’s Republic (now the Unity) had been forced to blanket much of the wilderness with herbicide, the outlands had supported a generous population, or so she had been told. It was impossible for Malila to imagine anything but primordial chaos, thrilling herself to a dose of domesticated horror.

  Once free of the mountains, the landscape flattened. Crossing silver threads of rivers laced between dark forests, the skimmers pushed west. Malila made out faint rectangular traces among the trees. The land had memory, even if she did not.

  By late afternoon, the skimmers approached their LZ. Despite the blaze of gold, scarlet, and orange leaves, the forest looked less exotic here. The bunker, at the center of a wide free-fire zone, was low and brooding, its four sides windowless and sloping to a flat roof spiked with antennae and weapons. It was an ugly edifice, an unvarnished statement of Unity power.

  The skimmers landed. CRNA squads jogged out to secure the tree line. Three-quarters of an hour later, Malila left the skimmer to take possession of Sunprairie.

  She was barely on the ground as she heard the ramp door closing behind her and the Skimmerhorn drives accelerating. Willing herself not to watch, Malila heard the skimmers lift free and speed away. It was a policy of the Unity that aircraft minimize their time at low altitude, ensuring that the barbarians never captured advanced technology. Apparently, acting second lieutenants were not a commodity the Unity felt compelled to conserve.

  CHAPTER 8

  SUNPRAIRIE

  43.11.0/97_89.13.56/41 Sunprairie Station

  15.52.07.central_12_10_AU76

  The blackened door lay several meters from the portal, the rebar bent like grotesque writhing snakes.

  “Sergeant Nelson, is the station secured? Any explosive devices?” Malila voiced into her headset.

  “Sir. Yes. Station searched. No hostiles. Detected explosive devices: none.”

  “Meet me at the entrance, and keep a list of tasks.”

  “Sir!”

  Nelson could at least act as a scribe. Most CRNAs could hardly talk.

  Nelson and she strode through the base, which extended three floors below the hulking mass of the entrance. The first floor was all equipment and vandalized as expected. On the second floor, they passed through the landing into another room, crunching glass underfoot.

  “Sir! Second floor, supplies and officers’ quarters, sir. One bed, single; one command terminal, vid screen inoperative; toilet, unflushed; shower, nonfunctional; washbasin, occupied; cook surface, inoperative. Sir!” enunciated Nelson.

  Malila examined briefly the damp feral sock that lurked in the washbasin.

  “The colony is coming,” in red dribbled paint, decorated the back wall. It surprised her. She had been unaware the outlanders had the written word.

  “Sergeant, have this room cleaned; repaint these quarters.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  Malila was beginning to feel that her world was becoming understandable … until she started down to the men’s barracks on the lowest floor. A dark and foreboding pool of fetid water opened at her feet.

  “Sergeant, the men will bivouac outside until we get their quarters pumped dry. Do we have cover for them? What is the weather forecast?”

  “Sir! Shelters, food, water, and latrine facilities sufficient, sir. Weather report: fair weather, five days, minimum temperature four degrees standard, sir.”

  “Good enough, Sergeant. Let’s keep going.”

  By the time she finished the inspection, Nelson had a long list of menial jobs for the men. Malila sent him to organize the perimeter.

  It would take days to pump the station dry, bring the computers online, reestablish the network, and finally synchronize the signals with headquarters. The actual work was hers; CRNAs were only her bodyguard, nothing more.

  Malila began work on the pumps, emerging an hour later dirty and wet after crawling around service conduits and rewiring the connection through the panel. She would be listening to the pump’s low rumble for most of the next two days.

  The weather was good for autumn, and the men would be comfortable outside. She was just as glad. CRNAs always made their quarters smell foul after a few hours. As a cadet, she had called them “the rank and vile.” Malila smiled.

  Other than the intermittent sound of pulse fire, the rest of the travel-shortened first day was uneventful. Malila guessed there would be an abrupt decline in the local rodent population. The judgment of the CRNAs was poor. The rifles were locked to the platoon by fingerprint readers on the triggers and ID chips embedded in the base of the thumb. It kept them from losing them. They even had the antifratricide subroutine to keep the men from firing at each other by mistake.

  CRNAs were the bone and muscle of the DUFS. They were hardy, loyal, and dumb as a sack of hammers, but they fired quickly and accurately and took staggering losses before losing combat integrity. The use of their bodies, absent the higher functions, was the price the Unity had prescribed for their crimes. Lieutenant Chiu climbed up to the destroyed portal.

  “Sergeant Nelson!”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” rasped into her headset.

  “Feed the men, and set a perimeter. Reveille at 0600.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  She felt better when she was issuing commands.

  Her quarters were now clean, and the plumbing worked. She ate some rations, showered, threw herself onto the cot, took her ThiZ, and was asleep almost immediately.

  The first night was quiet, but fatigued as she was, Malila did not sleep well. She had her dream, waking her in the darkness with its usua
l panic. Once awake she could not sleep.

  All her hopes balanced at some point in the future. In time, she would watch the balance lever slowly drop her down into the depths of oblivion or lift her back to where she had been only hours before. Strangely, she missed Edie. Malila had created Edie—well, had designed the accent, the speech, the subroutines, and the commands—and yet she missed her. The useless O-A hummed in her head.

  She finally got up at 0200 and walked along the picket line. She found the CRNAs’ brisk challenges reassuring. She returned to her bed an hour later and was able to drop off again with the monotonous hum of the pumps sounding like a huddle of distant voices.

  She awoke still grumpy and a bit dazed. Even the CRNAs were having trouble getting started in the cold morning air. It took repeated orders to get them to respond. With luck, she thought, the men would be under cover tomorrow.

  Despite her weariness, Malila set to her task with eagerness. Her path to rejoin the DUFS, reenter the Unity, and retrieve her career led through the dank and dimly lit corridors of Sunprairie. In a way, she found it a pleasure to fall back onto her skills as a warrant officer, doing her own work and depending on her own computations. She spent the day fixing one problem only to find another that had been undiscoverable until she had fixed the first.

  Every few hours she went to the surface to give a new task to Sergeant Nelson and the CRNAs.

  She worked through the afternoon and into the evening before she caught herself nodding. Then she ordered Nelson to wake her at 0530, took her usual hit of ThiZ, stripped down to her skivvies, ate some rations, and threw herself onto the bunk in a haze of exhaustion.

  She slept well until, hours later, she awoke in the dark with a hand over her mouth and a knife to her throat.

  “Don’t move, lass,” hissed a voice. The hand moved enough for her to breathe, if just barely. She heard the muffled sounds of what might be commands, several loud reports, and then single shots at longer intervals. After the first few, Malila counted thirty-seven shots fired. She felt a jab in her thigh and then nothing.

  CHAPTER 9

  HECATE

  Nyork, Unity

  12.47.11.local_11_10_AU76

  Hecate ran down the stone steps of the museum and into the street without looking back, glad that a real excuse compelled her to leave Malila and go where she might think. She hurried along the sidewalk under the awnings put up to catch the buildings in their inevitable decay. After taking the descender for the belt trip uptown, she looked at her watch. She’d get back only a few minutes early, and it made her nervous. She would feel much better if she arrived at her usual fifteen minutes before the end of lunchtime.

  Maneuvering to the fastest belt, she started walking whenever she could, dodging small groups of people as she went, and emerged into the towering lobby of the People’s Building at 148th.

  Malila was so frustratingly dense at times! It came from her finding things so easy. She had never needed to study at school, had never needed to practice. It gave her a blind spot, almost a cruelty. It also made Malila blind to the failings of the Unity. Hecate supposed that was only reasonable for a DUFS. The whole society heaved and groaned, toiled and struggled, merely to give the soldiers their next shiny toy. Certainly, no one was going to dispute their position of supremacy. Data readouts and ponderous reports were no match for a couple of pulse mortar shells lobbed into a ministry.

  Hecate absentmindedly walked to her elevator and announced her floor before settling back into thought.

  She had gotten much up too upset about the krill farm and could not blame Malila, or her boss, for not sharing her concern. She supposed Undersecretary Rice herself was engaged in an unseen battle with her own superiors, just as Hecate was engaged with Rice. While Hecate had to contend with awkward facts coming in from the field, Rice had to contend with a couple dozen S22s, like Hecate herself. Rice had to keep the S22s moving forward and had to make her own bosses happy with an analysis of the analyses. Hecate wondered if she would ever have the ruthlessness needed for Rice’s job.

  Exiting the elevator, Hecate entered the bustle of her office, dodging the kid from CORE as he sped by on skates.

  “Kazzen! Can I talk with you?” she said to the disappearing back of the computer tech.

  “Get back to you in a minute, Jones,” echoed back to her in the nearly empty office.

  She finally was able to wend her way to the small desk in a windowless corner, and her stomach lurched.

  “Jervani-ah, can I help you?” she said, and the young man looked up, startled.

  “Oh, uh, hi, Hecate! I was just looking. Nice holos, really,” he said, rapidly putting the holo he was holding down. Then he moved it and put down a paper he was carrying. “I should check up on something … Bye,” he said as he walked off.

  Dumb and clumsy, Jervani-ah was somebody’s new henchman. It might just be a mind game, but it might be someone trying to gather the innocent coincidences that fueled office politics. It had taken Hecate only a short time to realize that politics was the true product of her whole division.

  Rearranging her pictures back to where they should be, she picked up a holo of her friends and herself in a frame she’d made in school as a child, all improbable flowers and pink hearts. A younger Malila smiled back at her from midair as the projection sensed her regard and activated itself.

  The image, giving her a faint buzzing feedback as it appeared to rest on her palm, enlarged as she moved it nearer. Malila smiled broadly at her from an age ago. Malila was the true believer of the group and never saw the problems others did. If she led, people followed.

  Luscena, next to her in the holo, possessed the sheer vitality to lead, but her talent had seduced her. She preened herself as long as others applauded. Alexandra, next to her, had the smarts but not the personality to make a stand on her own. Alex spun stories to spec, fooling the less wary … and herself along with everyone else.

  Hecate moved a finger along the contours of the holo to the last of her friends, Tiffany’s auburn hair off-color in the image. Tiffany was such a good person, bumbling along with her head down, doing good things for less worthy people, and not looking where she was going. It was always so good to have them together again, just like today. It spoke to old times and confidences.

  She loved them all, with a childish ardent love that she could never really examine. And she loved Victor.

  Hecate’s coworkers started arriving, coming back from lunch the usual thirteen minutes late. She put the holo image down; it faded slowly as she moved to the next holo of Victor himself, looking a bit absentminded as he received the Osmian Prize in 74.

  Doctor Victor di Lorenzo was her first patron … her only one for the four years since they’d met. He was one of the people her teachers had helped her choose among the more senior staff when she was an E7, just finishing government guild school.

  The whole thing had terrified her younger self. Hecate could see the utility of the system easily enough, of course. Take the new kids straight out of school and have them mentored by the experienced bureaucrats. In exchange for guidance and protection, the thirteen-year-olds provided loyalty and pleasure-sex.

  But Hecate had not enjoyed offering herself. It must have shown. In the morning, after each submission ceremony, the other patrons-elect had wished her well and wished her elsewhere. None had accepted her as a protégé.

  Victor had been an S31 and an E28 when they’d met. She’d followed the protocol precisely: disrobing, then enunciating the submission speech while looking into his eyes. Victor had held her by the hand before leading her to his bedroom.

  He’d held her all night in a warm embrace, listening to her fears and hopes, sharing stories of his life, and letting her sleep. She had risen the next morning to leave, thinking he had rejected her as a protégé, only to be surprised as he gently pulled her back to his bed and told her of his accep
tance.

  They had been inseparable ever since. He was not a particularly good patron for someone in her division. His area of expertise was in bacteriology, but his work was important and well regarded. Their prolonged relationship had amused and then concerned her teachers. It was a joke among his friends. Neither she nor Victor cared. They were both happy to remain each other’s sole pleasure-sex partner and nearly constant companion.

  Victor reminded her of Tiffany, in a way. He was a good man who dealt with the problems at hand and expended little regard for the commotion of life around him. He lived, in his way, a life of quiet seclusion: doing his experiments, collating the data, writing his insightful papers, publishing them, and defending them with humor and dignity. Fame surprised him.

  With Victor now an S33, their lives should be easier, but Victor was probably not as good an administrator as he was an investigator. He depended too much on others’ good will and integrity.

  Her world revolved between these three centers of gravity: Victor, her friends, and work.

  Work … She had found her work fulfilling until Undersecretary Rice had arrived. Her last boss, Wiscoll Root, had always maintained that their job was to get the best information into the most understandable package for the ward leaders and district supervisors to argue over and let the chips fall where they may. As long as the information was sound, he did not care what happened to it.

  Undersecretary Rice cared what happened to it … sometimes. She would devote endless efforts to craft a report one day. On another, she would shovel critical findings into an obscure footnote in a huge routine report. Victor had sniffed when Hecate had told him Rice was her new boss.

  Hecate replaced Victor’s holo in line and straightened them all again before sitting down to start the report for the now-defunct krill farm. It would be a short report.