by Baen Books
"You too, Skipper. Be good to yourself, you."
She offered her hand and he only hesitated a moment before shaking it.
She walked out of the aid station into the hard, bronze metallic light of the late afternoon and found herself facing the Nigerian journalist Boniface, his body armor glowing golden-orange in the setting sun, but because of the chameleon feature it glowed on the side which should have been in shadow, making the moment surreal and other-worldly. She nodded a greeting.
"Visiting Major Colloredo?" he asked and she nodded again, although it wasn't really his business. "Will he be all right?"
"Mr. Boniface, as a young brown-bar second lieutenant, Tony Colloredo led a rifle platoon on the Spratly Islands when everything went to hell, come away with a silver star and a purple heart. He's a tough, brave, big-hearted Marine, him. He'll be fine. Just needs to mend some."
Boniface nodded and looked down the street at a light combat walker moving from the downstation toward the perimeter, the whine of its turbines clearly audible. J. C. followed his gaze and the dust raised by the walker's foot pads seemed to sparkle like flakes of gold floating above the gathering shadows.
"I am a diligent researcher, Captain. I am aware of your previous service with then-Lieutenant Colloredo." Boniface shifted his weight and his eyes lost focus. "I went back to review my visual and audio captures during the firefight, the one where your four Marines were killed and Major Colloredo was wounded. I must have done something wrong in the confusion. There is no recording. Perhaps I recorded over it by mistake. These things happen."
He turned and walked slowly back toward the downstation. J. C. watched the sun until it touched the horizon and then she followed him.
29 December 2133 (D Plus Seven Days)
T'tokl-Heem Downstation, on K'tok
Six days later J. C. stood in the blackness of the broad street code-named Tungsten and she looked up at the night sky, watching the occasional streaks of light. As a child she'd been told to make a wish on a falling star, but these falling stars were bits of wreckage from their own task force, still entering atmosphere and burning up five days after they had taken a terrible beating from the uBakai Star Navy. Lieutenant Colonel Mazanadarani, the cohort commander, walked over to her and she nodded to him. Too many snipers still at large for saluting.
"Evening, J. C." He looked up as two streaks of light crossed the sky, one brighter and longer than the other. "They took a hell of a shellacking up there."
"Do we know the real numbers, sir? Been hearing rumors sound pretty bad."
"Bad enough. Over two thousand dead. Nine ships totally destroyed—half the cruiser force. Peleliu and that Indian transport are okay but the Brit transport, HMS Furious, is gone, Forty-Two ROMAC's whole support and supply echelon with it. It's a real mess. Say, how's Lieutenant Gunderson working out?"
J. C. squinted at him, taken off-guard by the subject change. "My company XO? He's fine, sir. He'll appreciate you asking."
"He ready to run Delta? I want to move Major Banerjee over from Ops Boss to the cohort XO slot, but I need someone with a good tactical head to fill in behind him. You want the job?"
J. C. felt her face flush followed by a wave of gratitude it wouldn’t show in the darkness. It was a good step up, especially for a mustang officer like herself, who'd risen from the ranks. A lot of senior officers didn’t think of mustangs when it came to filling staff slots. But the opportunity would never have been there if Tony Colloredo hadn't been wounded, and that complicated things. It surely did. Overhead she saw another shooting star.
"Let me put it another way, Captain," Mazanadarani said. "You are the new S-3 Ops Boss, so let me hear an aye, aye, sir."
"Aye, aye, sir."
"We've had it pretty easy so far, but it's going to get bad, J. C., real bad. The Navy's pulling out, most of it is anyway, leaving us here to hold this planethead: our brigade down here and five destroyers in orbit."
"Five destroyers? That's all?"
"That's all," Mazanadarani said. "We've got to hunker down and hold, hold until the brass figures out how to get us out of this tiger pit. Here's where we find out what we're made of."
J. C. looked up again, as if she could see into orbit. "Shoot, sir, already know that. Now we find out what them tin can sailors is made of, them."
Children of the Dust
Catherine Asaro
Statement: Major Bhaajan, Ret.
Pharaoh’s Army of the Skolian Imperialate
Imperial Space Command
In writing this statement, I’ve used language I didn’t know in my youth, as a girl in the Undercity. It would be difficult for me to give a full statement otherwise. However, I’ve done my best to stay true to the way I thought in those days. For spoken words, I’ve used the Undercity manner of speech. My hope is that these choices will present the most realistic record of the events, as I recall them, and so respond to the military inquiries about the community that lives hidden under the desert.
We were innocent in those years, the four of us, Dig, Jak, Gourd, and myself. I know it sounds odd for me to describe our group that way. Yes, we were a dust gang, dedicated to street fighting. We lived on the edge of poverty and considered petty theft an accomplishment. And yes, Dig’s mother led one of the most brutal drug cartels in the Undercity, a choice Dig hated. Violence, crime, and starvation defined our lives. Yet for all that, we had an innocence that those of us who have survived will never again know.
The members of our dust gang were the closest I had to kin, though none of us had a blood relation. Dig and I were like sisters, Gourd like a brother, and Jak—well, Jak. Saying what he meant to me is hard even now, nearly thirty years later. At the age of fifteen, I knew only that he and I had a lot to discover about each other. The four of us lived on the cusp of adulthood, not yet scarred beyond healing.
This is our history.
I
Kajada
We loved to run. We ran hard, we ran for the sheer pleasure of speed, and we ran to outpace the death grasping at our heels. We also worked out every day, with fists, kicks, and rolls, what we called the rough and tumble. We practiced hand-to-hand combat, learned new methods from established gangs, and tried out new ideas, all to defend our territory in the aqueducts. We had no rules, except to win however possible.
Why anyone called these underground ruins “aqueducts,” I had no idea, because no water had run through them for as long as anyone remembered, besides which, they were too large for aqueducts. They seemed more like empty canals that for some bizarre reason lay under the desert.
Today, Dig and I practiced in one of the canals. She aimed a kick at me and I dodged, then tucked into a roll so I could punch her in the knees. She went down and hit the ground hard.
“Drill that, Bhaaj,” she said.
I jumped up and smirked. “My win.”
She climbed to her feet, scowling. “Against me, yah. Not Jak.”
I had no idea why Jak hadn’t shown up for our workout. More and more lately, he disappeared, for hours, even days at a time. I worried about him, afraid for his life, but I couldn’t admit that. Fear made you weak, and weakness killed. It was safer to be angry.
The small lamp on my wrist gauntlet created a sphere of light around us, with darkness beyond. Powdery dirt covered our clothes. We both wore ragged trousers and muscle shirts. Our fight had stirred up a cloud of dust, mostly red, with glints of blue from traces of azurite. It floated in the air, gradually settling back onto the ground.
Dig threw her hair out of her face, and it fell down her back in a mane of wild black curls, exactly like mine. We never bothered to cut it, but I tied mine back when it annoyed me. Dig had more muscles and stood taller than most of the kids in other gangs. I’d passed her in height this year. You’d never guess she was two years older, seventeen to my fifteen. She had a gauntlet on her left wrist, and I wore them on both. Gourd had made the gauntlets using scraps of tech-mech he dug out of salvage dumps.
> Dig wiped the back of her bare hand across her forehead. “Come with. Get water.”
I fell into step with her, striding along the canal, kicking up dust. I checked to make sure the panels on my gauntlets were in place, protecting the worn out tech. Some dust would still get into the workings, but not enough to ruin them. I hoped.
We called this canal Lizard Trap, for the small reptiles that scuttled through the dust. We claimed it, and we fought any other gang that challenged our claim. The ceiling was twenty meters high, and the width about fifteen meters. It was only a moderate sized canal two levels down from the top of the Undercity, but it was ours.
Dig went to one wall and grabbed a projection in the rock, then looked back at me. I strode over, reached for a handhold—and the race was on. We scrambled up, climbing fast. It took only seconds to reach the midwalk halfway up the canal from the ground to the ceiling. I hefted myself onto the path a few seconds after Dig, losing the race by less than a handspan. She jumped to her feet and watched me stand up. When she put her hands on her hips and grinned, I laughed. So. She may have lost our fight, but she’d won the race.
We jogged along the midwalk, side-by-side, with the drop to the canal on one side and a wall of rock on our other side. I felt good, strong and fit, ready to take on the world. That didn’t take away the hunger, violence, or constant fear of death we lived with in the Undercity, but today I felt ready to challenge it all. I still had my youth and optimism, even when faced with the unrelenting darkness of our lives.
Except . . .
Something inside of me felt unsettled. Restless. No matter how many fights we won, how many races we finished, how many foes we conquered, I couldn’t enjoy our successes. Something was missing, but I didn’t know what.
#
We found Gourd in the large cave where everyone in our circle slept. He was seated on the ground, leaning against the wall, with the parts of some boxy contraption scattered over the floor, which he’d swept clean of dust. Makeshift lamps he had designed shed light throughout the cave. I couldn’t tell what he was making, except the pieces looked worn out and broken. No matter. If Gourd put it together, it would work.
At sixteen, Gourd had more height than any of us, so big now that everyone in the aqueducts gave him a wide berth. Fortunately for the other gangs, he preferred fiddling with tech-mech to fighting. Gourd hung out with the cyber-riders, trading ideas and tech, but he never went over to their community. At heart he was a dust ganger. One of us.
Beyond Gourd, the six little dusters in our circle, ages two to nine, were gathered on a large rug, playing with rock toys. Top Deck, the father of the two-year-old girl, sat watching them, laughing when they clowned around, and making sure no one tried to eat their toy or stick someone else in the eye. He looked after the kids because he didn’t like to fight, and he had neither the interest nor the skill to join the cyber-riders. Nor did he want to become a drug punker, running product for Dig’s mother, Jadix Kajada, the crime boss who led the Kajada drug cartel.
Top Deck’s woman had worked for Kajada until she died, murdered by a drug punker who ran with the Vakaar cartel. I’d never seen Top Deck cry. None of us cried. But after living with him for years, I knew his tells. He still mourned his woman. He probably would forever. Well, fuck the cartels. Kajada and Vakaar didn’t only kill people with the product they sold, they murdered whenever it suited their purposes in their battle to control the Undercity drug trade. I hated them, which caused me problems, because Dig Kajada led my dust gang and I would give my life for her. Fortunately Dig didn’t like her mother much more than I did. She wanted nothing to do with the cartel. We were Dig’s people: Gourd, Jak, and myself.
Our dust gang protected Ketris and Byte, a pair of cyber-riders with two kids. Right now, they were out rummaging up salvaged tech-mech or trading for it on the black market while Top Deck looked after their little dusters. When Ketris and Byte weren’t busy being cyber-wizards or parents, they cooked for the rest of us. They were the senior members of our group, already in their mid-twenties. Top Deck was nineteen. We’d also taken in three orphans we rescued from starvation. All together, these people formed our circle. In return for protection and a secure place to call their own, they helped make our territory a home.
None of us in the dust gang had parents except Dig, and Jadix had no interest in being a mother. Dig’s father had died years ago from the Carnelian rash, one of the diseases that prowled the Undercity, turning the skin red and scaly, making its victims burn with heat. Even if anyone here had known how to take him to the city in the desert above, no facility there would have treated him. And so his life ended. We lived on the edge of death in the Undercity, with no hospitals or doctors, just what we could take care of ourselves or steal from the above-city.
From the City of Cries.
Supposedly Cries rose up from the desert in shining towers. Yah, right. I’d never seen it, only images Gourd showed me when he hacked the city meshes. Who were they crying for up there? I had no idea. Maybe they were unhappy because they couldn’t be us, down here in the cool aqueducts beneath the killing desert. I found it hard to believe the City of Cries existed. Sure, something was up there, but those glossy towers looked more like fantasies than reality.
I knelt next to Gourd. “Found this in salvage.” I pulled the bundle of quantum-optic fibers off my belt. “You want?”
“Yah, good.” Gourd took the bundle and nodded his thanks.
Dig went off to find a bottle of fresh water, one of our rarest commodities. I still had water in the thermo-sack on my belt, so I just wandered through the caves where we lived, pacing from one to the next. Natural geologic events had shaped these spaces as the ground buckled over the eons and poisonous water saturated with minerals dripped everywhere. The caves formed a maze around and below the ruins of the aqueducts. Top Deck had woven rugs to soften our living spaces. I didn’t understand how he created such beautiful things out of so little, but I liked the result. He also fashioned our utensils, plates, and bowls out of stone or from scraps of defunct tech-mech.
I felt edgy, pulled by the need to go—where? We lived here, scratching out a life of joy and grief, always running. I wanted to run somewhere. I longed to see new places, but I didn’t know what or where.
“Eh, Bhaajo,” a youth said, his deep voice as sensuous as sin.
I turned around. Jak was standing by the entrance to the cave, leaning his fifteen-year-old self against the wall, his arms crossed, his eyes half-closed. His black hair blended with the darkness, and unruly curls fell over his forehead into his eyes. He dressed in black, both his ripped trousers and his muscle shirt. A dagger as long as his lower arm glinted in a sheath on his belt. He pushed back his ragged hair, taunting me with the way his muscles rippled in that beautiful body.
“Eh.” I had nothing else to say. He’d vanished for an entire day, all eighty hours of it. It scared the blazes out of me. What if he had died? I couldn’t admit my fear, so instead I glowered at him.
Jak came over, slow and easy. I crossed my arms, making a barrier between us.
“Got dinner,” he said.
“Where?” I didn’t see any meal.
“Other place.”
I didn’t intend to go any other places with him. Just because he showed up looking as sexy as who knew what didn’t mean I forgave him. Not a chance.
Jak touched my cheek. “Looking good, Bhaaj. My wild warrior queen.”
I needed him to stop being so distracting. “Not today.”
His fingers trailed along my arm, making promises. “You sure?”
Damn, he smelled good, a combination of spices and the faintly aromatic scent of dust.
Maybe I could forgive him this one time.
#
Jak had first showed me the grotto when we were kids. He found it during one of his trips to explore the maze of caves that networked the canals. He had led me through a darkness so complete, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. A drop
of water splattered on my nose.
Jak had flicked on his gauntlet light—and a wonderland sparkled into view. Light glittered through the crystalline formations around us, all created as mineral-laden water dripped over the eons, hardening into cones of rock that hung from the ceiling or rose from the ground, ringing a pool in the center of the grotto. In the light, the lacework of crystals shimmered, as if we had entered a place of magic. It was one of the best birthday gifts I ever received.
Today, we bathed together in the pool. We could never drink that mineral-laden liquid, not without poisoning ourselves, but we loved the rare feeling of being submerged in water. Afterward we went to our place behind the cones of rock. We pulled the tarp off the carpet we’d left there and curled together in its warmth. Holding each other, we made love in the sparkling light, lost in the passion that chased away the nightmares of our lives.
Later we dozed. Eventually I spoke drowsily. “Had dessert before dinner.”
Jak laughed, a deep, husky sound. “Yah. Good dessert.”
I sighed, content. After several moments, I remembered I was mad at him.
“Where go today?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Dice.”
I sat up, pulling on my shirt. “Stupid dice.” He did that more and more lately, visiting gambling dens with dangerous strangers.
“Dice may be stupid.” He grinned lazily. “But Jak smart.”
“Win?”
“Dice, a lot. Cards, a little.” He rummaged in his clothes, then sat up and opened his hand, showing me three pieces of sweet-chew. “For you.”
“You won candy?”
“This time.” He brought out three more pieces for himself. “Next time, credits.”