A Separate War and Other Stories

by Joe Haldeman

  He handed me the binoculars. “See for yourself.” No kid, no blood trail.

  “No one there now, at least on the surface,” I said to Lillian. “Drill round, H.E., maybe.”

  “Roger.” I could hear her keyboard. A few seconds later, the round came in with a sound like cloth tearing. It made a puff of dust where we’d been standing, and then a grey cloud of high-explosive smoke billowed out of the entrance to the underground lot, a couple of hundred yards away, the same time we heard the muffled explosion.

  “On target,” I said. Of course they’d be idiots to stick around right under where they’d hit us. That parking lot had tunnels going everywhere.

  “Need more?” she asked.

  “No, negative.”

  “Hold on.” She paused. “Command wants you to go take a look. Down below, in the lot.”

  “Why don’t they come and take a look?” That was really asking for it. They could pop us from any direction and scuttle back down their tunnels.

  “So do you want more arty?”

  “Yeah, affirmative. Two drill rounds with gas.”

  Wipers squeaked, cleaning the soot off the front as we rolled slowly down the hill. “What flavor? We got CS, VA, fog, big H and little H.”

  I looked at Mason. “Little H?”

  He nodded. “Fog, too.” I relayed that to Lillian. Little H was happy gas; it induced euphoria and listlessness. Fog was a persistent but breathable particulate suspension. Not that we’d be breathing it, with little H in the air.

  (Big H was horror gas. It brought on such profound depression that the enemy usually suicided. But sometimes they wanted to take you with them.)

  The two rounds thumped in while we were fitting the gas masks on. Track’s airtight and self-contained, but you never know.

  I tuned to infrared, and the ruins around us became even greyer. Spun to the left, and then left again, into the lot’s down ramp. “Hold on.” I gunned it forward and turned on glare lights all around.

  “Jesus!” Mason flinched.

  “Go IR,” I said. To him it must have looked like I was speeding straight into an opaque wall. I slowed a little as we slid inside, sideways.

  If you were looking in visible light, you wouldn’t see anything but light, from our glare, in the swirling fog. In IR, it was just a thin mist.

  A few derelict cars amid debris. The crater from her first round was still smoking. There were dozens of holes punched through the ceiling from previous drill rounds. I switched off the IR for a moment and saw nothing but blinding white. Clicked it back on and looked for movement.

  “What do you see, Seven?”

  “What am I looking for?” I said. “No obvious bodies where your H.E. came in. Nobody walking around in hysterics. No flamers.”

  “Power down, turn off your lights, and listen.” I did. Turned up the ears and heard nothing but creaks and pops from our engine, cooling.

  In infrared there was enough light to see in, just barely. Faint beams shone down through the arty holes, from the nightlights suspended over the city.

  Someone laughed.

  “We might have one,” I whispered. Little H disperses fast, and it can penetrate deep into a tunnel if the air’s moving in that direction.

  The laugh continued, not crazy, just like responding to a joke. Except that it went on and on. A husky female voice, echoing.

  It sounded like Jain’s laugh.

  “Sounds like she’s in a tunnel,” Mark said. “Over there.” He pointed ahead and to the right.

  “Yeah, good, a tunnel.” This was probably the actual trap they’d used the boy as bait for.

  Or maybe that is Jain, and she’s bait. For me. I shook the notion off. How could they know I was in this track?

  “Seven, you have backup coming in. Hold your position.”

  Hold our position against what, a laugh? “Keep an eye out, Mark. I’m gonna armor up.” One of us was going to leave the track, for sure.

  “Guess we both better.” The armor was restricting and hot, but with it you could survive a flaming or a point-blank hit from a .65 machine gun. That would break a bone or two and knock you down, but you’d live.

  Not much room in the track; no room for modesty. I had to stay half in the seat while I stripped down. Mark was watching my reflection. I didn’t say anything. If I liked men, he’d be near the top of the list. Enjoy the flash.

  The bottom half of the armor wasn’t bad, heavy plastic mail, but the top was a bitch for women, if they had any breasts at all. Clamshell snaps along the right rib cage. I grunted at the last one.

  “Hurts,” Mark said.

  “Join the army and have a walking mammogram. Go ahead.” He stripped down quickly. I glanced, and was obscurely disappointed that he didn’t have an erection. What am I, a toad? No, his partner and immediate superior.

  While Mark was armoring up, our reinforcements came down the ramp, subtle as a rolling garbage can. An APC, armored personnel carrier. Here this soon, it must have been the one stationed up by the T entrance at Park.

  “That you, Petroski?” I said on the combat scramble freek.

  “No, it’s Snow White and her fuckin’ dwarfs,” he said. “Mental dwarfs. They said you got movement down here?”

  “Just someone laughing after the arty came in.” I turned on the green spotting laser and cranked it around to where we’d heard the voice. It looked like an open freight-elevator door.

  I told him about the boy and the flamer; he’d seen the smoke. “You see the green pointer? The elevator there?” It wasn’t bright in IR.

  “Yeah, but hang for a second. Got some boys and girls still fuckin’ with their breathers.”

  “What?” APCs are open. “You got guys breathin’ this stuff? Didn’t they tell you—”

  “Yeah, Little H. They’ve got ’em on, just checking the buddy valves. Command said get right down here, no time for the regular drill.”

  “Hope it’s not that serious,” I said. “So far we have the Disappearing Boy and the Laughing Woman. Don’t think we have to call in the nukes yet.”

  The laugh again, and a chill down my spine. I clicked away from the scramble freek. “Mark, I could swear I know that voice.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “No, from before. Here in Boston.”

  “That’s real likely.” Only a fraction of one percent had survived the fever bomb. They were all carriers.

  This time the laugh ended in something like a sob. “We lived together more than two years, inseparable. People called her my shadow. She was black.”

  “Lovers.”

  “Yeah, don’t be shocked.” Mark was straight as a ruler, but I thought he knew I wasn’t, and didn’t seem to care.

  “Probably just wishful thinking,” he said. “Projecting.”

  “I don’t know. You learn someone’s—”

  “Ready to ride,” Petroski said. “This is a kill, right?”

  “No,” I said hastily. “Play it by ear. We might want a capture.”

  “What the fuck for?” The quarantine camp in Newton was full to overflowing. And overflow was obviously what it mustn’t do.

  “Let’s just triangulate on the sound. You go over left about a hundred yards and turn off your engine.”

  “I’ve gotta get authorization, not to kill.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said, improvising. “I’ll go in with the nonlethals. You just back me up with a regular squad.”

  “In the dark with nonlethals?” Mark said. “You are fuckin’ nuts.”

  “I’m not asking you to come along. Hand me that tangler.” It was the size of a pistol but, instead of bullets, it fired a tightly wound ball of sticky monofilament that blossomed out to become a net. I started to take the Glock 11-mm. out of its holster.

  “Christ, don’t leave your gun behind!”

  “I’ve got a squad backing me up.”

  “So they can kill whoever gets you, afterwards,” he said roughly. “I don’t want to break
in a new partner. Take the fuckin’ gun.”

  Well, that was touching. I left the pistol in place and tucked the tangler inside my web belt. “Satisfied?”

  “Yeah, but you’re still nuts. Those sickos just as soon kill you as look at you.”

  “Yeah, and we’d rather kill them than look at them.” I opened the door and swung out into the fog.

  The fever virus bomb had sprayed Boston Christmas morning. I was visiting my folks in Washington, or I would have joined the million who were dead before New Year’s, bulldozed into mass graves. Or become one of the few who survived to be sickos, carriers.

  I’d talked to Jain on Christmas and the next day. She’d gotten the cough a few hours after the bomb, and by the next day her lungs were so full she could hardly talk other than to say good-bye. On the third day, all the phones in Boston were dead.

  I couldn’t have gone to her. Every American city had been locked down Christmas Eve, when they learned what the bomb was, but not where. “A big city in the East.” Soldiers and police running everywhere, in Washington. Our family had piled in a car and tried to get out, but every exit was blocked and guarded. Seemed like typical government nonsense at the time. But they must have known how infectious it was, and how fast it would spread.

  Boston was dead by dawn of the third day. Of course when I “joined” the military, I was sent here. Supposedly I knew the city, but without the T, the subway, I was lost. And everything underground belonged to the sickos now.

  One-half of one percent of a million people meant five thousand carriers—survivors, they called themselves—living off the ruins of the city.

  I didn’t think Jain could have survived, she’d been so near death when we last talked. Then I found out they all had to go through that stage, and I had some hope that she’d lived. Then I saw what happened to the survivors, and I more than half hoped she hadn’t.

  Her name hadn’t been on the casualty list, but about a third of the bodies hadn’t been identified. She always was walking out without her purse.

  Petroski came up with a short squad of riflemen, all armored like me. Only one, a sniper, actually had a rifle. The three others had Remington shoot-’em-ups, fully automatic shotguns. And I would be between them and their target, a comforting thought.

  “What’s the call, Lieutenant?”

  I thought about the geometry of it. “Put the sniper and one other under that truck there.” I pointed. “The other two on the wall, maybe twenty yards left and right of the elevator. Hold fire until I give the order.”

  “Or you get creamed. You trust that armor?”

  “So nuke ’em if I get creamed.”

  “If it’s a flamer, Lieutenant,” the sniper said, “get down fast. I’ll be shooting straight in. Your armor wouldn’t do squat against this.” He patted his rifle with affection. It was a 60-mm. recoilless.

  “Thanks. Try to aim a little high till I can get out of the way.” I nodded at their sergeant and he said “Go.”

  They scurried off, darting from cover to cover as if it were a training exercise. They’d be safer tiptoeing. If the enemy had IR they would have fired at us already. They could hear them moving, though, and might fire at the sound.

  Nothing happened. I started walking straight toward the elevator. I had an IR flashlight; transferred it to my left hand and drew the tangler.

  By the time I was twenty feet away I could see that what sounded like a “tunnel” was a freight elevator with both front and rear doors open. Corridor beyond.

  I chinned the command freek. “Lillian, get me a floor plan of this parking lot, and whatever’s north on the same level. Am I walking into another big lot?”

  She must have had it up already; it flashed onto my data side almost instantly, my own position a blue circle. “It’s a service corridor,” she said. “Keep walking straight and you’ll wind up in the Big Dig. About a thousand places to hide along the way.

  “They’re not gonna have much fog in there. You want another round to the north? We can probably get the corridor.”

  “Not yet. Let me see what’s what.”

  “Okay. Your funeral.” Actually, there was a note of relief in her voice. She could shell an old target like the underground lot until Judgement Day, but every time they put a round in a new place, they had to follow up with an assessment team and file a damage report. This was still Boston that they were blowing up, and someday we’d have it back. What was left of it.

  Moving as quietly as possible, I inched over to one side of the door and flashed the IR around it. Chinned the scramble freek: “It’s an open elevator shaft, like eight feet to the door on the other side. No way I’m gonna try to jump it.”

  “Want a couple grenades?” the sergeant said.

  “Not yet. I—” There was a loud crash, and I flattened myself against the wall.

  “What the fuck’s goin’ on?” the sergeant said. “We’re gonna lay down some—” There was a loud crack and a 60-mm. round screamed down the corridor.

  “No! Wait for my command!”

  Then a scraping sound. Someone had dropped a metal plate across the shaft, and was pushing it.

  The voice that had laughed whispered, “That you, Ardis?”

  She knew my name and there was no mistaking the Jamaican lilt. “Jain! Get away from the door!”

  “I am. I’m on the floor over on the side. You comin’ over?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” On the freek: “Everybody hold fire until I say otherwise!”

  “Or if we lose your carrier wave,” the sergeant said.

  I popped once for affirmative and stepped toward the metal plate. Then I stopped. “How did you know it was me?”

  She laughed, from the little H, then forced herself to stop. “We…we’re not dumb cavemen, Ardis. Someone monitoring the military web recognized your name and told me. I found out you were in charge of Track Seven and what your duty schedule was. It was pretty easy to set up this meeting.”

  “Easy! What about the kid?”

  “He volunteered. We were afraid you might kill an adult. Your partner, Mark, might. He has twenty-three kills, none of them children.”

  “How did you know it wouldn’t be Mark coming after you here?”

  “I know you, Ardis. You wouldn’t send him. Come across.”

  The plate was about a foot wide. I had to look at it to place my feet, and tried not to think about how far down the shaft went. She took my hand for the last couple of steps.

  “You be lookin’ like Papa Legba,” she said. The armor was shiny black and formidable.

  The fog was thin in the corridor; I could see her well. She was wearing a shabby jumpsuit that covered most of her body. Her face had some of the hard striations that were the aftermath of the disease, but to me they were like a contour map of her familiar beauty.

  I stepped toward her, stepping into a dream; gathered her into my hard breast. Everything blurred. “Alive,” I said. “Jain.”

  “God, my darling,” she sobbed and laughed. Then she held me at arm’s length and stared into my faceplate. “Look, can anybody else hear what I’m saying?”

  “Not unless I click them in.”

  “Fast, then.” She took a deep breath. “Look, I’m not infectious. Nobody is.”

  “What? What about Newton?”

  “Just a prison.” She stifled a laugh. “Silly damned stuff. Look, we’ve had normal people live with us, they don’t get no plague.”

  “Then why not just show them?”

  “Once when we tried, they just took everyone to Newton. Second time, they killed everyone. Not sure why; what’s goin’ on.

  “We need you; we need someone in the power loop. Come live with us—come live with me!—for a few months, and then get back in touch with your people.”

  I had a hundred questions. Then I got one myself: “Lieutenant! What the hell’s goin’ on in there?”

  Without answering, I toed the steel plate and pushed it into the elevator shaft.
/>   “Let’s go,” Jain said.

  “Just a second.” I took off the helmet, popped the cuirass, and stepped out of the armor. “They can home in on the armor.” I kicked off the boots and piled it all up in the corner. “Get out of here fast,” I whispered.

  We slipped along the wall about fifty yards, and Jain lifted a piece of plasterboard that hid a hole big enough to wiggle through. “You first.” I crawled into a dark room full of boxes, feeling a little merry and playful from the whiff of little H. She followed me and as she pulled the cover back, I heard a gas grenade rattling down the corridor; heard it pop and hiss. “This way.” She took my hand.

  We went through a silent door into another corridor, dark except for a cluster of three dim flashlights.

  “Mission accomplished,” Jain said quietly. “Anybody have something for her to wear?”

  “Jacket,” someone said, and handed it over, rustling. It was damp and smelled of rancid sweat, but at least it was warm. Sized for a large man, it came down to about six inches above my knees. It would look very fetching, if we ever got to somewhere with light.

  We moved swiftly through the dark, too swiftly for barefoot me, afraid of tripping or stepping on something. But it gave me some time to think.

  Jain wouldn’t lie to me about this, but that doesn’t mean that what she told me was true. She might unknowingly be passing on a lie, or she might know the truth and be in denial of it. In which case I was already walking dead.

  I put that possibility out of my mind, not because it was unlikely but because there was nothing I could do about it. And I’d rather be uncertain and with Jain than safe in my track.

  We stopped at a tall metal door. While everybody else played their lights on the bottom right corner of it, a big bare-chested man—my benefactor?—took a long crowbar to it. After several minutes of grunting and prising, the door popped open.

  “This is a good defense,” Jain said. “It opens and closes easily from the other side, but nobody’s going to just walk through it from here. This’ll be a long ladder.” I followed the others to step backwards onto a metal ladder in the darkness.

  It wasn’t totally dark, though, looking down. There was a square, the floor, slightly less inky. I had an irrational twinge of modesty, my bare butt right above the stranger below me.