Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  Something kicks her in the back, jostling her. Mai spins around and knocks away the gun of a scared soldier who has managed to sneak up on her.

  He stands there, stupefied, holding his hand, waiting for whatever comes next.

  “Mai!” Duc shouts.

  She has her fist in the air, ready to bring it down and crack his skull, but freezes in place. Her heart is hammering, her mouth dry. She can’t escape the adrenaline-pounding certainty that she almost died.

  But of course, she hasn’t. The man is no threat.

  “Leave,” she shouts into her helmet, and the translation booms out at the soldier.

  He rabbits away.

  “Mai?” Duc asks.

  “I am fine,” she tells him.

  Mai glances back. There’s activity in the air: ten heavy lift airships ponderously moving more wall segments in, to be dropped in place to secure the territory they are clearing.

  Soon the huge, articulated Ploughshares trucks will be along to gather up everything here for recycling.

  Duc tosses down seven mangled AKS-74s. “Then let’s go,” he says, and they’re on the move again, loping in long, impossible strides to catch up to the advancing line.

  As they catch up, Mai notices that Nguyen’s entire right side is blackened. She must have absorbed a large explosion of some kind while Mai’d been destroying the bunker. Other soldiers show signs of absorbing more fire, but the rate of it is fading. The North Koreans are mostly retreating into the woods on the west side of the hill.

  Mostly.

  One enterprising gun crew is trying to bring their huge 152mm cannon to bear on the advancing line.

  For the first time Mai sees Nguyen’s calm crack, and she hastily orders another pair of Peacekeepers to disable the cannon.

  The two armored soldiers snap into motion, and then calmly shepherd the North Koreans away from the weapon with shooing motions, ignoring the small arms fire. Once the North Koreans are clear, they smash the aiming mechanism, then get to work on the tube itself.

  A North Korean officer runs up to the two blue armored soldiers, pistol high, screaming at them. His face is red, and he looks almost ready to cry with frustration and rage.

  The distant pop of his pistol as he empties his entire clip into the backplate of the nearest Peacekeeper’s armor is accentuated by Mai’s translation software.

  “Stand and fight, cowards! Face me like real soldiers,” the artificial voice keeps murmuring.

  Mai feels sympathy for him.

  This isn’t a proper war.

  None of them have trained for this.

  It makes little sense, to either that officer or her, on some deep level.

  Part of her craves a fight. A real fight. A test of skill, courage, and arms.

  “Here’s the artillery,” Nguyen murmurs to them all. “On me. Destroy it all.”

  Mai and Duc move through the firebase with the rest of the team, dismantling the twelve big artillery guns and countless small arms and machine guns.

  Most of the machinery is in ill repair. Only five of the twelve look like they are actually firing, and a small bunker off to one side has been stacked with dud rounds. Which Mai figured Ploughshares could deal with. Suit or not, she didn’t want to be playing with those.

  There’s been one casualty, and Nguyen is not pleased with this. The wounded Korean is on a pod-like stretcher, hooked up to emergency life-saving equipment while a medic they brought along treats him.

  “This could be a public relations disaster,” Nguyen tells Mai.

  “What happened?” Mai asks.

  “He threw a grenade, but it bounced back at him,” Nguyen says, shaking her head. She’s removed her helmet and holds it tucked under an arm. “We were too aggressive. I fought against the new timetable, but was overruled. UN headquarters are emboldened by all this success. Now look at this, all people are going to see is this idiot on their late-night television, wounded.”

  Mai looks over the wounded man. “He might live.”

  Nguyen cocks her head. “You’re smarter than that. You know it’s the image of him right now, wounded, that will play out across the world. Polling is going to show lowered support for the mission. Are you okay, Sergeant Nong? My command software flagged one of your actions.”

  Mai thinks back to the moment where she raised her fist, and opens her mouth to answer, but another soldier runs up. “Captain, you need to come with us.”

  The North Koreans have withdrawn from the firebase, and the defense array is fully extended to its new circumference, bringing the area under its anti-ballistic umbrella. The airships are placing the new walls around them. Nonetheless, Mai and Nguyen pull their helmets back on and lope after the messenger.

  There’s a trail leading back to the woods, and off to the side is a hastily dug pit. A fresh, earthy scar in the grass.

  Lying in it are bodies. Thin. Ribs showing. Hollow-eyed.

  “Civilians,” Nguyen’s voice crackles.

  They’ve been dragged and stacked in this shallow grave. Just old men, women, children, trying to sneak their way around to a better life.

  Mai rips her helmet off to take a deep breath of air, then regrets the decision. The air is ripe with the stench of decay.

  “This is our fault. They’re trying to get into our camp,” she says. She does not replace her helmet, just yet. Something about the smell of death grounds her, reminds her of what is at stake, who has the most to lose, the most to fear.

  Nguyen raises her visor. “They’re dying trying to escape north to China right now, or slowly in their own homes. Don’t forget that.”

  Mai swallows and nods.

  But it doesn’t stop her from feeling personally responsible in some small way.

  Mai catches a ride back to the core camp center on a Ploughshares truck, exhausted and nerves frayed. A Chinese engineer sitting on the back of the flatbed is curious.

  “I didn’t think you could get tired in those suits,” he says to her in careful English.

  “That is a misconception,” Mai tells him. “Your body is still moving, all day. Muscles still do much of the work. They are just amplified.”

  “What about getting shot at?” he asks. He’s staring at the scars in her outer armor.

  “It becomes normal,” Mai says, offering a salty fatalism she does not yet feel. She’s looking down at the helmet in her hands. There’s a dimple right in the forehead, and a coating of copper and lead that has dripped onto the faceplate.

  That dimple suggests at least some level of vulnerability.

  Mai shakes that away and looks around. The fleet of recycling trucks are covered in advertising logos. “Does everything have advertising built into it?” she asks the engineer, looking to change the subject.

  He shrugs. “Why not? If all goes well, what will the refugees see every day? Logos for Ford and Nissan, McDonald’s and Dannon, Apple and Samsung. What better advertisement than being the ones who brought them peace and prosperity?”

  And if it doesn’t work, Mai figures, these people will never see the logos again. The sponsors lose some trucks, cash, and some shipments of last year’s shoes and tracksuits.

  These companies will write these off as charitable donations and somehow, come out ahead.

  They always do. Tails you lose, heads I win.

  The minds from which this evolved, despite their ramrod-organized military world, are the children of non-violent protestors and emergent, technologically-enabled regime overthrow. They are the nieces and nephews of two generations of UN sorties, which are derided by the major powers, but have a history of quiet, incremental improvements and painfully slow progress.

  They are the process of gamified solutions, market testing, and the Western fear of bad publicity.

  What did it mean that this was war? At boot camp Mai practiced for bloody hand-to-hand combat, and learned group movement. Thinking as part of a squad. Reaching the overall goals of a mission.

  Armies want fast-thin
king, creative problem solvers able to deploy violence for the nation they serve.

  Now Mai is wondering how she ended up being a robotic creature, following the exact letter of the law to not so much as harm a hair on her enemy.

  Even when they are slaughtering the innocent.

  “It’s not the mission,” Nguyen explained at training in Australia. “It violates the mandate of the mission. Fail it, and we are just another invading force.”

  “It doesn’t seem . . . right,” someone objected.

  “Right has a new meaning when wearing this armor. It changes the equation. You are a supreme force unto yourself.”

  “With technological superiority like this, we couldn’t possibly lose,” Mai added.

  “Depends on what you mean by lose. Westerners certainly learned the limits of simple technological superiority when your grandfather was just a young man.” Nguyen stared her down, and Mai had wondered if Nguyen had accessed those files about Mai’s family background. “A nation is a fiction of consent, and North Korea has built a mythology and controlled fiction unsurpassed in the world, aided by extreme isolation. People starve and thank their rulers for a handful of rice, or thank them for permission to visit a Western Red Cross station. In order to reshape the fiction, we need to reshape the narrative that the world sees, that North Koreans see, and that we engage. Force is one narrative. But we are not limited to it.”

  Captain Nguyen walked around, looking at her recruits.

  “These methods are not effective enough when implemented by oily-faced teenagers, the unemployed, and the uneducated. What they need are the iron-hard wills and command structure of a military mindset. The kind that understands that one might have to run into a hail of gunfire and die to protect the mother country. The kind that can follow orders intelligently. No nation has ever seen an invasion force like this.”

  One of the Western advisors was there. He chipped in. “It took the army to develop one hundred percent non-fossil fuel mobility while civilians dicked around with political initiatives, wasted subsidies and lots of arguing. We just did it. We built the Internet, our ICBMs took people to space. It takes the hard, organizational capacity and raw willpower of an army to do this type of mission right. Sometimes assholes need to be shot. The rest of the time, we will wield a different sort of weapon for a different world. That weapon today will be you: the execution of a well-controlled non-violent incursive force. Because you’re an army, and you will execute this and well, because if you don’t, you’ll be spending some ‘personal’ time with Captain Nguyen.”

  And then Mai and her fellow recruits learned how to get shot at, attacked, and beaten, without once displaying or reacting with aggression.

  She wrestles with a fleck of shame, having failed that training to a small degree on the firebase. The fear in that soldier’s eyes lingers in her mind the rest of the way back.

  The hardest part of Mai’s day is hearing the distant, occasional pop of a handgun from somewhere in the forests. Her amped-up acoustics in the full-on armor pick it up every time. Software calibrates, offers up information on where the shot came from, and shows it in her heads-up display.

  Every single time a gunshot goes off, she has to stare at the damn red marker telling her where it has happened.

  Each pop makes her flinch with the knowledge that it is the execution of a desperate, captured civilian.

  “Someone should put eyes on that,” she tells Captain Nguyen in a staff meeting. “We could use it to turn opinion against them.”

  “Opinion is already against them. Sympathetic members of the military are uploading video of the executions. Our job is to protect the camp. Stay put. Patrol the walls, Sergeant. Do your job.”

  Eventually Mai transfers to the south wall and dampens the acoustics with help from a technician.

  But even the threat of death doesn’t stop the trickle of refugees. They risk everything to get through the North Korean emplacements, and make a desperate run to the safety of the camp. The camp constantly grows.

  After another one of her long patrols, Mai runs into Duc near the mess hall on the north wall.

  “How are you?” she asks quietly. He’s been a bit withdrawn ever since they first found the open graves.

  “I’ve now been shot one hundred and thirty-seven times,” he tells her, a note of wonder in his voice. “The armor works. But I think . . . it’s . . . ”

  Duc looks away, then back at her. He opens his mouth to continue, and it seems as if he’s screaming. A demonic sound fills the air, rising in pitch, higher and higher until Mai can barely even comprehend it.

  When Duc shuts his mouth, the sound doesn’t stop.

  They’re out of the mess hall and through the doors in an instant, yanking helmets on and looking around, and then finally: up.

  A shimmering, hard red slash of light cuts the sky above the camp in half. It stabs upward into the sky, and originates from somewhere to the south, where intel thinks the North Korean Army has established a new firebase.

  “What is it?” Duc asks.

  Information scrolls across their helmets. It’s a laser. High energy, tightly focused. Most of the red slash she’s “seeing” is actually interpolation from her suit’s sensors.

  Mai follows the path of the beam, and sees that it intersects neatly with the icon that represents the dirigible floating thirty kilometers overhead.

  “They’re going after our power,” Duc says.

  The icon wavers and blinks out.

  All around them lights flicker, then go dark. Mai spins around and looks at the tower at the heart of their refugee city. The lights on the outside of the Point Defense Array flicker and go dark.

  Satellite communications links to the armor go live, and their helmets kick on automatic recording mode: 60fps video streaming directly back to operations centers in Hanoi, Beijing, and Geneva. All local bandwidth is reserved for encrypted inter-team communications.

  That results in everyone having a thumbnail of Captain Nguyen’s face in the upper right corner of their visors, spitting orders and soliciting updates.

  Mai and Duc are deployed to the south gate, and they sprint through the streets to get there, leaping over a small one-story refugee processing building in their way.

  In the background of it all, emergency sirens wail. Citizens are, no doubt, being ushered away from windows and into the cores of skyscrapers. But if a full-on assault comes, there’s little protection. The camp is vulnerable without the Point Defense Array.

  Slightly out of breath, Mai scans the woods and hills beyond the border of the camp. “We should have rerouted all power from the reactor by now,” she says to Duc.

  And as if answering her directly, Captain Nguyen speaks up. “I’ve just learned that several of the power cables leading out from the reactor have been sabotaged. We are unable to power up the array fully. As a result it’s in a fuel-cell powered self-defense mode right now, only targeting any rounds that might hit its tower. The engineers report that it will take as long as ten minutes to get power back up. You know your orders. Prevent any North Koreans from getting past the gate. And hold your position. Contact is imminent. Forces are building up for an assault.”

  Mai can see via thermal imaging that bodies are flitting through the trees.

  “There hasn’t been any satellite imagery showing that the rest of their army has shown up,” Duc says. “It’s just this battalion. We can handle that, even without the array, right?”

  “Of course,” Mai agrees.

  Even as she opens her mouth to reassure Duc further, a brief flash flickers from behind the trees, followed by the quiet thump of sound catching up to light.

  “Mortar-fire,” Mai shouts, broadcasting to the entire open channel. Her helmet projects a path and warning insignia blare at her to MOVE.

  Duc spins away, and Mai is leaping clear as the world erupts in orange and black. She sees stars wheel overhead, the world tumbling around her, and she turns her tumble into a roll
.

  She lands on her feet, legs bent, taking the force of her impact. Her left hand drags, fingertips furrowing the ground as she slides backwards on her boots and comes to a stop.

  “Duc!”

  He’s facedown. The entire back of his suit is blackened. She rushes over to him.

  “Duc!”

  There’s a groan over the helmet radio. The status report shows that he’s just been dazed. Duc sits up as Mai scans the tree line, waiting for the next launch or the inevitable rush of bodies.

  The next mortar launch arrows well overhead, and Mai frowns as she follows the trajectory over the wall. The refugee-processing building explodes in a mess of compressed fiberboard and electronics.

  Mai stands up.

  The next mortar round walks further into the camp.

  “They’re not going to try a direct attack,” Mai reports to Captain Nguyen, somewhat stunned. “They’re just going after civilians.”

  More rounds now slam into the skyscrapers at the center of the camp. Broken glass twinkles as it rains down into the streets.

  The open channel fills with medics responding. Ten wounded. No deaths. But another ten minutes of this, and it was going to get bad.

  “Captain . . . ”

  “Stand your ground Sergeant. It could be a trap to lure some of us out, before the charge. Do not leave your post. Listen to me, there are three million live watchers, this conflict is being streamed everywhere, as it happens, to satisfy mission backers and advertisers. We keep our course.”

  But Mai’s already stopped paying attention. “Duc, what is that?”

  Her visor has caught the sound of tracks.

  “Tank?”

  “No.” For a brief moment, two kilometers away and only visible by the helmet’s advanced computational lenses, she’s seen the outline of a self-propelled howitzer, trundling through the brush between Nike and the new Korean firebase.

  KOKSAN, her visor identifies it. 170MM of death on wheels.

  It must have been driven up to stand in for the artillery Mai and her team already destroyed.

  Mai is already moving forward before she really understands it.