One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  The villages. My last serious action with Lim was in one. I'd transferred to another unit as soon afterward as I could. Thinking of that mission, I suddenly found the cab hot, constricting, oppressive. My pulse quickened, the rush of the memory triggering the unthinking, unreasoning rush of aggressive, angry hormones I've fought most of my life, and I knew I couldn't beat back the memory. I closed my eyes and let it wash over me.

  Rain drizzled out of a cloudless sky the color of water in a clear brook. The unrelenting heat overwhelmed the climate control in our fatigues and launched volleys of sweat down our backs, arms, and legs. Baker squad, my team, was fanned out across the rear of the village, ready to catch or kill any stray Purifiers. Data from the sensor webs we'd dropped via silent-opening delivery shells showed little motion and no active transmissions, so we figured no more than a few hostiles remained in the area. Lieutenant Earl played it safe, though, sending us to the rear position, then taking Alpha squad fast and hard, cocked and locked, right up the main path into the clearing in the village's center. A few shots and the ozone of arcing weapons cut the air; then Earl's voice, tight and clipped, barked out of my earpiece.

  "Baker squad," he said, "hostiles controlled. Come to Poppa. Keep the newbs at the rear."

  We formed up around my lead. For the raw meat in the squad the war on Nana's Curse was their first action, but we'd been here for months, so I couldn't believe anything in this collection of shacks could be bad enough to pose them a problem. Orders are orders, though; I motioned them back, and they fell in quickly. We double-timed out of the cover, over to the rear entrance road, and into the clearing.

  I held up my hand, and the squad stopped. The moving people grabbed my attention first, and in a second's glance I took in the motion: Earl and a few of the Alpha squad men were leading four Purifiers—all oddly out of uniform, some missing their pants—to the front of one of the shacks near where the main road entered the clearing. A few more of Alpha squad stood off to the sides, several retching loudly. Lim paced in the center of the clearing, vibrating with energy, hands moving nervously, her close-cropped hair so drenched it resembled the surface of a black pool.

  In the next second my gaze moved to the ground, and I understood Earl's order.

  On the far side of the clearing an open door gave way to a meter-tall stack of bodies that filled a small clay and thatch building. Spread around the clearing in front of Lim were the tangled bodies of at least half a dozen children, the oldest barely a teenager. None was fully dressed; some wore shredded pants, others no pants at all, and most were missing most of their shirts. All were cut, broken, bleeding. The blood pooled in puddles bigger than I'd have guessed such little bodies could produce. Blood oozed from some and gathered under others, so much blood the sources were hard to spot, numerous cuts and hacks marring the half-naked corpses. The acrid smell hung in the moist air. My ears pounded with my own heartbeat. The scene tightened its grip on me, and I had trouble breathing, standing still, doing anything except screaming. I fought to maintain self-control, to keep it together.

  "Listen up," Earl said.

  I forced myself to look at him. Everyone else except Lim did the same. Her head pointed in his direction, but I caught a glimpse of her eyes: She was seeing only the images in her head.

  "SOP with prisoners is to evac them to local brigs for questioning and then to POW storage." He slowly made eye contact with each of us, moving rapidly past Lim when he realized she wasn't yet focusing on him. "These men," he gestured to the prisoners, "do not deserve and will not receive that mercy. If anyone wants to discuss this decision, speak up; now's the time."

  No one said a word to Earl. What mumbling I could hear was all angry agreement.

  Earl nodded. He motioned to the men holding the prisoners, and they brought the four Purifiers to him. Earl pushed one to his knees. Three Alpha squad corporals followed his lead with the others. A few seconds later, all four prisoners were kneeling, hands restrained behind their backs with quick-application synthetic ties. Earl pulled a pistol from a holster on the rear of his belt.

  "Lim, Moore, take your squads to our regroup point," he said. "I'll join you shortly."

  "Sir, Lieutenant, sir." Lim's voice surprised me with its calm, careful, formal cadence. "Sir, I'd like to handle this, sir."

  I was already moving, my squad behind me, and as I passed Lim I noticed her face was utterly calm, her expression serene, only the brightness in her eyes betraying any sign of the horror that surrounded her.

  "Please, sir," she said.

  Earl stared at her for a bit, then nodded his agreement. "Alpha squad, on my lead," he said. To Lim he added, "We'll wait for you. Make it clean and simple, one shot each to the back of the head."

  I couldn't hear her answer over the sound of our feet on the road as we exited the clearing and double-timed for the rendezvous point a few hundred meters away. No one spoke when we reached it. I didn't bother maintaining formation once there; Earl would give us new orders shortly, and I figured we could all use a little time to deal with what we'd seen.

  He and Alpha squad appeared less than a minute later. "Fall in," he immediately said. "Weapons and comm check."

  The squads were slow to move, all of us trapped in our heads with the images of the village clearing.

  "Now, people!" Earl yelled. "Inspection in ninety seconds!"

  Everyone jumped to, Alpha squad left and Baker right. We all scrambled to check the status of our weapons, ammo packs, and comm gear. Between the seconds we lost to getting moving and the time it took to realign in formation, we were hard-pressed to complete all the checks by the deadline Earl had set. I finished barely in time, because Earl started his inspection with Baker squad, and I was first.

  When he finished with me, I realized how wrong I'd been: Giving people time right now amounted to letting them dwell in a bad place they needed to leave. Keeping them busy was exactly right; they'd process what they'd seen later, certainly for days, probably for the rest of their lives. I vowed to remember this lesson for the future, even as I fervently prayed I'd never again need it—another battlefield prayer that went unanswered.

  Earl was halfway through Baker squad when I realized Lim wasn't back. He appeared in front of me, as usual having recognized the problem before me.

  "Moore," he said, "see if Lim needs assistance . . ." Lowering his voice, he added, ". . . and retrieve her."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  I double-timed back into the village, energy rifle charged and at port arms, just in case we'd missed some hostiles. I froze when I entered the clearing and saw Lim.

  With her left hand, she held one of the men by the hair. His mouth was taped shut. With her right hand she plunged her combat knife in and out of the man's chest and stomach, the whole time smiling and talking to him in a voice so low I couldn't make out her words. Blood and bile and bits of entrails hung from her blade. Two of the men were on the ground, body cavities ripped open, their insides exposed and partially spilled, clearly dead.

  The fourth man appeared to have tried to crawl away. The blood pooling under his legs was the result of Lim's answer to that attempt. I threw up into my mouth, choked back what I could, and spit to clear the rest.

  I saw with cold clarity exactly what I had to do, the path so obvious it wasn't as if I were choosing at all. I was only doing what was inevitable, necessary, unavoidable. I put down my rifle, drew my pistol, and shot the fourth man in the head. Lim kept hacking at the man she was holding up. I quickly shot each of the two dead men in the head; Earl expected four shots.

  When I turned to finish the third man, Lim stood between him and me, her knife pointed at me, the smile still on her face, her eyes wild. "You shouldn't have done that," she said. "I hadn't even started on the last one, and I'm not done with this guy."

  "We're leaving, Lim," I yelled. "Lieutenant's orders. These men may have deserved—"

  She cut me off. "May have deserved? What they deserved is more than we could ever
do to them. This is only a taste."

  I took one step closer to her. "You're done," I said. "We're leaving. You tracked down one who managed to run, then we tapped all four. That's how it happened. Got it?" I pushed past her, shot the last man in the head, and holstered the pistol.

  Lim stared at me as the fire in her eyes slowly died.

  "Clean your knife," I said. I headed out of the village.

  She wiped it on the back of the shirt of the man I'd just killed, then caught up to me.

  When she was even with me, I changed to double-time pace. She followed, and we entered the regroup point abreast.

  "Problem?" Earl said.

  "Nothing significant, sir," I said.

  Lim nodded her agreement.

  He stared hard at both of us for a two count, looked away for another two beats, then turned back to the men, his internal argument resolved. "Fall in with your squads."

  Only when we were heading out did I realize I was still shaking, my mind stuck in an image loop, the same composite frame screaming from the monitor inside my head, burning into its pixels until I became afraid it would never be able to show anything else: the dead, defiled, bleeding children in the background, the foreground a close-up of Lim's smiling face as she hacked and hacked and hacked at the prisoner's body.

  Chapter 18

  I shook my head to clear away the image. Though the years since then have done nothing to blur it, they have weakened its hold on me. The stories I'd heard of Lim since that mission all painted her as a fierce, fair, dependable fighter—as long as nothing sent her back to the dark, smiling place the clearing had either created or awakened. I didn't see anything in the kidnap of Chung to cause that reaction in her, and I needed a teammate I could trust to get the job done. Anyone new I recruited, even if trustworthy, would have flaws as well, but I wouldn't know those flaws. I wouldn't know that person at all.

  I knew Lim.

  I was still wasting time. I wasn't comfortable with Lim, but that didn't matter: As I'd agreed with Earl, she was the best option available to me.

  Lobo and I were going to Velna.

  Once we slid into a low geosync orbit over Dishwa, I had Lobo tap into the publicly available data flows to see what he could learn. The combination of that data, what he already had in his store, and the information Gustafson had given me all painted the same basic picture. Dishwa was indeed, as Earl had observed, a pit. All the serious corporate manufacturing plants sat outside the city, their staffs freed only every few weeks. Corporate security was uniformly inward-looking, worrying only about protecting the fabs and their trade secrets, not about what the workers did when on R&R in Dishwa. From the nonstop flow of reports of thefts, fights, and other petty crimes, the Dishwa police didn't much care either.

  The largest prison on the planet, the one Lim's group managed, hunkered down like a cancerous growth on the northern tip of the city. Well-behaved inmates earned wage-free jobs at local businesses after med techs laced their bodies with trackers and a variety of small explosive charges that would detonate if they strayed from the prison's controlling signals for too long. The pay they earned went toward prison upkeep. Those who caused trouble ended up in one of the slowly expanding sprawl of tube racks, buildings housing hundreds of fluid-filled tubes, one prisoner per tube, wires keeping their muscles fit while governmentally approved counselor voices whispered governmentally approved messages of good behavior, recovery, and repentance. Many hard cases figured the tubes for easy duty, but after a few weeks, most, when given the option, chose to go back to work. Those who stayed in the tubes for too long were rarely entirely right afterward, the voices never leaving them.

  Dishwa served as the FC's tryout for the tubes, and nothing I saw made me believe this technology would last any longer than any other prison fad. The only way humanity has ever found to successfully solve the problem of prisoners is to avoid having them, to address the issues before people turn into convicts. No technology we've yet found succeeds at turning large populations of prisoners into contributing citizens.

  "Another beautiful place you've taken me," Lobo said, after I'd gone through the information he'd amassed. "And whom are we here to kill?"

  "Very funny," I said, "and the answer is, no one. We're here to recruit help. I think you'll like her; she likes big machines. In fact, she prefers them to most people."

  "A woman of good judgment," he said.

  "Call the prison," I said.

  A reasonably convincing young male answering construct in a khaki uniform appeared on the comm display. "Dishwa central prison," it said. "We're tracing and recording this call. Speak."

  Lim's personality had infected even the answering protocol; lovely.

  "Jon Moore requesting an in-person meeting with Alissa Lim."

  "Purpose of meeting?"

  "Catching up on old times," I said. No point in marking this as confidential; she'd know I'd never visit socially. The construct vanished, and in its place an advertorial detailed the exciting and humane new therapy the prison was pioneering for the forward-looking Frontier Coalition. I tuned it out and waited while the construct tracked down Lim, gave her the message, and received her response.

  After a few minutes, the construct reappeared and said, "Request granted at these coordinates and time." Lobo captured the location; we'd meet her about an hour before dusk.

  When he showed me the spot on an aerial view of the city, however, I reconsidered; I had no desire to put down Lobo in such a highly populated area and no time to find a place to stash him and still make the meeting. "I need to land a Predator-class, fully armed assault vehicle," I said. "Is that acceptable at these coordinates?"

  The advertorial resumed, and over the next several minutes the earnest faces of experts in psychology, criminology, and neurology explained why tube-tech was the prison wave of the future.

  "Negative," the construct said when it reappeared. "No nongovernment craft of that class are permitted over our airspace. Request granted at these new coordinates and time."

  Lim had changed the meeting location to a private shuttle facility twenty klicks from the prison and the time to a bit after dusk. I was pleased by her prudence. The Lim I'd served with would have either ignored the civilians or relocated us to the prison and set up for full combat there. The prison undoubtedly possessed significant self-defense capabilities, maybe not enough to destroy Lobo but certainly enough to consider taking the fight, so it wouldn't have been a tactically bad choice. I saw as a welcome sign of a calm maturity the fact that she was now factoring into her thinking both civilian casualties and the cost to her business of any action at the prison. I was even pleased that she was moving our meeting to a remote location, albeit one that I had to assume she was even now ringing with her own forces. Maybe this would work out after all.

  "Thank you," I said. "We'll be there."

  * * *

  We landed in almost whiteout conditions, a winter storm having squatted over the shuttle facility and showing no sign of stretching its legs anytime soon. As we settled on the tarmac, I asked Lobo, "How bad is it?"

  "I count twenty-four human profiles on IR," he said, "deployed in groups of three at various points in an irregular circuit around us, but no heavy weapons."

  "Oh, the weapons are there," I said. "She's just shielding them and showing us the people. Transmission traffic?"

  "Massive and heavily encrypted," he said. "Enough of it is hitting me that I have to assume we're being constantly monitored. My inner shielding is detecting no electromagnetic traffic, however, so we remain, as I would expect, secure."

  "This should go smoothly," I said, "and all her precautions are understandable. Still, if anything happens that gives you any cause for alarm, leave immediately at maximum speed and track me from orbit. Don't hesitate."

  "Affirmative," Lobo said, combat programming clamping down on the humor.