Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  "Eighteen." There was no hesitation, no doubt. We didn't forget things anymore. Nothing slipped our minds.

  "Eighteen," I repeated. "Twenty for me. We killed thirty-eight of them in less than half an hour, and we didn't fire a fucking shot."

  I stared at my hands. It seemed like I could see the talons through my skin, like I could feel them burning-hot inside my forearms, still wet with blood. I felt another rush of bile and squeezed it down this time.

  "It won't always be this easy," he reminded me. "Gonna' come a day you'll wish it was this easy again, I'll bet."

  "You ever think about the fact that they gave us this ship," I said, "and gave us enough juice in here," I tapped the side of my head, "to steal it if we wanted to?"

  He cocked an eyebrow, his mouth twitching up at the corner. "You thinking about finding a beach somewhere and sitting out the war?"

  I laughed, shook my head. "If I wanted to sit it out, I was already in a good place for that. What I mean is, they took a bunch of kids and spent a shitload of money turning us into probably the most dangerous killers in the history of the military---of anyone's military---then sent us out in starships all by ourselves." I thumped a fist against the bulkhead. "How close are we to losing this war, Slick, that they'd take a risk like that?"

  "The Tahni sent a strike force all the way to Mars," he said, face looking way too grim for someone barely out of his teens. "They blew the shit out of our fleet and nearly destroyed the whole fucking shipyard. They managed to kill somewhere around ten thousand people between Deimos, Phobos and the surface." His eyes closed and I would have thought he was praying for the dead if I hadn't known he was an agnostic. When they popped open it was to bore into me with a glare. "Could we do that in their home system without losing every single ship? Could we get a single fucking missile onto Tahn-Skyyiah through their orbital defenses? I'd say we're damn close to it, bud. Way too close. They need us to work."

  "Then we'll make it work." I pushed away from the bulkhead and headed for the galley. "I'm going to get something to eat."

  Maybe I could keep it down this time.

  ***

  Transition Space isn't an exact thing. Time's just ever so slightly off there for reasons no one has ever been able to adequately explain. It's not a big difference, particularly if you're part of the same warp bubble, which is why military convoys are still possible, but it gets bigger the farther apart you get from a ship heading away from you. The upshot was, even though we'd left a day before Holly and Brian and their target was the same distance from Hermes as ours, they'd already returned by the time we got back.

  We arrived at Terra Australis under the cover of night, running the ID codes of a heavy lift cargo shuttle, and let the computer land itself on the broad, open pad outside our base. Tractors trundled out, headlights casting shadows along the broad, flat plane, to tow the Raven under the concealment of the massive hangar built into the side of the hill. Deke and I padded down the boarding ramp and left it to them. We headed for the lift banks squatting in the glow of the interior lights in the near corner of the hangar; most of the base was built beneath it, carved into the same granite that made up the bulk of the Edge Mountains.

  Holly and Brian were there waiting for us, along with Colonel Murdock and Major Huntington, standing in the circle of the overhead light panels for the lifts. Murdock wasn't on base all that much while we were training, but I figured he'd be here to meet all of us as we came back from our first mission. This was his career on the line after all, not to mention the war. Or did I have those backwards?

  The local equivalent of insects buzzed around the lights, their monstrous, outsized shadows fluttering around us as Deke and I approached. I didn't salute the two superior officers because Murdock had ordered us not to do it on base and I honestly didn't fucking feel like it at the moment. Holly hesitated just slightly before she stepped up and gave me a hug. It was warm and comforting, but I could feel the slight difference. I let her free to embrace Deke while I shook Brian Hammer's meaty hand.

  "I audited the reports the Raven transmitted when you Transitioned," Murdock said to us, just a slight sense of excitement and satisfaction in his tightly controlled voice and face. "I'll schedule personal debriefs with each of you for tomorrow, but I wanted to let you know that was very well done."

  "Thank you, sir," I said because I knew Deke wouldn't. I nodded to Major Huntington politely. "The Raven did all right by us."

  Huntington wasn't as reserved about his smile or his air of satisfaction; he looked as if he wanted to dance a jig.

  "After our debrief tomorrow," Murdock went on, "and a short medical examination, I've decided to allow you four some down time. There'll be a hopper at your disposal and you can head into Sanctuary if you like, or enjoy some of the great outdoors." The dryness of his tone told me what he thought of that option. "Try not to attract attention," he cautioned us, catching the eyes of each of us in turn. "Don't get into a fight, don't get arrested, and for the love of God, don't let someone stream footage of you doing something stupid on the open 'net. Or this will be the very last time you see the light of day except when you're on a mission."

  "Roger that, sir," I said, and Brian and Holly echoed. "Thank you, sir."

  We all nodded our way past him and Major Huntington and into the lift, waiting until the doors shut in front of us before we all breathed a collective sigh of relief to be away from them.

  "How'd it go?" Deke asked Brian and Holly as the car lurched downward, carrying us underground.

  "It was perfect," Brian said, his voice booming with enthusiasm. "They expected nothing. We killed over two dozen of them and none as much as touched a weapon."

  "One of ours touched a weapon," I said quietly, in counterpoint. I turned and looked at him. "I found him in a storage closet with a handgun. He'd been hiding, watching us rip his friends to shreds. He shot himself."

  Brian laughed. "That's beautiful," he said earnestly. "That's exactly what Colonel Murdock was looking for."

  "Yeah, well," Deke cut in, "let's not start giving each other celebratory blow jobs yet. We're only two teams out of five. Let's hope all of us were this lucky."

  "It shouldn't be much longer till Mat and Reggie get back," Holly said. "The others will probably be at least a couple more days."

  She seemed subdued, thoughtful. I wondered if it had been hard for her, or if her headcomp's combat subroutines had just carried her along the way mine had. Had it hit her afterward, the way it had with me?

  "I'm taking that hopper and going into the city," Deke declared suddenly. "I've been cooped up in one base or another too much these last few months. I'm getting drunk and getting laid and I don't care if it's a Licensed Escort or a pleasure doll at this point." He looked around the lift at us. "Anyone else coming?"

  The lift opened and we stepped out, hesitating in the broad corridor there while the doors closed behind us.

  "I think I am going for a hike in the mountains," Brian decided. "It would be nice to test myself out, see what I can do now, away from all the probes and cameras."

  He waved at us and strode purposefully down towards the ready room, probably intent on recording an After-Action Report on his mission.

  "What about you, Holly?" I asked her, my hand going instinctively to her shoulder.

  She leaned against me for a moment, looking like she was mentally drained, but then straightened and pulled away slightly.

  "I think I'll wait for the others to get back," she said. "I want to make sure Daniela's okay."

  "You want me to stay with you?" I was hoping she'd say yes. Even though I'd made up my mind that what we had wasn't what I was looking for, I didn't want to give it up.

  "No." I felt something sink inside my chest like a lead weight at the word. She patted me on the arm, smiling in a way that didn't reach all the way to her eyes. "You shouldn't let Deke head out alone. Go keep an eye on him." She shrugged. "Honestly, I'm just...not up for anything right now. I'm not ready
to be around people yet."

  "Not even me?" I hated myself for the way that sounded. I was being needy and juvenile and I suddenly felt all the naiveté I thought I'd left behind on Canaan weighing me down and I wished I could crawl into a hole.

  "Not this time," she said, her fingers tracing down my cheek before she headed off down the hall to her quarters. I watched her go for a second before realizing Deke was still standing behind me.

  "Sorry, bud," he said quietly after a long, silent moment. "I thought you guys had a thing."

  "I thought we did too," I admitted, shaking my head. "But I guess we don't anymore. Maybe we never did."

  He grunted reflectively. "You know," he said, "I think Daniela and Mat called it quits a couple days before the mission."

  "No shit?" I blurted in disbelief. "You think it has anything to do with...?" I waved a hand in the direction Holly had walked.

  "Holly and Daniela are pretty good friends," he speculated. "Maybe they both figured it wasn't a good idea to have a relationship with someone else on the team."

  "Yeah." I sighed. "At least Holly waited until we got back." Not that I hadn't known something was up before I left.

  Deke grinned and slipped an arm over my shoulder. "Hey, what is it you believers say? Every time God closes a Transition Line, he opens a jumpgate?"

  "Something like that," I allowed, laughing despite myself.

  "Well, let's take that hopper over to Sanctuary tomorrow," he went on, steering me down the hall away from the direction Holly had gone, "and find ourselves some civilian girls ready to have a good time."

  Chapter Fourteen

  The beat reverberated deep inside my chest, like a second heart trying to get into synch with the original one, a constant undertone to music that screeched like an overheating turbine before it exploded through my head. The rotating dance floor was overlaid by a hologram of a stylized starscape and a spiral galaxy spun overhead, its movements matching the beat of the music, while stars exploded and nebulae expanded among and through the dancers. Most of them didn't seem to notice, their eyes either focused on the men or women around them or just unfocused from whatever combination of alcohol and narcotics was their thing.

  Every possible combination of male and female had paired off---or in some cases, formed into groups of three or four---on the various levels of the dance floor, and the groups shifted in patterns I couldn't follow from my perch on the walkway above them, reminding me of a video I'd seen in class of the human circulatory system. I wondered if it was on purpose or just some sort of natural, chaos-theory pattern. If there was a pattern to their movements, there was certainly none to their manner of dress. Somewhere around half of them were in what seemed to be business casual for Sanctuary: dress slacks and long-sleeved shirts, often with something they called a "bolo," which looked ridiculous to me. The rest were in almost everything imaginable, from the latest and most expensive hologram-inlaid Earth fashions to absolutely nothing at all, bare-ass naked. I tried not to stare, but then I thought that perhaps that was exactly the reaction they were looking for.

  I looked down at my drink for a long moment before I shrugged and took a sip of it. I'd let Deke pick it out since I'd never drank alcohol before. It was neon green and it tasted sweet and sour at the same time. I took too big of a swallow and nearly choked before I managed to get it down.

  Holy shit, I said to him, happy I didn't have to shout to be heard over the music. Are you sure we aren't too young to be drinking? I didn't know local laws, but on Canaan you couldn't drink alcohol until age twenty-five.

  Not with a military ID, he assured me, hanging over the railing beside me, his own drink held casually in his hand, already half-empty. We're golden.

  I cautiously attempted another sip, deciding to take his word for it. A warm glow seemed to spread out from my chest and my headcomp warned me that I was in danger of becoming intoxicated and asked if I wished to use my nanites to counteract it. I assured it that I did not and told it not to bother me again. There was a pleasant buzz inside my head and I grinned at the feeling, looking around the huge volume of the club's interior.

  Le Maintenant was, according to the garish and invasive advertising out in the street, the largest privately owned entertainment complex in the colonies. I could believe it. Hermes was the oldest colony in the Commonwealth and the second most populous behind Eden out at 82 Eridani, and Sanctuary was its largest city. Three hundred thousand people lived in the city or on its outskirts and the only thing I'd seen that beat it out was the one school trip I'd gone on during my Fourth-Class year to Capital City out on the North American East Coast.

  Sanctuary wasn't the interconnected hive of Capital City, of course. Over a billion people lived cheek-by-jowl in that gargantuan monstrosity and I still had nightmares sometimes from the trip. I didn't understand how they didn't all go insane with just people and more people everywhere you went, and nowhere to go to be alone except plugging into Virtual Reality in a booth somewhere. No, Sanctuary was more akin to Harristown back home, just writ large. Individual buildings were connected by streets, and they even used private groundcars to get around still. There was space and a bit of sprawl as the industrial and business areas gave way to apartment blocks and even a significant number of private houses.

  Harristown, though, had nothing like Le Maintenant. It was a squared-off building in the industrial district that looked like a huge warehouse from the outside; inside it was home to shops, restaurants, ViR immersion tanks, fitness centers, swimming pools, pleasure doll rentals, Escort service centers and, of course, the largest dance club I'd ever seen.

  And the only dance club I'd ever seen, I acknowledged with a self-deprecating shrug.

  Bud, Deke said, nudging me, we aren't going to meet anything but the bottom of our glasses standing up here watching.

  I glanced at him sidelong, raising an eyebrow. You can't be serious. I have never once in my life danced to music like this. I nodded down at the undulating groups below us. If I waded into that, I'd be as likely to go into Combat Mode as anything resembling dancing. Hell, that shit looks like unarmed combat, come to think.

  Bud, you have access to any style of dance ever recorded, he reminded me, grinning slyly and pointing to his skull.

  Holy shit, you're right! I realized abruptly, my eyes widening. It was so hard getting used to things like that.

  I linked into the local 'net and did a quick search for the popular dance styles until I found one that looked similar to what we were watching, then accessed a tutorial and had my headcomp analyze it and feed the results into the subroutine that controlled my unarmed combat patterns. And suddenly I knew how to dance. It was incredible.

  You're a genius, Slick, I told him with honest admiration. No one could come up with more unauthorized uses for government issue hardware than Deke.

  I prefer to think of myself as a visionary, he said, shrugging modestly. Let's go find someone to dance with.

  That wasn't nearly as difficult as I'd feared when he first suggested it. Once we'd made our way down to the covered walkways that ringed the dance floor, I saw that there were scores of people standing there, drinking or smoking or talking or making out---no one was outright having sex there, I was relieved to find; I wasn't quite open-minded enough to accept doing that in public. Among them were many who were quite obviously waiting to dance with someone.

  Deke patted my arm and nodded towards a tall woman with hair so flaming red that it couldn't be natural and a dress that seemed to consist mostly of strips of material loosely connected to one another, key areas concealed by holograms of various ocean animals native to Earth.

  Wish me luck, he said, tossing his glass in a recycling bin and heading over towards her.

  Visionaries don't need luck, I reminded him, raising my drink in salute.

  I was trying to watch him, but people shifted and moved in my way, and I started moving back and forth to try to see around the crowd. Then I realized that one of the people
I was trying to look around was looking straight at me. She was as tall as me at around a meter-eight, with neck-length blond hair that looked like her natural color, the bangs curled up at the sides in a style I hadn't seen before, and eyes of polished jade set in a face that was thinner than I would normally have found attractive but worked perfectly with her features. She was wearing a short, white dress that emphasized her athletic, leggy build very nicely and I took a step towards her almost without meaning to.

  "Hi," I said, having to yell to be heard. "I'm Caleb."

  She had a drink, something amber in a long, thin glass, and she took a long, leisurely sip of it before she leaned in close to my ear and responded. "Jenna Duquesne," she said. Her voice was strong and melodic, like a singer's. "You're not from around here, are you?"

  "What gave me away?" I put my mouth close to her ear to say it and I could smell the scent of her, something sweet and subtle, not overwhelmingly strong.

  "You're either from a high gravity planet," she said with a breathy laugh, "or you're some sort of government experiment!"

  "Would you believe both?"

  She laughed again, then tossed her empty glass in a recycler. "Would you like to dance?"

  "Given a choice? No," I admitted. "But I will if you want to."

  "I do want to,” she told me, offering a hand. I took it and let myself be dragged out onto the floor.

  I hadn’t been far off when I said I might spontaneously go into Combat Mode out there; I had to consciously keep my headcomp from seeing the flying bodies as a threat, but it did come in handy avoiding collisions. We carved out a spot of our own, using a generous combination of hips and elbows, and I fell into the patterns my headcomp had selected, treating the dance as a martial arts form. I didn’t have to think about the moves, which left me plenty of time to appreciate her. She was graceful, her motions sinuous; she had to have danced as a hobby when she was younger, I figured. She certainly hadn’t learned the way I had; my style was workmanlike and uninspired next to hers.