She was back in camp. She was back in her own camp. She looked down and saw she was lying on a stretcher. Hellfire—she’d lost some time there, hadn’t she? The others—Gutierrez and the others—must have gotten her out. Gotten her and Anselm into the evac transport, brought them home. She didn’t remember any of it. Just—just red lights, red warning lights, and that sound—
“How many hours?” someone shouted. She turned and saw a doctor flanked by a pair of medical drones. He was shouting at her. “How many hours has it been since the earworm infection started?” He asked again, slower, pronouncing each word carefully as if she couldn’t be expected to understand basic English.
She wanted to answer but her suit’s displays were still shut down. “I don’t know. I …” she tried.
The doctor scowled and ran over toward another stretcher, a few meters away. Anselm was half in, half out of it, his legs flopping on the ground. He was still screaming, but she could barely hear him over the screeching noise in her head. “Get the program running—get him restrained. Now!” the doctor shouted. “How long? Exactly?” he asked Ehta. “We have six hours tops to help him before the trauma sets in and—”
“I don’t know!” Ehta said. “I don’t know—I can’t switch on my displays.”
“Where’s your officer?” The doctor checked a display of his own. “Where’s Second Lieutenant Holmes?”
“He got it two days into the patrol,” Ehta said.
Orderlies held Anselm down while a display lit up in front of his face, blue and red and green lights playing over his eyes and his cheeks. He was still screaming.
“What was that about your displays?” the doctor asked.
It was Gutierrez who answered. She was standing right behind Ehta. “The sergeant heard it, too. She heard it—but then she kind of came out of it, she stopped screaming—”
The doctor’s eyes went wide. “That’s not possible. Damn it, somebody restrain her, too.” Ehta tried to fight but Binah and Gutierrez grabbed her arms and forced her to lie down. A drone came bobbing up to her and started spraying light in her face. Geometric patterns bloomed all around her, blocks and circles and complex three-dimensional shapes that rotated and twisted as she looked at them.
“Sergeant, I don’t know how you’re lucid right now,” the doctor said, his face obscured by a pulsing heptagon. “You were hit by a supernormal stimulus. Do you know what that means?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “There are certain sounds hardwired into the human brain. Things our primitive ancestors needed to listen for, like the roar of a tiger, right? You hear that sound, you’re going to jump. You don’t think about it, because if you take the time to think, the tiger will already be on your back with its claws in your guts. It’s just a reflex.”
“Anselm—is Anselm—” she tried to say, but he was ignoring her. Lecturing her.
“A supernormal stimulus is a sound that activates that same reflex—except moreso. It’s not the sound of a tiger yowling. It’s more like the Platonic ideal of a tiger’s yowl. It’s that sound of death, distilled and magnified until it sends your brain into a bad loop of fear. Once you hear that sound you can’t unhear it. It’s cycling through your short-term memory, playing over and over again. If we don’t break that cycle, your brain will try to code it into a long-term memory. If that happens—”
“I know about stress disorders,” Ehta said. In front of her a ring of dancing squares split into triangles and disappeared. “What the hell am I looking at?”
“We need to get your brain occupied with other tasks, to disrupt the memory formation process. Otherwise you could be looking at flashbacks, at night terrors for the rest of your life—in a best-case scenario. Don’t fight this, just try to organize the shapes however it feels right, okay? Come on, Sergeant, you need to look at the shapes.”
“Damn it, I told you—”
“Do what the doc says, Sergeant!” Gutierrez told her. She could just see her corporal through the dancing colors. She looked terrified.
Ehta forced herself to calm down, to look at a couple of blue star shapes that orbited around her head. Blue stars. Like the commendations they gave to ace pilots. And there were red squares, too, red squares all around her, red squares like the warning lights on a weapons board, and—suddenly there were red squares everywhere, the program responding to her eye movements, showing her what it thought she wanted to see—red lights—red—red warning lights—she started hearing high-pitched chimes—
No. No, she wouldn’t let this happen again. She couldn’t. She found one last shape that wasn’t a red square. A lavender oval. She forced herself to stare at it. To make it fold in half, then in half again. She found she could make it split into multiple conic sections if she concentrated.
“Good,” the doctor said. She could see his face nodding behind the ovals and paraboloids. “Good, your numbers are coming down. I’m showing a strong projection from your infralimbic cortex. That’s good, keep it up. Good—”
She looked over to her side, toward Anselm. He was screaming—but that was just background noise now. She saw the shapes rotating around his head, saw them change and darken. “Are—are his shapes supposed to look like that?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about him,” the doctor told her. “Worry about yourself.”
But how could she look away? The shapes around Anselm were dark, spiky things, just scribbles of lines in the air. They weren’t changing so much as growing, filling more of the space around his head. White triangles stabbed in from the sides, like teeth gnashing at his face.
Through the shapes she could just see his eyes. Rolling like an animal’s, white all around the irises. Eyes of pure terror.
“Is he—is he—”
The doctor stood up and shoved his body between them, so she couldn’t see Anselm anymore.
Around her the lavender shapes started to wink out, one by one. Green triangles appeared in front of her and she felt an urge to make them join together, to gather them into an icosahedron. She tried looking over at Anselm, but they wouldn’t let her. He was one of her squad, damn it. He was her responsibility—
“Spike him,” someone said from behind the doctor. “He’s done for.”
In front of her the yellow triangles just wouldn’t stick together. They kept flying apart, no matter how hard she tried to join them.
Abruptly, Anselm stopped screaming.
Cygnet’s tail jumped up in the air and its tip shook back and forth for a moment. It must have been some kind of signal, because someone new entered the room. Bullam looked up and saw that it was the old man, the one she’d seen down at the dock playing with toy boats.
She could see him better now, in the well-lit room. She could see the tiny scars that crisscrossed his cheeks. Any competent doctor could have gotten rid of those—he must have kept them, perhaps as tokens of some old battle. She saw how thin he was, saw his fine, wispy hair. His jaw was set as if his teeth were clamped tightly together, but what really caught her attention was the look in his eyes.
There wasn’t one.
There was no spark of intelligence there. No human emotion. He didn’t look like he was blind, nor did he seem to be under the influence of any drug she knew. Instead it was like he was a mannequin. An imitation of a human being.
As he walked into the room he seemed to be striding on nothing at all—on open air. Yet it didn’t seem to bother him. He came and stood in front of them, his arms hanging loose at his sides.
“M. Bullam,” Cygnet said, “I’d like you to meet Captain Shulkin. I was talking earlier of the pilots and such that we’ve recruited from the Navy. The castoffs, the misfits they don’t want anymore. Our own private force. I told you how rare and valuable they are. The Captain here is the star of that particular show. He’s a genuine war hero! The man who beat back the Establishment at Jehannum.”
Bullam considered standing and reaching to shake the old man’s hand. The thought of getting off the divan made her head spin
. “M. Shulkin,” she said, “it’s a privilege to meet you.”
Shulkin didn’t nod. He didn’t even look directly at her.
Bullam frowned. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. But are you well, M. Shulkin?”
“He’s fine,” Cygnet said. “Absolutely fine. Just had some work done, is all. Navy personnel are prone to a certain kind of mental illness, I don’t know if you know this—they would say he got the wind up him. It’s a rather colorful way of describing combat stress. It happens to a lot of their people, and it affects them in a variety of ways—some of them can’t sleep, for instance, or they can become unreasonably aggressive. Alternatively, prone to cowardice. Captain Shulkin tried to fly his destroyer into a red dwarf star. Psychotically suicidal, they tell me. Compulsively so. He had to be relieved of duty.”
Bullam shuddered, despite herself.
“Luckily for him the Navy has a long history of treating such illness. It’s a special kind of optogenetic treatment where they use lasers to reduce dendritic connections. They burned away part of your brain, didn’t they, Captain?”
Shulkin’s face didn’t harden. He just nodded, his chin twitching toward his shoulder. “Took the parts I didn’t need,” he said. “Made me operational again.”
“Don’t worry about offending him,” Cygnet said. “He’s quite past that kind of thing. He doesn’t have any fear, either, which is what they were after, I suppose. What he does still have, what we prize in him, is his experience. His knowledge of tactics is legendary. He was one of the brightest officers in the Fleet, in his day.”
A sudden flash of light appeared in Shulkin’s eyes, as if something buried very deep was trying to signal the outside world. “I can still fight,” he said.
“Oh, I believe it,” Cygnet replied. Turning back to Bullam, he said, “I want to find out what Aleister Lanoe is up to.” His tail draped itself across her shoulder. “I want you and the Captain to go and fetch him for me. Before he makes contact with this mysterious new ally.”
When Ehta finally got her suit rebooted—when the techs were sure they’d erased the earworm from all of her systems—she was discharged from the medical tent. The doctors all lined up to watch her go. They couldn’t believe that she’d made it.
There was no word on Anselm. This was just a forward operating base, and the medical facilities were only set up to handle emergency procedures. Anyone stable enough to be moved was taken fifty kilometers back behind the lines, to a place where specialists could treat them without having to listen to bombs raining down outside. Anselm had been heavily sedated and loaded in a transport and that was the last she’d seen of him.
She wanted to know more. She owed it to her squad to find out what happened to him. When her wrist display lit up, though, and she reached to make an official inquiry, she was surprised to find that new orders were already waiting for her. She was to report to her CO for immediate reassignment.
The officers’ tents were on the far side of the camp, grouped around the landing pads—the thinking among the enlisted was that the officers wanted to be able to be the first ones to evacuate when the Navy finally gave up on Tuonela. She passed by a half-dozen troop transports and ducked under the airfoil of a Z.VI that was in the middle of refueling. There was a funny-looking ship sitting on the pad directly outside her major’s tent, a crescent-shaped flying-wing kind of thing she didn’t recognize. It had the three-headed eagle on its fuselage, though, so she ignored it and pushed through the weather field of the tent.
It was warm inside. Mist had condensed on the sides of tea glasses and some of the flat displays that lined the walls of the tent, and the noncom who came to meet her was actually sweating. She always forgot how cold Tuonela could get—it was always the same comfortable temperature inside her suit. The noncom gave her a weird look, then gestured her over to his workstation. “How are you still standing?” he asked.
She realized she couldn’t remember his name. Well, it was his job to keep track of her, not the other way round. “The medicos checked me out and let me go,” she told him. “I’m fine. I got a little dose of an earworm, but—”
He shook his head. “You know that isn’t how it works. You get hit with one of those things, you don’t recover. Damnation, Ehta, I already had you pegged for medical rotation, then I see your name pop up on my active roster—you’re hard as a box of nails, aren’t you?” He laughed and sat her down in a folding chair. “Well, it’s over now. You’re going home, you lucky bastard.”
“Home?” Ehta asked.
“Sure. You’re being invalided out on a full medical discharge. Well, I suppose nobody can call you a malingerer. You’ve been a PBM for how long now? Nearly three years? Compared to most of the outflow I process, that’s making old bones.”
“Wait—I don’t get this. I’m fine,” she said. “I came over here for reassignment. I’m fine.” She realized she was repeating herself. “I need to get back to my squad, they’re all waiting to hear about Anselm—”
“Ehta,” he said, smirking at her, “don’t you get it? Maybe that earworm hit you harder than you thought. You’re done. The Planetary Brigade Marines thank you for your service. Let me send you some information. You’re eligible for half pay for the rest of the year, and of course you’ll get medical and substance abuse rehabilitation benefits. The Marines take care of their own, you damned fortunate so-and-so.”
“You’re—you’re cashiering me,” Ehta said.
His smile was warm and genuine. She really wanted to knock it off his face.
“I’m fine.” She shook her head. “Listen, you—you don’t understand. This is my career. This is my life. I’ve been fighting since I was a child.”
His smile fell off his face. She didn’t notice, not at first, that he wasn’t looking at her anymore.
“It can’t just be over. Not like this. It can’t just … stop, with no warning!”
The noncom jumped up out of his chair and stood up ramrod straight, his eyes focused on nothing. She thought maybe he was having a fit.
“Damn you, this can’t be how it ends!”
“It doesn’t have to be,” someone said, behind her.
No. She recognized that voice.
She rose slowly from her chair, and turned around. “Commander,” she said.
“Hello, Ehta,” Aleister Lanoe said to her.
Chapter Thirteen
This is ridiculous,” Bury said. “We might as well still be stuck in the brig!”
They’d been let out of a cell and moved to a small section of the ship reserved for fighter pilots, just a ring of coffin-sized bunks surrounding a common wardroom and galley. Told to stay in that area and not wander. With no explanation whatsoever. It was unacceptable.
Instructor Candless—no, he needed to call her Lieutenant Candless now, he remembered—was as infuriatingly calm as ever. She and Ginger were strapped in around a microgravity table in the wardroom, sucking on tubes of green paste—the best food available in their stores. The two of them were totally calm, acting like this kind of thing happened all the time.
Bury wouldn’t stand for it. He was destined for bigger things than just keeping his head down and waiting for orders. There had to be more to life in the Navy than just that. “I refuse to just stay put,” he sneered.
Candless turned and looked at him with those eyes of hers, the ones that seemed to look right through him. “Ensign, you should sit down right now and be quiet. It is my firm belief that Commander Lanoe will explain everything,” she said, sounding as if she actually meant it. “We just have to wait a little longer.”
“It’s been days!” Bury said. “I need to get out of here.”
Candless frowned, but then she nodded and looked away from him. “Very well. If that’s what you need. Go see what the inside of a Hoplite-class cruiser looks like. I’m sure it’ll be educational.”
Bury kicked off a wall and pulled his way through a hatch, out into the long corridor beyond.
; “Just don’t touch anything,” Candless called after him.
The Hellion grunted in frustration and shoved himself at speed down the corridor. It was no more than two meters wide, so he kept caroming off the soft plastic walls, but every time he did he kicked again and gained more speed. Soon he was in the long axial corridor that ran the length of the ship.
With no idea of what he actually wanted to do. Just get some exercise, maybe. Burn off some of his frustration.
The corridors and cramped little chambers that made up the Hoplite were silent except for a background sound of machinery ticking over. The discreet sighs of the ventilation system, the high-pitched whines of displays turning themselves on and off. There was something missing from that quiet, something it took him a while to put his finger on.
Eventually, though, he worked it out. He could hear the ship all around him, hear it going through its autonomous motions. What he couldn’t hear—anywhere—was a human voice. No sound of someone coughing quietly, or humming to themselves. No soft thuds of people kicking off of walls to move themselves around.
Once he’d noticed the human absence, he couldn’t hear anything else.
The corridors and compartments of the Hoplite were narrow and cramped. The dozens of people who should have been aboard would have filled up that claustrophobic space. Instead the emptiness positively echoed.
He made his way back through the gunnery bays, forests of tubes and pipes glittering with control displays. Empty. Back toward the engines, where the ship’s background hum became a constrained roar, as the life support systems worked hard to shed excess heat from the big toroidal fusion reactor. A crew of engineers ought to have been back there, massaging the power plants, keeping them in trim.
Nobody.
He found a command-level control station. Just a square of gray plastic mounted at the center of a machine shop. He waved his hand over it and a display lit up, showing him a schematic view of the engines. Everything looked in good order—no red lights showing, no warning chimes sounding. That wasn’t what he was looking for, though. Instead he queried the display as to where all the technicians had gone.
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