“Fuck them.” Eversen banged his fists on the rail. “Everybody employs a Phillips, nobody employs an Estian — nobody employs us. It’s not fair!”
“I told you,” Ereli said. “The Emancipation was the worst thing that ever happened to us.”
“At least we’re not slaves.” Eversen slumped back down. “At least we’re free. Have rights.”
“Okay. Not the Emancipation, then — when the corporations made us. That was the worst thing to ever happen to us.”
“We didn’t ask to be born,” Eversen muttered. “So they decanted us instead.”
“Exactly. And then they tell us we’re free and leave us chronically unemployed.”
“We had work in Tajikistan.”
Ereli smiled, thinly. “We had fun in Tajikistan.”
“Not all of it was fun.” Eversen’s tone was flat, dead. “Most of it wasn’t. Shouldn’t have been fun, anyway.”
“That’s what they say.” Ereli jerked his chin at the city again. “Fighting’s not supposed to be fun, killing’s not supposed to be fun, risking death’s not supposed to be fun. Sex and drugs and alcohol are supposed to be fun.”
“They’re not.”
“They’re not,” Ereli agreed.
“Getting stuck in that house while the revolution rolled over us, spending days under siege? That wasn’t fun.”
Ereli slumped down over the railing next to his brother, adopting the same low pose. “It was kinda fun.”
“Kinda. I felt alive, anyway. Like I had purpose.”
“So I don’t see what the problem is. Everyone deserves to have a purpose.”
“I don’t think it’s moral for us to start a civil war just because we’re unemployed.”
“It’s not because we’re unemployed. It’s because they don’t have anyone to fight for them.”
“Who? The Azerbaijanis? We haven’t even finalized our pick.” Eversen shook his head. “Everything still in quarantine zones with the Eurasian War’s fallout, everyone in what’s left of Bolivia, they all need protectors. If that was really why we were doing this, we could have started a war any time.”
“We’re not starting a war,” Ereli said, carefully. “We’re holding a crowdfunding campaign. It’s different.”
2. Pushing it.
::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.
::/ March, 2105.
::/ Edane Estian.
Edane stretched out his hands, and looked at them. His left hand was rock solid, while his right hand trembled uncontrollably. That was because, technically speaking, it wasn’t his right hand.
He knew all the scars on his left hand. That dent in his middle finger, just beneath where the fingernail started? That was the suicide bomber back in Dushanbe. The clipped scar across his knuckles, a dark line of knitted flesh under ruddy red-brown fur, had been courtesy of glass in the streets when he caught himself on his fists, scrambling to his belly during a firefight. The dry scab across the back of his thumb, that was being a klutz when a cookery lesson from Janine hadn’t gone as planned.
But his right hand? That was all a mystery to him. The ring finger and pinky were untouched, but there was an old burn that made the fur tangle across the back of his middle finger and forefinger, and it lined up perfectly if he made a fist. It could have been a fist to throw a punch, or a fist to grip something small and delicate safely. If he squeezed carefully at his right hand, he could make out the knots of old breaks that had been repeatedly broken, just under the knuckles on his right hand’s long bones.
Edane had done that to himself, once. Punched too hard without a glove, broke his hand just under the ring finger’s knuckle. That’d been with his right hand, too, but his right hand before he’d gone to Tajikistan. Before patrolling Dushanbe’s streets. Before the mortar strike in the Tous marketplace. His right hand before shrapnel and blast force had torn pieces of him away. His right hand before.
He’d been lucky. A little more time spent bleeding into the marketplace’s stones, and maybe one of Edane’s brothers would have been sitting where he was sitting, puzzling over a left hand written over with mysteries. Scars without answers.
He waited for his can of meat to warm up in the sunshine, sitting in the shade under a tree away from the picnic tables and other players, most of his combat gear piled up beside him, wondering where the scars had come from and when the shaking would stop.
“You overdone it again, kid?” Marianna stopped beside him, on her way from the MilSim league organizer’s table and back to the snack stand. “Something wrong with the arm?”
“No.” He ducked his head away from her, and folded his arms — left over right, pinning the shuddering limb to his body.
Marianna grimaced, a narrow line of sharp teeth and gum on display, tail stiff. “Don’t give me that shit, kid.”
Marianna was like him. Gengineered dog. But smaller, and older, and that seemed to give her the idea that she had some kind of authority over him. As if she were his older sister — she might have been built from an earlier version of Edane’s genes, but she didn’t have command authority, she didn’t own him, she just ran the MilSim team, his life was none of her—
KRAK!
Her helmet bounced off his skull and whirled away. She swung it around her fist by the chinstrap, and snarled. “Are you listening to me, kid?”
Edane winced away, rubbing his head. “Yes sir.”
“Show me the arm.”
Gingerly, Edane stretched out his right arm. She started prodding it, poking it, as if she knew what she was doing.
“You tear something again? I fucking told you to take it easy with the arm, Edane.” She let him go, and he drew his arm back to himself, hunching over it.
“I don’t think I tore anything,” he muttered.
“You sure? You fucking tore something last month.”
He glared up at her. “I said I didn’t tear it. “ He looked back down at his shivering hand. “I think. I think I’m just tired or something. My arm’s just tired.” He shook out his right shoulder, looking away.
“You go easy on that thing.” Marianna pointed at him accusingly. “Siegelbach didn’t go and get himself killed so you could fuck up his arm. Nobody else is letting someone graft their dead arm onto your sorry ass, kid.”
“The doctors said the nerves are only supposed to grow an inch a month,” Edane snapped back at her. “It’s only been eight months since I got it, and I can already use my hand. The graft’s fine, I’m doing great, I do all my goddamn exercises and the physiotherapists say I’m getting function back faster than anyone they’ve ever seen, so lay off!”
“I’ll lay off when you stop pushing yourself hard enough to tear those fucking nerves.” Marianna growled, properly growled, a low sound of threat reverberating in her chest. She poked him. “Slow down. That’s an order — and shoot left handed for Christ’s sake. Your aim out there’s been shit for the last hour.”
Edane didn’t want to shoot left handed. He didn’t shoot left handed before, he didn’t want to shoot left handed now, even if his MilSim rifle was ambidextrous. He looked away sullenly. “Yes sir.”
“I’m keeping an eye on you, kid.” She wagged her finger in warning, and strode off back for the snack stand.
He watched her go, scratching at his right wrist nervously. He stopped, when he realized what he was doing, and when it didn’t look like she was going to come back with her helmet. They still had twenty minutes before they re-deployed for the next round on the field. Plenty of time to rest, eat. By the time he got back out there with the rest of the team, his arm would probably have calmed down some. Probably. But he’d shoot left handed anyway — that had been an order, in the context of the MilSim team, which she did have command authority for. But he was sick and tired of her butting in about his arm.
In defiance, he opened the can of sun-warmed meat right handed, twisting the little key in the notch to peel open the metal, and used the key’s wire loop as a spoo
n to scoop out and eat the preservative jelly first. He had to take extra time, and duck his head close to the can, but he didn’t spill like last time.
That was something, at least.
*
Semi-professional MilSim Team Eight-Eight-Zero, registered with the Middle American Military Simulation Sports Gaming League, Marianna Estian team leader, came in with a combined score of three hundred sixty-two points, ranking as fourth out of sixty semi-pro teams, and fifteenth in the combined semi-pro/pro table. Of the match’s three factions, theirs — faction two — ended the match in a victory tie with faction three, with a points differential of thirty-five.
It was a very complicated way of saying Edane fucked up.
During the match Marianna had split the team into the usual two fireteams — her with Eberstetten, Erlnicht, and Svarstad; Edane with Ellis, Salzach, and Louie. She’d kept them roughly together, running parallel about a quarter-kilometer apart on a path hooking south-east and then bending up north across the playing field and into enemy territory, cutting through the forests towards the enemy hardline locations.
That part went okay — the hike was almost pleasant, without the distraction of a radio or HUD and waypoints, done electronics-off to keep from producing EM-signatures. Technically, of course, the MilSim’s augmented reality goggles and tracking software and equipment were all still running to keep tracking the match, but as far as the experience of hiking went, it was a pleasurable three miles under thirty pounds of mock ballistic armor with all their equipment. Sure, it was hot, but there was plenty of water, and even Louie — the team’s only human member, just seventeen — did okay. The under-armor circulation meshes they wore for cooling helped out a lot.
The trouble started late into their second round deployment, around about the time the team slowed down a little to let Louie catch up. That was expected, the kid didn’t have the same stamina as the rest of the team, but that was when they wound up in a firefight behind the lines, and Edane’s aim had gone to shit.
Oh, he’d shot left handed. Curled his right arm around, gripping his left wrist with his right hand, barrel braced against the crook of his half-numb right elbow. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to shoot, and it worked for him most of the time, but the jitters in his arm had gotten so bad that out of the twelve shots he’d taken, eight had gone off-target.
The planned, methodical search for the enemy hardlines had turned into an ambush and a scrambling run to find the on-field servers the hardlines were linked to. Radio links, especially long range radio links, were too insecure and far too easy to jam, so hardlines in and out of combat zones were key combat infrastructure, almost as important as air and fire support. Successfully cutting the hardlines would net an immediate score of thirty points, but more importantly it would open up all off-field radio communications to EMWAR interference. Succeeding in EMWAR objectives like that — electronics, emissions, and electromagnetic warfare was key — had a knock-on effect worth a whole lot more than thirty points.
Four shots hit, which was to his credit, but eight of Edane’s shots had missed. That had shaken him — he wasn’t supposed to miss — and he’d fumbled a reload later, his shaking fingers refusing to guide the magazine into its well. That’d left him a few steps behind the rest of the team, unable to get out of cover fast enough, and he’d wound up eliminated as he’d concentrated on catching up rather than checking the environment around him.
One member down, it didn’t take long for the team to lose another, and another… until only Marianna, Salzach and Erlnicht had walked back in off the field two hours later, victoriously carrying eight lengths of cut fiber-optic cable with them.
It shouldn’t have taken two hours. It was supposed to be a victory, but Edane knew — the whole team knew — he’d let them down.
Not that it was obvious, by the way everyone was fussing over Louie.
Salzach reached over the van’s middle seat, ruffling Louie’s hair. “See?” he said, pointing at Louie’s pad. “You’re aiming better. Just had to develop some upper body strength.”
Edane, in the front-left seat, beside the van’s interface screen, shrank down, watching the road ahead, his ears flat. Salzach was probably just trying to encourage the kid, that was all. It wasn’t a comment on Edane’s performance — just on Louie’s.
Louie had a lot of trouble keeping up, but they all liked having him around anyway. He was a kid, not a soldier. But Salzach had been friendly with Enzweiler, back in Tajikistan. And Louie’s family had adopted Enzweiler after the Emancipation. So Louie was family, and if he wanted to hang around his foster-brother’s clones, his foster-brother’s clones were happy to let him.
“Yeah,” Louie said, squirming under the contact. “Dad says I just need to eat more protein for dinner, then I’ll build muscle…”
“Hey, just make them feed you something nutritious, like meat,” Salzach said.
Louie stuck out his tongue, playfully disgusted. “Nah, we’re gonna have chicken and ‘fu.”
“But that doesn’t have nutrients.” Salzach leaned forward over the middle seat’s back, pressed against the van’s roof. “Gimme a can of meat.”
Obligingly, one of the brothers up front grabbed one from the little cardboard crate of chow they hauled along. Salzach had to turn the can around twice to find the part of the thickly printed label that had the nutritional information, amongst the ingredients and legalese. No smart-paper on the label to simplify the search.
“Now look, Louie, how are you gonna grow big and strong without your… Ethylened— Ethylene-dia—… shit, how do you pronounce this?”
The can got passed around, with various failing attempts to say it, until Marianna just looked it up on her phone. “You pronounce it limescale remover.”
“What!?” Salzach burst into laughter.
Her grin had a sharp viciousness Edane couldn’t help wanting to emulate. It was just the right mix of friendly and tear-your-throat out.
Marianna was kind of a role model for everybody. Even Edane. Natural, given that she’d been born ten years before any of his brothers. By the time of the Emancipation, Marianna’s production run was almost grown up. Almost ready to put into use. Edane’s run had been six or seven years old. Some of Marianna’s sisters had transitioned straight from pre-Emancipation existence as owned people to private citizens in the same line of work, security and warfare. Marianna herself had been up to something she didn’t like talking about in the depths of old Colombia, far enough south of the city that the borders of the Middle American Corporate Preserve gave way to old-style nation states. But now, now she taught self defense and martial arts, and ran the MilSim team. And that grin, stretched across her muzzle, made Edane wish his face were just that little bit sharper, like hers.
“Meat’s full of limescale remover, Salzach,” she teased. “You’re advocating we dump industrial cleaning supplies down the boy’s throat.”
Edane snatched the can back from the others to look it over, fighting off a smile — amused, not sharp. Cans of meat were familiar. Beautifully familiar. What he’d grown up on as a kid in the barracks. He’d lost track of the stuff for years, nobody seemed to believe that anything like meat could qualify as food, but some brother’s family found someone still making it in bioreactor vats up north somewhere in Mexico, canning it just like the Mess sergeant used to dole it out. Edane put his phone to it, but the label didn’t even have a smart patch to link to the web address, he had to scan it in so he could check their food safety certificates.
Meanwhile Louie was laughing so hard he was hiccoughing, and Salzach was slapping the kid’s back. “I’m advocating we feed the boy some real food. None of this sauce and spice stuff. If it doesn’t get pulled out of a vat in dripping strands of tissue and spun into a solid mass, it’s just not food.”
God, they were going to make Louie choke.
Maybe it was silly, enjoying this kind of thing. Laughing about it. But as a kid, Edane hadn’t caught on to
any of it. It had taken him years to understand what a joke was. Sometimes he still didn’t think he understood.
Eberstetten, sitting in the front, was frowning down at his phone. He’d looked it up too. “It’s a multi-use chemical. Ee-Dee-Tee-A. Ethyla-something-something.” A short pause, his ears flicking back at the laughter behind him. “It’s also for treating lead poisoning.”
“See? So if you get riddled with bullets, just eat your meat, Louie.” Marianna punched his shoulder, grinning still. “All that nutritious meat’s gonna sop up the lead like a sponge, leave you just fine.”
“Nah, nah, no way it’s not!” Louie yelped, gasping for air between fits of laughter, face scarlet.
Eberstetten just turned and stared, ears flicking curiously. “I meant real lead poisoning,” he clarified, cautiously.
Edane… Edane shook with silent almost-laughter, distracted from his problems, for a little while.
Eberstetten would get the joke eventually.
When they dropped Louie off, at his folks’ place in the suburbs, Salzach walked him to the door. Stood there, tall and silent.
It was always awkward for the parents. Even Edane could see that much from the street. Edane knew the way those people looked, because his mothers had kind of looked like that when he’d been in the hospital. It’d been rough on them. Louie’s folks, Enzweiler’s folks, looked like nice people. A little reserved, holding back. Trying to hide the way they looked at Salzach, longingly, like maybe the bad news never came, and Salzach was really Enzweiler, and their son had never been killed on a cold mountain while trying to escape Tajikistan after the revolution kicked off, just a few days after Edane had been wounded.
Salzach, out in front of Enzweiler’s mom, dad, and little brother, bore the weight of that longing silence longer than Edane thought possible. He smiled at them, gave Louie a friendly thwack on the back, and made the van rock when he got back in, slumping in front of the dashboard console.
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