by Jamie Sawyer
“Can I just say,” he started, “what a damned inspiration you are to us all, sir?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He saluted as well. “I mean, two hundred and twenty-three transitions? Man, you are one mean bastard. We all heard about what you did on Helios – with the Krell, and the Directorate and all. Jesus Christo, that was some serious shit.”
It was actually two hundred and twenty-four, including today, but I chose not to correct him.
“As you were, troopers,” I said, trying to brush the group off.
“Our outfit is new,” the kid called to me as I went. “Indigo Squad. Just got our approval from Command. We’re going to be just like you, sir.”
I glanced back at him once, at the four identical faces. They were all younger than Blake when he had died; probably barely had a hundred transitions between them. They’d never be selected for an operation in the Maelstrom, probably hadn’t been soldiers before induction into the Programme.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” the trooper said.
I was already moving off into the crowds and the noise swallowed anything else that he had to say.
I found myself in front of a wall-sized view-screen, showing President Francis’ disembodied head. Some things hadn’t changed at all. I sniggered to myself. President Francis was still in power; still head of the Alliance and all things good. It seemed that he was a constant, the rock around which the river flowed.
“What’s the saying?” I asked the president as he griped about the free market conditions on the Core Worlds. “The best medication is self-medication?”
Francis didn’t answer me. He just kept talking: that perfectly quaffed black hair, that award-winning smile—
I was being watched.
I clocked them before they saw me. From across the sea of faces, two familiar pairs of eyes peered back at me. I’d seen the guys before – down at the dry docks. They were good tails but not good enough.
Before I could get a proper look they were gone again.
I found a bar and went inside. My regular haunt had closed during my time on Helios, to be replaced by a fast-food joint with a fake attitude. So instead I just found somewhere that sold alcohol and would tolerate a tired old veteran.
“Good evening, sir,” the robotic bartender said. It was just a mech-job; all gleaming steel and plastic, a vid-monitor for a face.
“Vodka,” I said. “I need vodka.”
“We’ve got a good range of vodka-based spirits. Just had some decent-quality Tau Ceti import delivered. Or, if you’d prefer something a little fruitier, we have several flavoured vodkas—”
“Any vodka, neat.”
“You want a double?” he asked, rubbing a dishcloth over a glass: some bizarre programming affectation. “I can wire your unicard.”
“Give me the bottle,” I answered, slumping over the bar.
The money didn’t matter: I’d accrued a decent credit balance while I’d been in the freezer.
“You sure?”
“Just the one for starters.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“I’m done talking to robots.”
The plain glass bottle and clean shot glass sat in front of me. I poured myself a drink and downed it.
“This is the first drink I’ve had since I died.”
An electronic face formed on the vid-monitor and the robot gave me a sad, almost disapproving look.
“I get it: Sim Ops?”
I nodded, and downed another shot.
“You know the worst part?” I asked, slurring my words.
“Yes,” the robot said. “I’m pretty sure that you’ve told me this already.”
“The worst part,” I continued, regardless of the response, “is that there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. Command has the Key. They call the shots.”
“I’ll bet,” the robot said. Just one of the programmed responses I’d heard a hundred times already, but was too drunk to recognise.
It must’ve been early morning, although I’d lost track of time. The bar was almost empty: just me and a couple of shadowy stragglers over a corner table. A tired-looking hooker – naked, blonde, and equipped with the most perfect rack I’d ever seen: nipples flashing with psychedelic patterns – cruised past. The robot gave her a vague nod; face shifting into a reproachful frown that told the girl she was best off giving me a wide berth.
I slammed my shot glass down on the bar, maybe a little harder than I had intended. Looked to the vodka bottle: empty.
“Give me another bottle.”
“Don’t you have a girl to go home to?”
“Haven’t you been listening to me?”
The robot paused, gave me another of those sympathetic looks. “You could be President Francis himself, and I wouldn’t be able to serve you. Sorry, chump, but you’ve had enough.”
I exhaled and glared at the machine.
“I said: get me another bottle of vodka. I fought the Directorate on Helios. I killed an enemy agent. I brought back evidence of another alien species. And I want another drink!”
The robot gesticulated with its metal shoulders. “I can’t serve you. Go home. It’ll be kicking out time soon, anyway.”
Anger spiked in my blood. I reared up from the stool, brushed aside the vodka bottle and glass. Both slid off the bar top. Smashed noisily on the floor somewhere.
“This place never closes!”
“We do for you, pal.”
“I’m not your pal. I’m a goddamned major in the Alliance Army!”
The room spun a little. I was more drunk than I’d realised. No matter: I still wasn’t drunk enough—
“We’ll take it from here.”
I whipped about, fists up.
The stragglers from the corner table stood beside me. Up close, in a moment of drunken clarity, I recognised them. The tails from the dry dock, from outside. I immediately flagged them as military, but an entirely different breed to me. Dressed in pristine khaki uniforms, officer caps held tightly under their arms. Holstered pistols that looked like crude children’s toys next to the hardware we’d been throwing around back at Maru Prime.
“Having a good night, Major?” the lead asked. “I’m Captain Ostrow. This is Lieutenant Pieter.”
“You’re MI?” I asked.
They had to be Military Intelligence. Spooks: the age-old interior intelligence service. Neither even tried to deny it. I’d been expecting this, but that didn’t mean I wanted to go through it. Or go through it again.
“Let me guess?” I roared. “You want to ask me some questions?”
The captain shook his head. “Not any more. But just for your information, Operation Keystone – the Helios mission – remains classified. I could arrest you for discussing it in public.”
He shot a glance over at the bartender. The bot was intently looking down at the floor; probably hoping to avoid a RAM-wipe.
“That why you want to see me?” I drawled.
“We can only erase the local psychiatric services so many times before someone will get wise to what you’re discussing, but not today. We have papers to serve on you, sir.”
Pieter slid a sealed envelope across the bar.
Sweet Jesus. It’s finally happening.
I felt suddenly and very firmly awake and sober.
“We’ll escort the major back to his quarters,” the captain said, nodding to the bartender.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” the robot said.
“Good.”
Mili-Intel were notoriously bad company and the other soldiers were silent all the way back to my quarters. Although it only took a few minutes, Ostrow and Pieter made sure that it was as uncomfortable as possible. They accompanied me to the door – probably under orders to make sure I didn’t do anything harmful to the new mission. Maybe they’d read my personnel records, or perhaps my reputation preceded me. Either way, they were wise to make sure I got home in one piece.
I scanned my palm against t
he controls. The two men watched from the end of the corridor; the shadowy captain nodding to me.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said. Added: “Sir.”
Nothing and no one touched the MI; not even Lazarus.
I gave him the finger and lurched into my quarters.
I could barely wait to pull the orders envelope from my pocket. The auto-lighting activated and I read from the single sheet of plastic.
*** EYES ONLY ***
TO: MAJOR CONRAD HARRIS (SERIAL CODE 93778)
FROM: ALLIANCE MILITARY COMMAND (ARMY)
SUBJECT: GENERAL COLE INBOUND (HARDCOPY) – NEW MISSION ORDERS
“OPERATION PORTENT”
ORDERED TO ATTEND BRIEFING SESSION AT 0800 (OH-EIGHT-HUNDRED) HOURS
RESTRICTED INTELLIGENCE: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION
ADDRESSED PERSONNEL ONLY
“Fuck. It’s for real. It’s happening.”
I slid down against the inside of the door, head in my hands. Sat there, listening to the wheeze and hiss of the air-conditioner.
For the first time in a long while, I slept without hearing the signal, without hearing her voice.
But I remembered something else almost as painful.
CHAPTER SIX
CARRIE
Thirty-four years ago
“Psst!” came the voice. “You want to see something cool?”
I was in my bed.
The apartment had three rooms: the bedroom that my mother and father had shared, in the little time they lived together as a couple; the combination kitchen-diner-lounge; the room that I shared with my sister. The whole tenement had that same smell – not specific, just the scent of decades-old decay – and our apartment was no different. The smell of too many animals living together, huddling in too close a space.
Except that these animals were human.
We were lucky, my mother used to say. There were plenty out there with even less.
It had been a few months since she’d died.
Carrie leant over me, on the edge of my bed. Her scraggly blonde hair escaped all over the place: big and unkempt. She never bothered to wash it.
She was – what? – maybe eleven.
Which made me eight, Earth-standard. Terms like subjective and objective ageing meant nothing to me, because I’d never left Earth. So, eight years was eight years – but at that age, nearly nine was better. Which made Carrie my older sister.
I bolted up in bed. The window was open, broken shutters allowing in the milky early-morning light. I was dressed in last night’s clothes – my school jumpsuit, though I hadn’t actually attended the local education centre in over a month. There’s nothing they can teach me there that I don’t already know, a voice – the voice of my eight-year-old psyche – told me.
“What’s up with you, Con?” Carrie asked. “You been at the meth again? Jonathan will have you if he finds it.”
Jonathan Harris. My father. Carrie always called him by his first name, mostly because it irritated him. The more he complained about it, the more she did it.
I shook myself awake. “All good. And you know I don’t do that shit.”
“Hmm. You look kind of sick?” Carrie said, tilting her head. She had the annoying habit of raising her voice at the end of a statement, so that everything she said sounded like a question.
“I’m good. Honest.”
“Don’t worry; Jonathan’s been drinking again.” She slung a thumb towards the broken door to our bedroom. “He’s in the lounge.”
I nodded. I’d seen that too many times before to bother going to investigate.
Carrie zipped up her jumpsuit. The same deep blue as mine, except that the edu-centre badge had been torn off the sleeve. Whether she’d done it herself, or one of the other children on the block was responsible, I couldn’t remember. She had become an easy target for bullies.
“What the fuck is up with you, Conrad?” Carrie asked again, pushing her face right into mine. “You want to see something cool, or not?”
“Okay. I want to see something cool.”
Our apartment was on the twenty-eighth floor, overlooking the mass conurbation that had become known as Detroit Metropolis. When I’d bothered attending school, I’d learnt that in earlier times this whole region had been known by a different name – that the Metro had once been regarded as an affluent area of Detroit and Michigan. Right now, that seemed hard to believe. We darted through the tenement communal hall, past the jeering street prostitutes and drug-pushers. Even though we were kids, they’d harass anyone: easier to keep your head down and get past them. Carrie led the way. Out into the bombed-out main plaza, the communal area between three apartment blocks.
It wasn’t long past nine in the morning but it was hot. The air carried the promise of another muggy July day. The sun was still a brittle haze in the sky, burning off low cloud cover. Where the clouds were thinnest, where the sky was a dirty blue colour, it was just possible to make out a fine black matrix. I put my hand to my forehead, squinted to make out the detail.
The Skyshield.
An orbital defence network – the answer to the Asiatic Directorate hostilities. The metal framework was in reality a collection of satellites gliding overhead in loose formation, in low orbit.
“Hey, Con!” someone shouted from across the plaza.
A man shuffled through the crumbling remains of a dried-up water fountain, a communal feature that the municipal authorities had long since turned off. His age was indeterminate, to me at least, but he was indisputably ancient: bony shoulders poking against a worn green T-shirt, skin like torched parchment. He pushed a shopping cart filled to the brim with papers and magazines, old bottles and rags, that produced an uncomfortably loud scraping noise as it moved.
“Hey, Con!” Joel called again, with a genuine smile. “It’s gonna be a hot one. A real Detroit summer.”
That had become a joke among the city folk: a Detroit summer. Carrie waited at the edge of the plaza, looking back – encouraging me to hurry up.
“When is it not a Detroit summer?” I asked. That was the punchline, apparently: I’d heard the joke, didn’t really understand the meaning.
“We get promised a nuclear winter,” Joel went on, waving his hands at the sky, “but that doesn’t seem to have cooled things off much.”
I was only eight. I didn’t recognise that sort of terminology. But I understood well enough the pictures on the newscasts and vid-feeds: the graphic images of New York under fire. The buildings, the emergency vehicles, the politicians and scientists demanding retribution.
“Let’s hope that this fucking Skyshield keeps us safe,” Joel added.
Of course, I knew that it hadn’t worked; had only made the whole ugly war go underground. All it did was force both sides to change their tactics. Instead of dropping bombs from the sky, they’d turned to dirty bombs, sleeper agents, attacks on civilians.
“Come on!” Carrie shouted. “Leave Joel to it.”
I waved Joel off and followed Carrie down to the highway.
We took a shortcut through an abandoned factory. The name MACMILLAN-FORDSWELL MANUFACTURING was printed in fading letters on a signpost out front. Story went it used to produce ground cars but I hadn’t seen many of those without armoured plating in recent history, and the factory didn’t look capable of making the sort of vehicles I saw on the streets. The windows had been stolen and there were holes in the walls. None of the factories here were operational any more: anything of value was produced off-world – Mars, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani – or on the orbital nano-factories.
“You’re slow as fuck today,” Carrie said.
“Leave it.”
She led us down to the riverside. That was what the local children called it: the riverside. It was really a storm drain. Now parched dry, it gave easy access to the sewer system.
That was where Carrie was headed. She picked her way down the bank of the storm drain, clutching the dry concrete side with dirty fingers. I followed her
– smaller, more nimble. We reached the basin at the same time.
“Too slow!” I gabbled at her.
Carrie tutted. “Not like you know where we’re going, anyway?”
“Show me then.”
She pointed at one of the run-off drains set into the side of the basin: a big black rectangle. A little taller than me, probably protected by a door or gate that had been torn off at some point. A corrugated rusty tin roof – a makeshift porch – sat crooked over the entrance.
Carrie stooped to get into the drain. Her uncontrolled hair clipped the frame as she went.
“Come on.”
I stopped at the entrance. I could smell the scent of real, present rot: that malodorous spoor. Clinging to the back of my throat. I knew that whatever had died in that storm drain was bigger than a rat or a wild cat – was big enough to give off a pungent wave of decay. Even old Joel’s smell was a preferable alternative.
On automatic, I followed Carrie into the dark.
There was a body inside.
The drain entrance led to a tiny chamber, not much bigger than the body itself, lined with further drains. A filthy fabric shoulder bag lay in one corner, the remains of a small fire in another. The place likely smelled bad at the best of times but the odour of death was undeniably coming from the corpse.
The body was on its front, face concealed, and dressed in a black costume. Good-quality boots, I noticed. The flesh beneath strained at the outfit; had bloated through exposure to the elements. I could see one bare hand poking from the sleeve of a black fatigue cuff.
I’d never seen a dead body before. There was some significance that this man wasn’t coming back and it was paralysing; more impactive than the smell and the press of the sewer walls.
Carrie knelt down beside the body. She didn’t seem frightened by him – by it. She grinned up at me.